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The Word of God is Quick, Powerful and Sharp

The Word of God is Quick, Powerful and Sharp

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 26, 1959

Summary

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

Message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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God’s Hidden Ones

God’s Hidden Ones

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 14, 1958

Summary

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

Message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jesus Christ the Rock”

Jesus Christ the Rock

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 22, 1959

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There is a Way that Seemeth Right to a Man

There is a Way that Seemeth Right to a Man

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 6, 1956

Outline

The importance of the end goal in life.

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

The importance of choosing the right path in life.

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

Deception in spiritual journey.

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

False ways and the importance of following the right path.

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

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

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

The importance of following Jesus Christ.

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

Message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Discouragement and What The Christian Can Do About It

Discouragement and What the Christian Can Do About it

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 5, 1957

Outline

Christian discouragement and its effects.

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

Causes and cures for Christian discouragement.

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

Spiritual encouragement in dark times.

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

Feeling trapped and captive despite freedom.

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

Christian biography and discouragement.

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

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

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

Message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Things Permitted by God for Growth in Grace

Things Permitted by God for Growth in Grace

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 28, 1958

Outline

The Bible and the nature of the world.

  • Disciples appoint leaders to manage daily ministry, prioritizing prayer and preaching.
  • Tozer desires to be a liberal preacher, imagining headlines like “Khrushchev converted to Russian Baptist Church” or “Walter Reuther apologizes to General Motors.”
  • Tozer laments the absence of biblical preaching in modern Christianity.

Church conflicts and sin in early Christianity.

  • Tozer argues that conflicts often have deeper causes than apparent.
  • Tozer: Early church faced sin despite Pentecost, miracles, and redemption.

The Presence of Sin in Religious Settings.

  • Tozer argues that holiness cannot be assumed based on outward appearances, even in a church setting.
  • Satan targets those closest to God, not those far away.
  • Tozer argues that Satan hates prayerful people and tries to trouble them, but God loves them and delivers them.
  • Tozer advises against praying and instead suggests living a lukewarm life to avoid trouble but acknowledges that this approach may lead to hell.

Sin and its presence in the church.

  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of standing up for freedom and truth, even if it means facing opposition.
  • Tozer argues that sin will always act like sin and can only be dealt with through redemption or hell.
  • God uses evil to polish the good, as seen in the Bible and in the life of Paul.

God’s use of suffering to perfect believers.

  • Tozer: God uses suffering to polish and perfect those in His bosom.
  • Tozer argues that God uses difficult situations to perfect and cleanse believers, citing examples from the Bible.
  • Tozer describes a community where men would physically punish a wife beater, breaking his spirit and shaming him.

Facing and dealing with sin in the church.

  • Tozer: Shame can be a means of spiritual growth, as God allows us to be publicly corrected and humbled.
  • Tozer warns of unconfessed sin in the church, urging separation and spiritual maturity.
  • A.W. Tozer emphasizes the importance of being oriented towards the spiritual life, facing the right direction, and being prepared to jump into action when trouble comes.
  • Tozer uses the metaphor of a church being like a battlefield, with wounds and weaknesses, but also with forgiveness and growth towards maturity.

Message

In the Book of Acts, in the sixth chapter of the book of Acts, in those days when the number of the disciples was multiplied. there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration. Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them and said, it is not reason that we should leave the Word of God and serve tables. Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you, seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, who we may appoint over this business. But we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word. And the saying pleased the whole multitude, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Ghost, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolas a proselyte of Antioch: And these they set before the apostles, and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them. And the Word of God increased, and the number of disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly. And the great company of the priests were obedient to the faith. And Stephen, full of faith and power did great wonders and miracles among the people.

I want to make a confession this morning. I wish I could be a liberal preacher. I wish that I didn’t have to tell the truth. Oh, just for a little while, maybe, not long. I’d probably get tired of too much sweetness and light. But I’ve thought about what I’d like to do if I could write my own headlines. If I could write my own headlines, I’d have one of the most wonderful newspapers ever published since man scratched on a rock and left it for some other man to figure out.

For instance, if I were editing that paper that I’d like to edit tomorrow morning. I had to have a headline saying, Khrushchev has been converted and has applied for admission to the Russian Baptist Church. Now that would be a headline, and blood pressure would go down all over the world. And then I’d have another headline, say, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek, went fishing together and kissed on each cheek when they parted. Then I’d quit worrying about the Formosa Straights. Then I’d have another headline saying Walter Reuther apologizes to General Motors for bitter things he said about them. And then I’d have another headline saying, 48 hours since a crime has been committed in the United States. Nobody has been killed on the highway since last Wednesday.

I can fix myself up a newspaper that would be something, now I tell you, and it would sell if I could follow it with anything. But of course, I’d have to, on the last line down below in red ink, I would have to write “April Fool’s.” Because that isn’t the kind of world we live in brothers and sisters. We live in a miserable, fallen, upset, hate-filled, God-defying world. A world where the spirit of wickedness works in the children of disobedience. And so that isn’t the kind of headline we get. Look tomorrow morning and see, find any of those headlines or anything approaching them.

Then I’d like to be able to preach for a while, announce a series of sermons and never have to acknowledge the presence of anything wrong with anybody. Start out with everybody 100% sanctified and cleansed and indwelt by the Holy Ghost, loving each other and in great fellowship; and great grace was upon everybody. And the devil was chained, and we were surrounded by the presence of beautiful angels. I’d like to preach like that for a while to be released.

But you know, you can’t find Scripture to support that kind of preaching. Some are trying it. And I don’t know how long they’re going to be able to keep it up. Some of them manage to find something to talk about and still keep it up for a long time. But you know, whenever you open your Bible, you run into two things, the grace of God and the sin of man. And no matter where, just close your eyes and flip it like this and see what you find, 2 Chronicles. Well, there you find trouble. And Solomon did thus and thus. And flip it over again. You find in the Psalms; God be merciful unto us and bless us. Well, why did you have to pray God be merciful? Because we’re a bunch of sinners. Find your Bible, open your Bible, wherever you will, and you will find trouble and grace, grace and sin, mercy and judgment, goodness and severity. You’ll find it throughout the entire Bible.

Now, all this is preliminary to saying a few words which I trust will be helpful. About this passage I just read to you here in Acts the sixth chapter. It says there arose a murmuring among the disciples about the Grecians against the Hebrews.

Now, the occasion was simply this, that certain people believed that the widows, certain widows were being neglected. They said, there is segregation being practiced here. And these Grecian Jews, who were Hellenistic Jews, Jews who had been brought up and trained in Greek schools in contradiction to those who had been trained and brought up in Hebrew schools. And when they got to Jerusalem and got converted, they naturally, the ones that were Hellenists and had been brought up in Greek schools and had been taught Greek, spoke with an accent. And the ones who had been brought up in Palestine, spoke the language of Palestine and had no accent. And the result was that the ones with the accent, said that their widows had been neglected. They said, you are showing partiality towards the ones that don’t have the accent. You’re practicing segregation here.

Now, the apostles, of course, were Palestinian Jews, and they were accused of favoring the Palestinian widows, very, very normal for the Hellenistic Jews, the Grecian Jews to imagine. Now, the cause of it was much deeper than that. Always remember one thing, when there’s a fight, the reason for the fight is never what you thought it was. Two men meet and start calling each other names, and then finally end up in a bloody brawl. And when they get dragged into court, the judge says, what caused this? And then one says he called me a name. And the other one says, Yes, but he called me a name first. That wasn’t the cause of it. That was the occasion for it. But the cause of it was deeper than that. And so it is with every trouble everywhere all the time. The real source of the trouble is always deeper than we think.

So, the cause laid deeper, the hidden presence of uncleansed sin was here. You know, we’re romanticists, you and I, and extremely inclined to be romantic. And we like to look back upon the church and talk in glowing terms about the church that was. There never has been a period in history when the church was all it should have been. And there never has been a church that was all that it should have been. I have quoted here before the little proverb that says he lies well who comes from a far country. And if you can find somebody that can come far enough that he knows that nobody can check on him. He’s likely to describe the spiritual conditions where he came from in glowing terms. But the simple truth is, if you went there, you probably would find that there were troubles there too.

Well, the cause lies in sin. And in the sixth chapter of Acts only a little while removed from Pentecost, what does it say here in the margin. It leaves it the same year. According to this, I don’t know how far you can trust these marginal dates. But according to the marginal dates here, it was the same year. And not yet one year removed from Pentecost, they were having troubles and accusing each other of partiality. So, you see, even that early church was human and the sin was there. And right in the presence of the apostles, here was the sour spirit expressing itself, expressing itself in dark looks and complaining and concealed whisperings and discontent.

And see the seriousness now of all this. God had become flesh to dwell among them. And they called Him Emanuel, Jesus the Savior and He was made Lord and Christ, and the Holy Ghost had come. After He had been slain and raised from the dead, the Holy Ghost had come. Redemption was an accomplished fact. And the Spirit had come as fire and sat upon them, and many were converted, and miracles were being done all around them. And yet, right in the very presence of it, there were murmurings and complaining. You see, this points up a well-known fact that sin is such a rash and unreasonable and rebellious thing by nature, that it will include itself even into the sanctuary.

I’d like to believe that when the Father puts on his black robe and gets his clerical collar on, and the little bright, freshly scrubbed altar boys get their robes, and everybody comes in still and quiet and the incense is smelt and the organ is heard and the bells jingle, I’d like to believe that that means everybody there is holy. And I’d like to believe that in an Alliance Church when everybody comes stumbling up the stairs and talking out loud, down to the front, and all the noise and ugliness that attend our services. Sometimes when we’ve all gotten together, I like to think that means simplicity, artlessness childlikeness, and that when we stand to sing and preach that that meant absolute holiness.

But you know, you can’t be realistic and believe any of those things. You can’t believe they would take a fellow that smokes and drinks and gamble’s and loafs and put a black robe on him and have him stand up and jingle bells. That doesn’t make him holy. And it doesn’t make a man holy who loves money and loves to eat a five-pound steak and go to bed at night and tell jokes until one o’clock. It doesn’t mean that when he gets up and preaches an evangelistic sermon that you’re hearing a holy man. As sin intrudes into the sanctuary, brethren, and it follows right to the prayer meeting. There are those that imagine that a banquet, or say, religious ballgame, that that’s where the devil; the devil never attended a religious ballgame yet. He didn’t need to. The devil attends the prayer meeting. He works where the people of God are trying to be a holy. A doctor doesn’t work on a man who had just been pronounced 100% healthy. He works on the fellow that’s likely to die.

And so, Satan doesn’t work on the man or the woman that isn’t close to God. He’s works on the ones that are so close he’s afraid he’s going to lose them. So, he follows around into the sanctuary. It was when the angels of God appeared before the presence of the Most High, as it was there that satan appeared. Satan appeared among the angels. You’ll look for Satan in a saloon.

The cartoonists have all showed Satan in a saloon, or in a halfway house somewhere, sitting on the front porch with half dressed women. He never attends any such places. Satan never attends a theater. Satan’s never found in a gambling den. Satan never goes to a saloon. Satan isn’t anywhere near Skid Row. If he sees a fella start for a mission and thinks he’s going to get converted, of course, he will send a demon to work on him. But as long as the fellow just lies around Skid Row, he doesn’t bother him. He knows he’s got him. The chicken raiser doesn’t bother when the chickens are inside the pen. But when one flies over the fence that he goes out and gets worried.

Now it’s right in the presence of the Holy One, right in the presence of God, sin comes. It’s so brazen and rash, that it follows right up to Pentecost and right in among the apostles and right where the saints of God are in prayer. My friends, we want to remember that. Some of you go to prayer and you say, I have a hard time in prayer. Well, if you don’t want to have a hard time, quit praying. If you don’t want a hard time, stop praying. You won’t have nearly as hard a time if you stopped praying as you will if you do.

But you say Mr. Tozer, I’ve always been taught the opposite. Well, then you’ve been taught wrong. Because it’s the praying man that gets himself in trouble. It’s the praying man that satan hates. It’s the right living man, satan hates. God loves, but Satan hates the praying man, the good man, the man who’s escaping, the man who wants to be right. The man who gets on his knees, He’s the One God loves, but satan hates. And so, Satan is going to trouble the man. It was one of the problems of the book of Psalms, one of the problems of the book of Job, why did the good people have such a tough time of it? It’s because Satan hates them.

God loves them, and Satan hates them. And they are in trouble because they’re prayerful people. So if you don’t want trouble, don’t pray. If you want to go to hell, why then, don’t pray. But if you want to have a relatively easy time and get along with your neighbors, don’t pray. Try to get along with everybody and go the way they go. And if they want you to drink, drink a little, but don’t drink too much. If they want you to dance, dance a little, but don’t dance too much. They tell dirty stories that makes your wife blush, laugh, guffaw and then apologize to your wife and say, that was kind of raw, but I had to laugh. Live like that and you stay out of trouble. Get on your knees and you invite trouble. Go to God and ask God to delivery you and set you free and make a holy man out of you, and you invite trouble. But it’s a wonderful kind of trouble, wonderful kinds of trouble.

I don’t quote Franklin D. Roosevelt very often. But he made a speech one time in which he said something that every American molecule inside of my body from my balding head to the bottom of my feet responded with an amen. He said we Americans love freedom and we’d rather die on our feet than live on our knees, meaning by that, we’d rather die fighting for freedom than to kowtow to a totalitarian big wig. And I, for my part, any day of the world at my age would rather give my life and die and have it over, to be a free American and to walk around looking over my shoulder for fear of Khrushchev or Mao Zedong was going to hear something I said. I’d rather die fighting than live a slave.

It’s the same way in things of the Spirit. Long ago I had to make up my mind. Are you going to be an easy, smooth preacher and get along and having everybody love you and celebrate your birthdays and bring you flowers and just carry around on a chip as we would say on the farm? Or are you going to be a prophet? And I said, God you can have the flowers and the other boys can have the gifts and memorials and I’ll take the power and the insight and the prophetic discernment and truth and the warfare in the fight. After a while you will likely smell the smoke. But I confess this morning that I’ve had on just about enough smoke. And I’d like to preach something nice and smooth and sweet. And I’ll do the best I can tonight.

But this morning, I’ve got to talk to you about this. And it isn’t sweet at all. It shows sin right in the presence of praying people, rationed rebellious. And now until it’s been destroyed, it will always act like itself. You can always be sure of that. It will act like itself. And sin can never learn good, and it must always be itself, even at the gate of heaven. Sin must always act like itself. God always acts like God and He can never act any other way. Satan sometimes tries to act like an angel of light, but that in itself is sin. So, the devil always acts like the devil. And God being holy, can’t possibly act any other way but like God. Satan, being unholy, can try to act like an angel but only succeeds in acting like a devil infinitely more devilish.

So, sin will always act like sin. And it can be dealt with only in two ways: by redemption or by hell. Either by confession and deliverance from it or by the certainty of hell after a while for it will go. And sin will be the fuel to keep the fires burning.

Now, why does God allow this? Why does He allow it among his children? Why? Well, He allows it for a number of reasons. Because He’s merciful, and a lot of people that were making trouble here in the book of Acts, the Bible just passed over them. They were making trouble, but later on, they saw their mistake and they went on to know God better, and they were ashamed of the way they had lived.

Haven’t you? Can’t you remember back, maybe some years back when you were sharp, and maybe you gossiped about somebody or said something hateful to somebody, and now you’re deeply sorry? And if God had judged you right then, sharply and harshly, he would have lost you. But He was patient and now you’re sorry, and you’re living a better life than you did. So, God in His mercy allows sin even to enter into the sanctuary.

And then it acts as an abrasive to polish God’s saints. God wants His saints to be shining saints. And God uses acids to make them shine, and to determine which ones are real and which ones aren’t which is gold and which is only imitation gold. The presence of evil in the world, and even crowding itself brazenly into the sanctuary, it’s the sharp switch God uses to chasten His children. And later, they’re to be thrown into the fire. Don’t forget it. He says, let the wheat and the tares grow together until the harvest. And then He will garner the wheat into His harvest. But He will throw the the tares into the fire.

Now those should be terrifying thoughts. They’re terrifying thoughts. It’s a terrifying thought to me that God uses the rejected to perfect the accepted. That’s a terrifying thought, that God uses a man He’s rejected to polish the man He’s accepted. He uses the woman He’s rejected, to punish and polish the woman He’s accepted. He uses the evil to help polish the good. If you don’t believe it, read your Bible. All the way through it was like that, tribulations and troubles and woes and jail sentences and lashings and all that Paul had to endure. They were that he might be a better man.

And Jesus learned obedience, how? By the things He enjoyed, no. He had learned obedience by the things He suffered. And the Pharisees and the scribes and Herodians and the lawyers and the rest of them that made life miserable for Christ, they were the abrasives polishing Him to make Him, even though He were God made flesh. They still taught Him something. He learned obedience by the things that He suffered.

Now, He never sinned. Let’s keep that straight. It’s necessary that we should. If He ever sinned, then sin had a claim on Him. He never sinned, so sin had no claim on Him. And when He died, He died not for Himself, but for us. And there lies the glory of atonement. But something He had to learn as a man, and that thing He learned as we are learning it in the same way.

Well, how the apostles met this. Do you notice how the apostles met it? I don’t know whether I’d ought to go on and talk about how the apostles met it or whether I’d better close here. I think maybe I’ll just close here and point out that God is using things and people that He is never going to receive to His bosom, to polish and perfect those whom He has in His bosom.

In the olden days, a man who loved his children very well, used to hire school masters and governesses. And they turned over to those school masters and governesses, the care of their children. And they were permitted to punish them; corporal punishment was permitted. And while the parents were greatly careful to get the right person, they did allow them to punish their children.

Now, God allows us to be punished. And it’s something we don’t like. We don’t want it. We wish it didn’t have to be so. We wish that everything could be sweetness and light. We wish that we could just live on syrup and lie down deep in green pastures, all day long beside the green pastures. We wish that, but it doesn’t work that way, my friends, God uses a tough, brutal husband to perfect and cleanse and sanctify a wife who’s obedient. And sometimes he lets her turn and say things back. And then he punishes her for saying it, even though the ugly husband to whom she said it, deserved that 20 times compounded. But that she dared to say it, God punishes her and makes her sorry, and she has to repent. And the good woman has to go to a bad man and say, I’m sorry. I’m to blame when it’s just the other way around. And so, it is God is using the troubles we have in this world as polishers and abrasives to wear away and take off the rust and to remove the impurities.

And this is one of the ways that God works. In the book of Hebrews, you know, it is so plain, that I don’t know why we escape it. It says in that 12th chapter of the book of Hebrews, that we must remember that the author, Jesus, is the author and finisher of our faith. And that for the joy set before Him, He endured. For the joy set before Him He endured.

And what did He do in the shame? You know, that’s one thing we can’t stand. We can stand pain, but we can’t stand shame. That’s one thing. That’s why I believe if corporal punishment were reintroduced. No, I’m not bloodthirsty, but I think that in the day, you know, when a big rough brute of a man beats his wife and beats up everybody he meets in a drunken brawl. Nowadays, they give him a suspended sentence.

But there was a day when men around the neighborhood, after a fellow out in our country, after a fellow had done this a few times, he’d beaten his wife a few times, or beaten his children until they come to school with black eyes.

He got a little note from the farmers around the neighborhood, signed by fellas around the neighborhood. And they said, now, we’ve had enough of this. Then the next time he got a little too much liquor and beat up his wife, several fellows appeared, too many for him to handle and said, come on, you might as well go quietly. And he knew what was coming.

So, they took him out, stripped him to the waist, and switched him like a kid. Switched him. And after a fellow had had a good licking, he never could lift his eyes again. If they’d come and tried to fight him; if they’d simply come and given him punishment for the body, he could have taken it.

But after he’d been taken out and whipped, it broke his spirit. He lost face. After that he had no face left at all, just a head. And every place he went, the people would smile. After that, he was a pariah, an outcast. Shame, often drove men like that out of the neighborhood. They just couldn’t stand it. They’d been licked like a kid. And they were so proud of the fact when they flex their muscle, a great big watermelon came up here, proud of their muscles. But after they got licked, they hadn’t anything left to be proud of. Shame is a terrible thing, brethren.

And the Scripture says here that he despised the shame. The shame He endured. He despised it and is now sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. And so now, you remember, that the Scripture says, my son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord. The very chastening we sometimes get from God, that very chastening is itself shameful. He allows us to be publicly put down a notch. And with shame, we hang around wondering if we will be received by the company.

I have never forgotten the missionaries telling about the Congo. A church member there who has been received into full fellowship, backslides, and commits any act he shouldn’t commit, and makes him sit in the penitential form for six months. There are special select box seats over here to the left of the pulpit. And if two or three fellas appear there with the shame of face and sheepdog look, they’ve been caught doing something good Christians shouldn’t do. And the old elder sentences them to sit in that box for six months, every Sunday twice until they have proved they’ve lived right, and then they can get out. It’s a tough way, a tough way, but it works. People are happy to keep right and live right in order that they might not get put out there on display. And Paul, in one of his terrible self-disclosures said, we have been made as the off scouring. We’ve been made a spectacle, the shame of it.

Well, it’s too bad, but it has to come, and it’s always brought upon us because somewhere there’s unconfessed sin, not necessarily ours, not necessarily yours or mine, not necessarily in among the people of God at all, except it has come in among them, and it’s not part of them. So instead of our seeing the headline, Khrushchev converted, Mao Zedong spends all night in prayer, we’re going to read Khrushchev insults Ike, Mao Zedong threatens to take Formosa. We’re going to hear, so and so dragged in an alley and murdered on the north side.

We’re going to hear that sin is present in the world. Sin is here and we’ve got to face it. And we’ve got to learn how to live with it but learn to live apart from it. And we’ve got to learn to live in a religious community, which we call the church, that isn’t perfect. And after all, suppose somewhere, there were to spring up in Chicago, a perfect church. A church where they had no carnal people at all. There wasn’t any flesh left, it was all crucified. Everybody was saintly. They were all Tom Hares. Everybody was as sweet and as pure as a dear old lady in Pittsburgh where I was last week. Ninety-nine years, nine months and 18 days she was, one of their old saints, she slept away and went to heaven.

Well, you fill a church full of people like that. Do you think you’d feel at home there? I don’t know whether I would or not. But you’ll never find one like that. You find one, two, or three or five or ten, but you won’t find a church full.

We’re growing up. We’re maturing. We’re fighting. And always where there’s a battle, there’ll be some people wounded. The only army that has no wounds is an army that has never smelled the smoke. And the only church that has no flaws and no weaknesses is a church who lives on Shakespeare and book reviews. They have no reason to have any troubles. They just come and go. But all of us who are seeking to know God better, we’ll have our troubles.

Now somebody says, trying to think this out and says, is Mr. Tozer slyly trying to get at some trouble in the church? No, there’s no trouble in our church. If there is, I haven’t heard of it. Everybody’s happy as far as I know. And we know and forgive each other and realize we’re not all we ought to be and not all we’re going to be. But there’s no trouble that I know of. This, simply, I preach it because it’s here, it’s in the book.

And it’s well for us to be informed. They call that oriented now, that is, orientated. It’s the same word. It means facing around in the right direction, so you’re squared off to where you’re going. Unless we know these things we’ll never be oriented to the spiritual life. You’ve got to get you squared off and face right.

I read somewhere a fellow said, never park with your wheels twisted. He said never back in, then leave your wheels turned left. If you do when you start. you’ll forget and you’ll leap out into the traffic. He said, always square them straight ahead so when you start, you won’t suddenly find yourself out in traffic.

Well, that squaring away. That’s what I like. I like to preach the Word of God so His people can, if they will be squared away facing the right direction. And from whatever direction trouble comes, and if they’re suddenly forced to jump, they’ll jump in the right direction, because they have been instructed and informed and orientated. Now, I think that’s all for this morning. And we’ll sing a closing hymn.

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Obeying the Truth, Love One Another

Obeying the Truth, Love One Another

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 17, 1954

Outline

Biblical logic and love.

  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of ordering one’s thoughts in preaching.
  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of understanding the logic of the Bible, which moves with precision and follows beautiful reasoning.
  • Tozer highlights the New Testament’s reason-based demands, never giving whimsical commands without a sound reason.

External vs. internal religion.

  • Tozer argues that many religions begin with external practices, hoping to change the heart through actions, but this is opposite to the New Testament’s emphasis on internal change (heart matters).
  • Tozer contrasts Jesus’ approach with that of the Pharisees, who focused on external practices to change the heart, while Jesus emphasized the importance of internal change (the heart) for spiritual transformation.
  • Tozer argues that external religious change is insufficient without an internal transformation of the heart and soul.
  • Hindus attempt to purify their souls through bathing in the Ganges River, but their efforts are futile due to the river’s impurity.

Spiritual purification and the importance of obeying truth.

  • Tozer: Seeking right in wrong way, erroneous journey despite honesty and good intentions.
  • Tozer argues that many people are traveling in the wrong direction spiritually, despite appearing to make progress.
  • Tozer argues that some Christians focus too much on activity and forget about the importance of inner renewal and belief in the Bible.
  • Tozer suggests that both faith and obedience are necessary for spiritual purification, like the two wings of a bird.

Faith and works in the Bible.

  • Tozer argues that faith and works are interconnected, citing examples from the Bible such as Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and others who demonstrated both faith and works in their obedience to God.
  • Tozer emphasizes that faith without works is dead, and that works are necessary to demonstrate true faith, citing Hebrews 11 as a “works chapter” that highlights the importance of both faith and works in the life of a believer.
  • Tozer argues that true love for others is not feigned, but rather unfeigned and based on a genuine transformation by the Holy Spirit.
  • Tozer criticizes politicians and union leaders who feign love for the people they serve, while actually pursuing their own power and profit.

Genuine love and its cultivation.

  • Tozer: Real love isn’t always fawning, but can be tough & honest (John 1 John 4:18)
  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of cultivating love in the heart through prayer, obedience, and humility
  • Tozer warns against half-heartedness and double-mindedness, emphasizing the need for a unified and wholehearted commitment to love
  • Tozer emphasizes the importance of being filled with the fullness of God, rather than settling for half-hearted faith or half-baked spirituality.
  • Tozer encourages listeners to purify their souls and demonstrate genuine love for their brethren, rather than feigning affection.

Sermon

In the first chapter of 1 Peter, 1 Peter 1:22, the 22nd Verse. Peter continuing his exhortation to the Christians scattered abroad says, seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit, unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently. Now, that’s as far as we’ll go because the other, with the privilege the apostle claims for himself, switches on the word “being” to something else altogether. So, we’ll stay by verse 22.

Those of you who preach or teach or address groups of any sort, will note that there is one thing that you must be able to do if you’re going to address an audience at all, and that is to be able to order what you’re saying. The average Christian knows enough to preach all night. But he couldn’t do it because he is not skilled in ordering what he has to say. So that sermon preparation as far as the homiletical angle of it is concerned, simply consists of ordering what you’re going to say so that you won’t talk in circles and meet yourself constantly running around the circle.

Now, this 22nd Verse, to my mind, is one of the most perfect verses for a sermon, not that there will be the most perfect sermon, I promise you that. But I mean, a sermon outline here, something that you could get in your head or heart and be able to give it. He says, you have purified your soul, point one; by obeying the truth, point two; through the Spirit, three; unto unfeigned love of brethren, four; see, therefore that you love one another, five; out of a pure heart, six; fervently, seven. And it even has the good fundamentalist seven. One of my dear brothers won’t preach at all unless he can get seven points in his sermon. I never allow myself to be hemmed in by mathematics. If there aren’t seven there, I’m not going to put another one in. If there are less than seven, I’m not going to add one merely to make it look good. But there are seven here.

And starting out with this, we notice a peculiar phrase, or two of them: seeing that, see that. You Bible students might put a line under this. Now, incidentally, in studying the Bible, never try to spare your Bible. The Bible that was given to you 25 years ago; it was a wedding present and is still in perfect shape. They might just as well have given you Barton’s Almanac because it’s not doing you any good. Wear your Bible out. Mark it up. Thumb it. And then when it’s gone, get another one. Retire it honorably and get yourself another one. Work on your Bible. And so, I don’t hesitate to say, if you want to do a mark on, so that seeing that, see that.

Now, there is the sweet logic of the apostolic teaching. The older I get and the more familiar I get with the Scriptures, the more I’m pleased with the logic of the Bible. It moves along with beautiful precision. It marches like an army. Occasionally, the holy writer or the writer who spake as he was moved by the Holy Ghost, will take the liberty of a digression. Paul is full of them. They call them ellipses. The scholars call Paul’s style elliptical. He will start to say one thing, and then he’ll look over and see something else and lose the thread of his thought and dash over and say something better. They call it elliptical.

But Peter did the same thing here and you will find that in the Bible. But you’ll also find that wherever there is a complete statement, it always follows beautiful logic. So he says, seeing that therefore, see that. Now seeing that ye have done this one thing or seeing that this one thing is true of you. Therefore, see that this something else is true of you, based upon this other thing that is true view. Now, that is clear as I’m afraid it isn’t.

So, we have it here, the Bible never breaks in; comes ripping through to your heart with a command, but always precedes it with a reason for it. That is, the New Testament always gives biblical reasons for what it demands. There’s never anything whimsical about the Holy Ghost. There is imperious, a command, but that command always grows out of some sound, plentiful reason why it’s perfectly natural and right that it should be so. So, he says, seeing that you have purified your heart, therefore, love.

Now let’s look at the seven divisions here. And don’t brace yourself for a long talk, for I promise you it won’t be. He says, you have purified your souls. And the man of God begins with the word “souls” inside us. Most of the great religions of the world begin with externals. In fact, I am at the moment unable to think of any that do not or does not begin with the external. They begin with diet or dress or aesthetic practices or the celebration of days. And then they hope, and do hope indeed, that somehow by the performance of external acts, they will be able to work in on themselves to their heart. That by beginning in the fingers, you can work through to the heart. Beginning at the toes, you can work up to the heart. That’s the religions of the world. Buddhism begins externally; and the great religions that make so much of dress and of ascetic practices.

It would be amusing if it were not too significant of a trend, to see how such groups as the Hollywood actors and the nightclub boys and all the rest, are going in big for yogi these days. Everybody wants to be yogi. Well, the yogi, of course, is one who begins outside. And by certain body practices, by even body postures. He manages to control his breathing. And then, after he’s got his breathing under control, he controls his thoughts and slowly he works it in to his inner man. And the hope is that he’ll change himself and purify his soul by something he does on the outside. Now that is exactly contrary to the Scriptures, to begin on the outside and work into the center is unknown to the New Testament.

And that was the area of warfare between our Lord Jesus Christ and the Pharisees. The Pharisees were externalists. Jesus Christ was and is an internalist. They believe that by practicing external things, they could work in to the center and change the internal through the external. Jesus knew better and fought them as long as He lived on earth, and died and went to glory to prove them wrong and to prove that He alone knew that it was the heart that mattered. It was the internal that mattered and when the internal is right, the outside falls into line perfectly. That is also the difference between modernistic doctrines and liberalistic religions that begin by training and make much of religious education.

Now, religious education at best is the training of the man to think right and act right. And certainly, it’s not to be decried. It is to be desired. But without the secret and mysterious internal change, all of this outside change will be found to be wasted at last. He says, you have purified your souls.

Now I conclude from my study of the Bible, that the faith of Christ begins in the center and works out to the externals, conduct, and that we are safe in concluding that if a heart has not been reached, any religious profession is vain, completely vain. If the heart has been reached, the religious profession then takes on meaning. But if it has not been reached, all religious profession is vain. Does it sound like an old bromide, or religious cliche for me to repeat what you hear so much from the average evangelist? And he’s right in it, that you can join all the churches in the city, be baptized by every mode known and celebrate every holy day in the Christian calendar, and still be lost, if you are not changed on the inside.

You have purified your hearts, your souls, he says. And so, the soul is the inside of a person, the essence of the one, the person that which matters. That which makes you. That which is you. For the word soul here certainly can be, and is extended to mean the whole interior man, since synonyms would be the heart of the man or the reigns of the man. But it’s the whole interior man, and this man has been purified. There is a purification of the deep inner life that is required before we have any right to believe that our religious profession is valid. Now that’s one, you have purified your souls.

Now, the next question is how? Purification of the soul by bathing in the river Ganges is the method practiced by the Hindus. But the catch is that all they ever get is external bathing. And they tell me those who’ve seen the Mother Ganga, that it isn’t much, because Mother Ganga is too dirty to ever cleanse anybody. But we do not smile at them, nor do we look down our holy noses at them for the simple reason that they’re trying, erroneously, to do a right thing. They’re seeking a right in a wrong way, and they’ll never reach it, just as a man might erroneously start to drive to Detroit but turned his car in the direction of Omaha. Now he might be ever so honest. And some of you may smile quietly inside remembering the time you did that very thing. You thought you were going the wrong direction.

A man told me once this. He said he was a truck driver and worked with two men; their systems they had two men on the truck. And they had a little bed up there as they have, and one would sleep while the other one drove and then they would spell themselves that way, so they always had a fresh driver. I don’t know if they always do that, but they do that, some trucking companies.

Well, this man told me that he was driving once on a truck and his copilot was sleeping in the little bunk back of the driver. And he said, he came down this way, say, going east, saw a filling station, swung completely around, made a U turn and parked. He got some gasoline and woke up his friend. He said it’s your turn. It’s time for you to drive a lot.

So, he climbed up in the bunk and went sound asleep. 25 miles later, the new driver found that he his friend had turned the truck around. Now he was perfectly honest, but completely erroneous. It was a mistake. He had 50 miles to make up because of an error. You might say, but he’s such a good man. The difference is, he’s going the wrong way. But he pays his debts and he just loves his wife. It doesn’t make any difference. He was traveling the wrong way. And he will never get to the terminal going the wrong direction. But he’s so handsome. And a man with hair like that couldn’t make a mistake. He did. He made the mistake and nevertheless, but he belongs to the Masons and he’s a church member, but he’s gone the wrong way. And no matter who’s going and how nice he is nor how bushy his hair, if he’s going the wrong way his personality won’t get him going the right way.

Now, there are 1000s of people that the devil has turned their vehicle around and they don’t know it. And they’re pushing it right down to the floor and they’re going along beautifully. And they imagine they are going where they want to go because they’re making a good bracket and getting up some speed, but they’re not going the right direction. The yogi who gets his breathing under control and can properly manipulate his abdominal muscles, and who can hypnotize himself and draw in his thoughts and all that, he is making progress all right, but he’s traveling in the wrong direction. For he’s assuming the validity of an erroneous doctrine, that the heart is made pure beginning from without, whereas the Scripture says, the heart is made pure first and then everything else comes of itself. Ye hath purified your heart.

Now, how do you purify your heart. It says, by obeying the truth. Now, by obeying the truth, I don’t want you to be shocked by that word, obey. It’s not popular in the day in which we live, but it’s a good word, obeying the truth. Now, there are two sides, obeying and believing. In Acts 15:9, the Holy Ghost says, God purifying their hearts by faith. And in our text, the Holy Ghost says, purify your souls by obeying the truth. So we have faith and works, one by Peter and the other by the Spirit and the apostles in the book of Acts. Now, is there any contradiction here? No, here’s where our critics come along and say there’s a contradiction here. There’s no contradiction whatsoever.

Suppose that I was talking about, oh, a seagull, and I was making a great deal over the seagull’s beautiful right wing; and I said that seagull has one of the most graceful right wings you ever saw. Now, watch him. And he extended that right wing and push it out there and shook it off. And it was so graceful, an artist would run for his pencil just to outline the symmetry and beauty of that wing. So, we teach the validity of flight by the right wing of a seagull. But another man comes along and says, have you ever noticed the left wing of the seagull? It’s simply beautiful. But the first man says, heretic, and legalist, that you would dare mention that a seagull has a left wing. Why our whole church is built on the doctrine that has a right wing.

And the critic stands off and says, listen to that argument, they’re contradicting each other. Well, anybody ought to know that a seagull can’t fly with one wing. He’d only flapping a circle. He’d never get off the ground. And also, anyone should know that a seagull can’t fly with a left wing. He would fly in a circle only. He’d be spinning the other direction. If he tried to fly with his right wing, he’d go counterclockwise. And if he tried to fly with his left wing, he’d go clockwise, but he’d be where he was after he was done flapping.

Now there is the trouble in our churches. Some go out and get busy. Just as soon as you join the church, they give you five jobs and the chairmanship of a committee. And away you go. And people just wear themselves out flapping their left wing. But talk to him about the new birth. Talk to him about cleansing on the inside. Talk to them about the renewal of the soul and they don’t know what you mean. But our crowd, we specialize on right wings. And we don’t believe much in activity. We just believe in believing. And we’re both wrong and we’re both half-right.

But if you’ll believed the Bible instead of believing half-truth and see that when one man says you are purified by faith, and another man says you are purified by obeying, they’re not contradicting, they’re simply giving you both wings of the bird, that’s all. Faith has to have works, or it flaps in a circle. And works have to have faith or they’re dead. So, by works and faith, we go along.

Have you ever noticed that eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews? I was just looking at it here this morning. Have you ever noticed how that’s called the faith chapter, isn’t it? It says, by faith, by faith, by faith, by faith. But have you ever noticed it’s also a works chapter? By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain. He offered it by faith, but he did offer it. And he offered it in obedience to some revelation God had given him. By faith Enoch was translated, but also, Enoch by works walked with God until he was no longer.

By faith Noah built an ark. And by faith and works, he built an ark. So that it took works to build the ark. If Noah had sat down on a wooden horse and piled his tools beside him and said, I’m a just to believing, he’d never have gotten the ark built. But he called in his carpenters, laid down the blueprints and went to work. And somebody came along and said, you hope to save yourself by building an ark? You are not a New Testament Christian. You are a legalist. You’re mixing works with faith. No, no, Noah might have replied, I’m obeying my faith by doing what I’m told. So, he built himself an ark.

Go on down the line to you come to Abraham. By faith Abraham went out, but he did go out and by faith. Who else down here in a hurry, Gideon? Gideon did things by faith, but he also did them by works. He actually girded on the sword and went out.

Then there was Barak and Samson. Samson could have sat sublimely by and gazed at the heavens and said, I am believing in the Philistines, and would have swarmed around him. But he grabbed a jawbone of an ass and slew about 1000 Philistines. And then there was Jephthah and David and Samuel. You can go right on down the line. So, the the 11th chapter of Hebrews is not only a faith chapter, it’s a works chapter, too. God never makes a whole chapter of one wing. He puts the other wing in, even if it isn’t so visible. So, they’re both there.

Now again, through the Spirit. But you say, that is teaching the power of the human character to do good. No, it isn’t, because he says,”through.” The Spirit of God never commands righteousness without giving the power to be righteous. So, it is through the Holy Ghost. The real Christian who has been renewed inside and purified in his soul. He’s got no confidence in the flesh. He knows the flesh will never get him anywhere. But in Romans 8, we have that the works of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh.

Now, the fourth point is, unto unfeigned love of the brethren. What does this all lead to, unfeigned love of the brethren. You see that word “unfeigned” here. Unregenerate society feigns its love, mostly. Politicians feign their love; they will kiss your baby. They’d even kiss your hand. They used to send garden seed. I haven’t got a package a garden seed in years. Has anybody around here got a package of garden seed? They used to send out garden seed, hoping that you would plant their garden seed and vote for them the next senatorial election. But they smile, they visit, they traveled around, they make whistle stops, they wave the flag, they quote Lincoln, and they’re all doing it to get your vote. They love you so much. When they make their speeches, they refer to you in drooling affection. But the reason they refer to you is that you have the sovereign power to put an X after their name.

And I suppose I shouldn’t say it here, but I often think how some of these lugubrious tears that union leaders shed over the poor, exploited, downtrodden proletariat. I think they’re crocodile tears made out of plastic, because those boys, call them in, call them out, call them in, call them out and make fools out of them. Treat them like puppets. And they’re riding in Cadillacs. Well, unions are good things, in a way, if they’re carefully run. I’ve always believed that. I also believe that they can become curses when they get into the hands of men who only claim to love the public but love only their own pocketbook and their own power.

And then there’s that salesman. He comes in, bless him. I used to sell books myself. That is, I went around trying it. I never sold much, because I was too honest and too timid. But a salesman comes in and he finds your name next door, and it’s Mrs. Jones, he says. How nice to see you. He found out next door who you are. Also he’s inquired about your family. Did Jim get back from the war yet? He wants to sell you something. The unregenerate world feigns its love for the most part except for its own tiny circles. But the Spirit implants real love, unto unfeigned love of the brethren. And the love of a Christian is not a feigned love.

I have had it said of this church, that it’s very friendly. And I have also heard it said of this church, that it’s quite unfriendly. I think perhaps a happy medium would be the truth. You will find friendliness here if you smile and look friendly. You will probably be passed up if you will look as if you didn’t want to be a friend. But I have been in churches where they just fawned over you. Haven’t you?

I remember years ago visiting a church. I just sat back there look straight ahead.

Pretty soon the pastor came around, and he fawned over me. You’d think I was Eisenhower’s twin brother they didn’t know he had. He didn’t know who I was. It wasn’t because of me. It would have been anybody else the same. He said he was so happy I had decided to look in on them. I hadn’t. I just had gone to church, but I didn’t quite accept that. It was a little too much. When you love me too much, brother, I’m worried about you. Love me enough, and it’s all right. Don’t love me at all, and I’ll pray for you. But when it gets to be fawning love, it’s feigned love.

Now, the Holy Ghost gives us love that is real. It’s real love. And you know that real love isn’t always fawning over its object. Real love sometimes rebukes. The sharpest book in the New Testament, you know what it is? The sharpest book in the New Testament is 1 John. The apostle of love also could wield a paddle more vigorously than any other apostle. So, the loving John could lay it on when he needed to. He that loveth his son whippeth him betimes, Scripture says. And God loves us and whippeth us betimes. And if we love each other, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we love them with the meek, harmless, fawning love, but we love them for their soul’s sake. And we love them in God, unto unfailing love of the brethren.

Then he says see now that ye love one another. Obviously then, this love is not a wild plant that will grow of itself. It is there in the heart by a divine planting, but it must be cultivated. Dandelions will grow without cultivation. Love must be cultivated. The human heart must be cultivated. We must work on it. We must pray, search the word, and obey and believe and humble ourselves and open our minds to the incoming Holy Ghost, so that we may cultivate and see that we love one another.

Then he says, out of a pure heart. And I can only pass that by for time’s sake and say that no other kind of heart can really love purely, because the heart to love purely, must love unselfishly. Unselfish love does not exploit its objects, and it doesn’t ask anything in return. That is so lofty that the modern world knows little or nothing about it. But it’s out of a pure heart.

Then he says, fervently, and I close by reminding you that God hates everything that’s halfway. He hates half-minded people. Ye are double-minded, He said. Now, a double mind is a mind that’s half one way and half the other. And God hates the double mind and says no man who prays with a double mind need expect to get anything. Have some kind of mind. Settle for one, but let it be all one thing. Don’t let it be a divided mind. But that’s what a double mind is.

They used to call them Sunday Christians in the country. They said they had Sunday religion. And they used to say quaintly that they hung their religion up with their new suit in the closet when they got home Sunday night and never put it on again till the next Sunday morning. Now that’s being double-minded. And God hates all double mindedness because it isn’t real. He says we are to love fervently out of a pure heart, fervent love, fiery love, fervid love. And God says that Ephraim was a cake not turned and you know what that is. I might ask for a show of hands, how many had cakes for breakfast this morning? I was brought up on buckwheat cakes. And I know what a half-turned cake is. It’s a half-baked one. And the Lord hates half-baked things. He wants it to be baked all the way through.

And then he talks about the lukewarm. Now, I want to ask you this question and send you home with this metaphysical problem on your mind. Is a bottle half full of something, half full or half empty? I don’t know myself. And is lukewarm water, half warm or half cold? Tell me Tom after church. Incidentally, I got a long, five-page letter from a brother in California, vigorously taking me to task for saying that Tom Hare was Irish. He declared he’s nothing of the sort. But I’ll talk about that later.

But what I wanted to say was that what God wants here is not a half anything. What I started to say is, is a half Christian a half-sinner, a half-Christian. I don’t know, but I do know this, God will sweep the whole business out together. He’ll have nothing to do with half stuff. He says that we are to be filled unto the half-fullness of God—never! For God to say a thing like that, He wouldn’t be God. Filled unto the fullness of God, he says, not unto the half-fullness. God has nothing to do with half-full things. He gives us a whole day, not a half day. He gives us a whole personality, not a half personality, a whole mind, not a half mind, a whole salvation not a half salvation. And He expects our love to be a whole love, fervent, and not half cold.

Well, that’s a little outline. You’re welcome to it. Think it over. Seeing now that you have purified your soul by obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren. Now see to it that that love goes to work, and you really love each other out of a pure heart, fervently. That’s Peter’s exhortation. I pray that it may be taken to our hearts and may do us good.

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“The Moral Implication of the Resurrection of our Lord”

The Moral Implication of the Resurrection of our Lord

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 10, 1955

I cannot let this day close without pointing to the moral implications of the resurrection of our Lord. And that would be the topic I would assign myself tonight, “The Moral Implications of the Resurrection of our Lord. And we’ll continue to think about this 28th chapter of the book of Matthew. In the end of the Sabbath, that is, not at night, but in the morning, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and that other Mary, to see the sepulcher. I suppose they hadn’t been asleep all the night. And as soon as there was any hope of light, they appeared. And behold, there was a great earthquake. For the angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door and sat upon it.

It would be very easy for a vivid Christian imagination here, to introduce a lot of things that are not in the text. Why did the angel from heaven sat upon the roll back stone? I think I know. If God had said to me, now you go down. My Son is in the grave. And I want you to go down and roll back that stone. He is coming out to be alive forevermore. He will never die again, but He’ll stay in life forever, a mortal life forever. Go down and confound hell and glorify the Father. And I think I know where I would have set when the stone was rolled back. I think I’d have sat where the angel did. Now that might not be the reason the angels sat there, but it looks all right to me.

Then verse three, the countenance of this angel was like lightning and his raiment white as snow. And for fear of him, the keepers did shake and became as dead men. And the angel answered, that is, answered the unspoken inquiry of the women and said, fear not ye. For I know whom ye seek. It is Jesus which was crucified. But He is not here. For He is risen as He said. And if you are doubtful about it, come and see the place where the Lord once lay, but lies no more.

Now, there are two thoughts here, the magnificence of this angel that rolled the stone away, this messenger from God and the warm love of these two Marys that came to the sepulcher to mourn their Lord. And then, the annunciation, He is not here. He is risen. Come and see the place where the Lord lay. And then in verse eight it says about these disciples, that they departed quickly from the sepulcher with fear and great joy and did run to bring His disciples word.

The fear that was here was not the fear that they had once felt. Not the fear that keeps men in bondage all their lifetime, that is, fear of death. The fear that they felt was another kind of fear. It was a fear that was replete with joy. That is, it was reverence. It was the sense of being suddenly found in the presence of the supernatural and the heavenly, and to know that the Lord had risen and was out of the grave. This brought a sense of the heavenly-ness upon them, a sense of another world, the sense of mystery and life and well-being and the presence of God.

And so, there was the fear of it there, and it was a fear mixed with joy. And they departed from the sepulcher. Someone said, I don’t recall whom I was talking lately, that religion lies in the prepositions. And here we have religion lying in another preposition. They departed quickly from the sepulcher. “From” is a preposition. It is a word of direction. They had come to the sepulcher. That was their religion that they had before they knew Jesus had risen from the dead. The direction was toward the sepulcher. They came to the sepulcher. There you have a preposition. The direction is toward the sepulcher.

And as soon as they heard the joyful news that He had risen from the dead as He said, and that you could actually see the place where He lay. Then the Scripture said, they departed from the sepulcher. They changed their preposition from to, to from. The direction was now not toward the grave, but away from the grave. Not toward the end, but the end was past and now it was toward endlessness. And they departed quickly from the sepulcher and did run to bring the disciples word.

And then verse sixteen, the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. What a wonderful thing for a man to do. He appointed to meet these disciples before his death, apparently, and said, I will meet you. I’m going to die tomorrow, and in three days, I will meet you; make an appointment for three days after He was to die. That’s what He did alright. And so they came and they found Him there. Verse eighteen, Jesus came. They saw Him and they worshipped Him. But being like you and me, there were some that were wondering about it all. It says, doubted, here.

In verse eighteen, Jesus came and spake unto them and said, all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth, all power. He had died in weakness. And they had seen Him limp and cold and dead on the cross. They’d seen Him taken down and removed and placed in a grave. Now, they heard Him say, all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. That might have been hard to believe except for one thing. He was there to prove that His words were real. If He had said that and not come through, and they had been looking down on His dead face and they had remembered that he said, all power is given unto me, they might have shrugged and looked at each other and shaking their heads and walked sadly away. For it would have been speaking, and not making good on your speech.

But there He was, keeping an appointment three days after death. There He was, present, in His own warm, living, pulsating, immortal person. And He said, all power is given unto me, in heaven and in earth. Now, how could they deny it? If a man just makes talk, you have a right to doubt him. But if a man stands before you risen from the dead, then you have a right to listen to him.

And when Jesus said, all power is given unto Me, He was there out of the grave, alive, to give weight and meaning, finality to what He was saying. And the church has believed that, that all power belongs to Jesus Christ our Lord. He doesn’t exercise it all yet, but He has it all. He can command the armies of the world any moment. He can change the course of nations with a wave of His hand or word of His mouth. He can raise the dead, for they shall hear His voice and come forth from their lowly graves. All power is his, all authority, the authority of a raised and living Savior, the authority of a dying Lamb, the authority of a King, the authority of a High Priest forever, the authority of the second person of the Trinity, it’s all his authority and it’s all His power.

So, He said, all power is given unto me in heaven and earth. That is why I for one, cannot as the old writers would say, I cannot away with, it means I can’t tolerate this pitying kind of religion. It’s pitying the Lord Jesus Christ all the time. Come weep with me awhile. Come, weep with me awhile. Let us kneel down by the cross and let us weep a while. Come weep awhile as though the Lord were a victim, a martyr, a victim of his own zeal, a poor pitiable man with good intention, but that found the world was too big for Him and life too much for Him. So, He sank down in the helplessness of death. And now, when we weep for a while beside His tomb and grieve awhile beside His cross and walk around in black.

No, no my brethren, He says, all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Here is the mighty Jesus, the mighty Christ, the mighty Lord. At Christmas time I said, the power doth not lie in the manger. And now I say to you that power does not lie at the cross. Power lies in the glory. The man who died on the cross died in weakness. The Bible says so. But He rose in power. And if we forget the resurrection and the glory and the fact that He is seated at the right hand of God, we lose all the meaning of Christianity.

Power does not lie with a babe in a manger. Power does not lie with a man helpless on a cross. Power lies with a man who died on that cross and went into a grave and came out the third day and rose to the right hand of power. There is where power lies. And the Savior that we serve is not a Savior to be pitied. And our business is not to mourn and weep awhile beside a grave. Our business is to thank God with tearful reverence that He ever went into that grave. To thank God, with joy, that He ever went to that cross. To understand what that cross meant and means and understand what that burial means, and then understand what the resurrection means that placed a glorious crown upon all His sufferings.

So, at His Father’s right hand, He sits in absolute majesty and kingly powers, sovereign over all the world. But you say, Mr. Tozer, isn’t that just big talk? If He is sovereign over all the world, what about Russia? What about juvenile delinquency? What about atom bombs and hydrogen bombs? If He is Sovereign over all the world, why is the West at the throat of the East? And why is there an armament race? Because, He has a prophetic plan that He’s working by.

And His plan calls for the nations of the earth to play themselves like checkers over the face of the world as over a checkerboard. And it calls for the return of Israel to Palestine. And it calls for the king of the north, to beat himself out. And it calls for the West to evangelize the world. And He’s waiting, waiting, though He has all the power, He’s waiting to exercise it. He exercises it in a limited way now through His church and would exercise it with unlimited power if His church was ready to believe that He would and could do it. All power is given unto Me in heaven and earth.

Now what are we to do? What are the moral implications of it? The answer is, go ye therefore. Therefore, is the word that means, as a result of what I just said, that all power is given unto Me in heaven and earth. Go ye and disciple all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son of the Holy Ghost.

Now, my friends, I want you to see here that Easter did not come and end. It’s not something to be celebrated each year as a something in itself, that began and ended in itself. It was but a beginning of some vaster and grander thing. I am out of the grave. I’m alive forevermore. All power is given unto me. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And then the rest of it says, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

You know how tenderly we take the knife of bad teaching and separate that little passage from the rest, as you might take a rine off an orange. We peel it off and put it on our mottos and on our calendars and in the back of our book or draw a line through it, lo, I am with you always even unto the end of the world, but He didn’t say that. Don’t make him say something He didn’t say. Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. He didn’t say that. He said, and lo, I am with you alway. That conjunction is not there by accident. He said go ye therefore and lo, I am with you always.

There’s the point. Easter did not come to give you and me a chance to smell sweet flowers. And you can’t imagine what a circle of fragrance there is around those lilies, beautiful, and I’m a flower man. I don’t know one from the other, but I love them. I do know that’s a lily. And I love all that goes with it. I’d whisper to you ladies that I even like the color that comes with Easter in the clothing. I don’t mind it at all. I’m not such an old fuddy duddy and just frown upon color. I like color. God made color. He made all in color there is. The devil never invented a color yet. He doesn’t know how. He can’t do it. He can’t make anything pretty. God makes the pretty things, and the devil makes the ugly things.

But Easter isn’t a time for us to smell flowers only, not a time for us to buy the new clothing only. And certainly, God knows it’s not a time to be the proudest fellow in the Easter parade. It’s a time for us seriously to consider the moral implications of the resurrection. If this is all true, if this is not more Santa Claus stuff. This isn’t simply more sentimentality and poetry. If this is history. If this is real. If this happened, and this church is founded upon the belief that it happened. And I stand tonight upon the faith that it happened. This is historically true.

Then if it is true, was does it mean to me? Does it have any bite in it? Does it get hold of me? Does it mean anything to me? Am I to listen to a cantata and sing, up from the grave He arose, smell the flowers and go home and forget it? No, it has a moral application. It lays hold upon us with all the authority of sovereign obligation, and says, go, you. You go. Everybody knows the grammatical construction here. You is the subject of that sentence. Go is the verb go. You, you go and teach all nations. Or as the margin has it, make disciples among all nations, or make Christians in all the nations.

So, the moral obligation of the resurrection of Christ is the missionary obligation. It is the obligation to carry the message and to tell the story and to be a financial and personal and praying part of this great commission. There are those who so rightly divide the Word of Truth wrongly, that they put this great commission in what they call the tribulation days and say it doesn’t belong to the church of Christ.

The devil is slicker than the communists. Communists are dumb. Every time they try to pull a fast one. They’re so dumb that it’s amazing how they can get along at all. If they didn’t have so much brass, they couldn’t. They cover their ignorance and stupidity with brass. But the devil isn’t so stupid. And he well knows that if he can succeed in getting us to be satisfied with a celebration, and say, oh, He’s risen from the dead. Let everybody say amen.

I even heard a man last night on the radio as I was sampling the station to see if there was anything worth listening to, comparing Jesus Christ to a baseball player who died when he was 38, Lou Gehrig. He said, Lou Gehrig, he was 38 years old when he got leukemia and died. He said he was a wonderful fellow, and incidentally, he was, a wonderful young man, a prince among young men from all I can learn about him. But he died when he was 38, and said, the unctuous voiced announcer, he died at 38, and come to think of it, Jesus died about that time. But look what Lou Gehrig accomplished, and look what Jesus accomplished.

And so, if we can get all soft voice and dewy-eyed and talk about Jesus and Lou Gehrig, the devil will be a happy boy. He’ll say, that’s what I want them to do. I want them to talk about Easter. I want them to have cartoons about Jesus rising from the dead. I want them to put on cantatas and sing great anthems and preach sermons about Him. But I always want them to think about Him as being just like any other big hero, a Lincoln, a Lou Gehrig, I don’t ever want them to remember for a minute that He is now seated in the place of power, and I’m a poor frightened fugitive. The devil never wants that, He wants us to think about Easter and buttercups and the bluebirds coming back.

But he doesn’t want us to remember that his Lord is at the right hand of God now and can put him in hell when the time comes. He can send him there and chain him and hurl him down the moment He wants to do it in the prophetic plan. He doesn’t want anybody to remember that. He knows he can keep the Christians mourning a while. Oh, mourn with me a while and weep with me beside the tree. He knows he’s got us. And he knows that he’s got a bunch of sentimental blubberers.

But if we can see that He is risen, and that He’s no longer dead, no longer mortal. Not even mortal, to say nothing of being dead. He can’t die anymore. Death has no more dominion. And that He has all the authority in heaven, earth and hell, and holds the keys thereof. Then we get our chest back and begin to look and think and feel differently about things. And it’ll be no more a celebration once a year, and no more mournful thinking about a pitiful Jesus that went out to die. But we’ll understand what the cross was for.

Next Saturday on the radio, I’m going to preach on, what did the cross mean? And as soon as we get a hold of that and we know the meaning of the cross and the meaning of the resurrection, then power begins to move in, and we take the offensive and become the aggressors. And our witness and our testimony become positive and final, and we’re to spread this all over the earth. I wouldn’t be pastor five minutes of a church that wouldn’t be a missionary church and wouldn’t have missionary interests, missionaries clinging around and missionaries going out sometimes and missionaries coming back, because that’s the obligation.

That’s the moral obligation of our Lord’s resurrection. It is that we surrender to His Lordship. All power is given unto me. It is that we obey His command, go ye therefore and teach all nations. It is that we believe His promise, lo, I’m with you alway even unto the end of the world. But let’s not separate them. Let’s not refuse to have anything to do with the going or the sending. Let’s not forget the nations and then say, lo I’m with you. He didn’t say it. He said, you do what I told you to do and lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

Well, next week we begin our 33rd missionary convention. Next Sunday night I’m going back to John again. I’m still in John. I’m going to preach a missionary sermon out of John following Brother Notson’s missionary message. And then I’m going to pray, and I know you will and do everything possible to see whether we can’t push up our missionary offering another $10,000 this year from whatever it’s been before.

Then, in addition to that, we have a crop of teenage young people now coming up in our church. Now, what’s it going to be for them? Where are they going? Are they going to mature, marry, settle down, get old, quick thinking, get into a groove and wear it deeper and deeper as the years go by as so many, many have done, or are they going to hear the voice of God speak to them? Are they going to listen to this voice spoken, O earth, hear the word of the Lord, says the Holy Ghost. And here it is. I am no longer in the grave. I am out and here I am, He said. And My power is all power there is. It’s mine. Heaven listens. Earth listens. Hell listens. It’s all mine. Now because it’s all mine, I can protect you. I can support you. I can go ahead of you. I can give you effectiveness and meaning and efficiency.

You therefore go and make disciples out of all the nations of the world, all the nations, and I will be with you. I will be with you. The American soldier goes out. He has the goodwill and the good wishes and the prayers and the love of his people behind him. But he may be caught somewhere in a foxhole all alone. And all 160 million Americans and all the unthinkable power of our American military, can’t help him at all. But there was never a Christian caught in a foxhole alone. Never. Paul said, my friends all left me, but nevertheless, the Lord stood with me. Hear that? He remembered that the Lord stood with him. Nobody, nobody’s ever been deserted by the Lord yet.

Twelve to fourteen years ago, a great big handsome fellow used to play with my boys. Oh, they were big enough now, 17-18; but they still played and fooled around there. They used to come over and I’d see him, a round-faced, handsome big fellow full of smiles; a very close friend to one of my boys. He became a flyer over Germany. He went out one night, and I think over the English Channel if I remember. Some of the mates, some of those who were with him in the squadron flying, saw his plane take fire and start to spiral downward and plunge. And I don’t know if they have ever found the body yet after all these years. Nobody could help him then. 160 million Americans back here, untold power, flew the air and floated on the sea and marched on the land, Marines, Air Corps, WACS, WAVES, Army, military power untold, but a handsome, young fellow, too late, spiraled down into the sea with the rest of his crew. And they have never been heard of since.

But no soldier ever went out yet for the Lord Jesus, ever went anywhere yet by himself. Never could be said yet of a man, a missionary, or a messenger of the truth. Here he is, all alone. Jesus Christ has all the power there is, but he’s way yonder and the man is alone. Poor fellow, it’s too bad, Jesus couldn’t get some of that power to him, too bad.

No, no, nobody ever said that that had sense in his head. For you said, lo, I am with you always even to the end of the world. And there never was a martyr yet on a mission field of the world, never a missionary that laid down his life in a cannibal jungle. Never a missionary that perished shooting the rapids or going over the falls, never a one, but the Lord Jesus Christ didn’t have him by the hand and lead him triumphantly victoriously through. Lo, I am with you always. But that itself is based upon the obligation, understood and accepted. Go ye therefore and teach all nations.

I hope that this church and all of us here and myself and these pastors and all of you friends, I hope that we’ll all see that Easter is not a time for celebration only. It’s a time for obligation. It is a time for moral implications. It’s a time to understand that if He rose, then we’ve got to do something. If He rose, then we can’t sit. If He rose, then we can’t settle back down in religious apathy. If He rose, and all power is His, then there’s something for you and me to do!

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I am Crucified with Christ

I am Crucified with Christ

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 20, 1959

Having read most of the story of Saul and the prophet Samuel from 1 Samuel 15, I’ll refer to it only as an illustration, but I want to take a text now from Galatians, the second chapter. Paul says, I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

Now, what I want to say tonight, will not be new to you, and it certainly will not be new to me. I want to sum up what I believe on a certain important phase of Christianity. I have said this. I have weaved it in here and there, as a weaver might weave in a favorite color into almost every tapestry that he created. But I want to sort of concentrate tonight and speak from the Lord. I don’t know what you will do about what I say.

And I’d like also to say this, that I will not teach anything that isn’t believed by every fundamentalist in the world. Every fundamentalist in the world believes what I’m going to preach tonight. But the difference is this, that most of them seem satisfied to teach it and hold it as a doctrine. But I insist that if it is true, then it is too important to let lie quiescent. It ought to be detonated. It ought to be set off and allowed to explode; and then, after the smoke is cleared, see what you have left. And if you don’t have anything left, you didn’t have anything left to start with, anyhow. If you do have anything left, it will be eternal.

These words by the man Paul are a very strange verse. So strange, that the man might be accused of deliberately confounding or confusing people at least. He said, I am crucified with Christ. And of course, the tense is, I have been crucified with Christ; and a man who has been crucified isn’t around anymore. So, it’s very odd that a man should say, I have been crucified. Nobody else has ever said it. A man might say, I am to be crucified. He might say, I am being crucified, but nobody ever put it in the past perfect and said, I have been crucified. He’s dead, he couldn’t talk.

But here’s a man talking. He said, I have been crucified. Nevertheless, I live a strange kind of crucifixion that, and he apologizes and says yet, I don’t mean that I live. What do I mean? I mean that Christ lives in me. And yet, Paul, you’re alive and you’re among us. We hear your voice and we see your little body, wearing it’s old fashioned toga. You’re among us, you’re alive, yes, I know. But the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. There’s only one conclusion here. The man who said I have been crucified. He had a resurrection, otherwise he couldn’t have said this. He had to explain that I was crucified and the fact that I’m alive here. I’m no ghost. I’m living now by the faith of the Man who loved me and died for me and rose for me.

Now, that’s what Paul said, and I haven’t added anything. I’ve just tried to explain a little bit. And I insist that if this kind of life was an apostolic life, if this is true, then you and I ought to be greatly disturbed about the way we’re living. And we ought to do something about it. Because you see, Paul here gives us the way of God. This is the way of God; the way God does things. God sets life and death over against each other and they’re eternal opposites.

You’ll find in your Bible, that there are opposites always standing against each other. Musical directors, and even pastors sometimes, in conspiracy with the musical directors, set up a service in which everything in it is like everything else. The pastor is going to preach about heaven. They sing about heaven, read Scripture about heaven. The soloist sings about heaven, and the offertory is “Jerusalem, the Golden. And it gets saccharin, because it’s all one thing. But life isn’t like that. Life is two things, always two things. One thing stands over against something else, totally opposite. We call the other sex from us the opposite sex.

Human life exists because there are opposites. If the whole world was made of men, we would last one generation and die. If it was made of women, one generation. But there’s the negative and the positive, life and death. And God sets them over against each other–eternal opposites. And do you know what death is? Death is the enemy, always the enemy. Death is the enemy and yet God makes it the gateway to life–strange. It’s here though. Paul said it. Life speaks of blessedness and peace and happiness and love and fulfillment. And death speaks of darkness and loss and eternal negation. And yet, strangely because we’re in the fix we’re in.

Now, mark you this, my friends, if we hadn’t fallen, all that I’m saying, would not need to be said. And if we hadn’t fallen, it would be foolish to say it. There are so many things that are tentatively true. That is, they’re true because of the fix we’re in. But as soon as the Lord comes and glorifies His church and sin is no more, that won’t be true anymore. I said a while ago, a man had to be stubborn, to serve God. That’s because we’re in a world surrounded by enemies. But five minutes after the Lord comes, I couldn’t say that and tell the truth.

In heaven, nobody is stubborn. Everybody lives in the will of God, smoothness and sweetness, and so will it be in that glad day when the Lord comes and glorifies his people. And then so many things that are true now won’t be true then. They won’t need to be true then. Take up your cross and follow me. Give up all. Leave your family and come and follow Me. It won’t have to be so then. Nothing like that up there. It’s down here true, but it’s not up there true.

So, here’s death and life, and they stand over against each other. And the reason for it is because the human race is bad, we’re bad. And we’re so bad that you can’t make us good. That’s the doctrine that Paul teaches. That’s the doctrine that Jesus taught. That’s the doctrine that the Old Testament story taught. Were so bad, you can’t make us good. God doesn’t try to. He doesn’t want to. It isn’t His plan nor His purpose to do it. We’re so bad that He doesn’t try to make us good. We’re so bad, the only way we can be made good is to be killed. There are some people so bad that the society pronounces a death sentence on them, and they die because they can’t be made good. They’re considered to be beyond salvation, beyond hope, beyond reclamation.

And the whole human race before the eyes of God is so bad, it can’t be made good. God can’t patch it up. He never meant to patch it up. He never came into the world that you and I should learn to think lofty thoughts and dream high dreams and learn etiquette and ethics and all the rest. He came into the world in order that He might fix it so a certain number of people could die with Him and rise with Him to a new life.

Paul never said I’m good. Paul said I died. Paul was so bad that the Lord couldn’t patch him up, couldn’t fix him up. It’s no use. There’s only one way to deal with Paul and that was crucify him. But a crucified man is of no account. He’s lying out there dead. So, the next thing, if God wants to use him at all, or to have his mouth filled with praise is to raise him from the dead a new man. The kind of man he ought to have been in the first place and wasn’t.

Now, what am I teaching? I am teaching Keswick doctrine, if you please. I’m teaching that which the Sunday School Times was founded on, the victorious life. I’m teaching that which gave birth to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. And yet, there are hundreds of thousands of us Christians who know this doctrine who’ve never made it work in our own lives or done anything about it. Now, I say it’s the way of God in this world in which we live. Put life over there and say there is life. Now, that’s what you want. When we start out for life and God said, no, you don’t get it that way. You get it by going the way of death. That’s the way of God. But it is the way of man to try to do the opposite. He wants to engraft the new life on the old life. That is my criticism of modern evangelism and a great deal of modern evangelicalism.

We don’t understand Paul, and we don’t understand the teaching of Christ and the cross. And so we take men and graft life on them. God never did it. He never meant to do it. He never tended to do it. He never planned it. He never ordained it that way. But we do it. We take the old life and then graft some new life on it. And we graft life in one hand and death in the other hand. We will not pass the judgment of death on ourselves; we just won’t do it.

We will save face. We acknowledge our sin. We admit our faults. We lose face and we get chagrined, and we get humbled, and we apologize, but we never pass the sentence of death on ourselves. Paul did. We curb the grosser manifestations of the flesh and count that enough. So, you see, the ways of God and the ways of man are contrary, the one to the other. And in the church of Christ, they are contrary, the one to the other. We get a fellow to admit that he’s accepted Christ, and we graph new life on him and get him fixed up. And pretty soon he gets so he can talk in public. And then after that, he gets on the board. And pretty soon he’s in a position where he’s exerting his authority and his weight in spiritual things. And he may be a good man and well-intentioned, but he’s had life graft on. He’s never understood what Paul meant when he said, I die with Christ. I have died. I’ve been crucified.

And so that man is trying to live like a man who had died when he hadn’t died. He’s trying to live like a man who had risen when he hasn’t risen. So, He’s halfway in between the old death and the new life, caught in the middle. Paul told us about it in the seventh chapter of Romans. Read that again sometime, that miserable, wretched seventh chapter in Romans.

Yet, the great man Paul said he was in that position. Such a man as I’ve described, won’t go all the way with God, but he won’t go all the way with the world either. He won’t go all the way to the cross, but he insists on going part of the way to the cross. And He says, I have been partly crucified with Christ. And so, he would have to admit, I nevertheless, I partly live. Because he’s partly dead, he partly lives, and that’s the kind of Christianity we have in our day. Partly dead and partly alive, everywhere, everywhere you go, it’s the same.

But the life, the victorious life, the life, the new wondrous life stands beckoning there, just on the other side. Not of an artistic gate. No artist ever painted that gate, that lovely, beautiful gate, not that. But it stands on the other side of a cross. And God says, if you want new life, then you will have to know death. Know death of what now? What kind of death are we talking about? Do I mean you’re going to have to die and go into the grave? Some people have foolishly interpreted it so. They say that we’re going to die and rise again; when we arise, then we’ll be good people.

Well, I want to talk about some of the things that have to be crucified and point out that God sent a man by the name of Saul, and said, these Amalekites aren’t fit to live. And I as the sovereign God who gave them life, now I want to take it from them. I have a right to do that. And I want you to go, and I want you to take an army and terminate them from the earth. Kill everything. Destroy it all, including their king and all of their fat cattle and sheep. And Saul said, I’m willing to go and he started. And he destroyed everything that didn’t do him any good. Everything he couldn’t use, he destroyed. But he thought it would be a nice mantelpiece to have around, to keep that king around to show him off.

And also, he wanted the cattle and the sheep. So, he kept the best of them. The old swayback heifers and the old lock horned steers, he killed them. But he kept all the fine-blooded cattle. The old wearied, dragged tailed sheep, that couldn’t keep the cockle burrs out of their wool, he let them die. The fine, young lambs and ewes, he kept. God had said destroy these enemies, and Saul decided that he knew better than God knew what to do with enemies. So, he made a distinction between enemies and enemies.

Now, what are the enemies that require the sentence of death? You and me? What are those enemies that keep you from growing in grace? Some of you haven’t grown in grace for years. You haven’t gotten any more spiritual in years. Why? What is it?

Well, first I’ll say that you can’t slay these enemies yourself. You can only pass sentence on them actually. You can only pass sentence on them. We call that slaying them because the slaying must be done by the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord. But I just wanted to point out a few of them to you; and one of them is self-righteousness. And now, self-righteousness, believing that we are in some measure righteous and not as bad as they say we are. We deny our self-righteousness in our creed, but we defend it in our conduct. We permit it to be felt in our hearts. Drunkenness and impurity and dishonesty in business affairs and lying out right and gambling, we say, oh, those are bad. Those are the vile things, and we get rid of those vile things. But self-righteousness can become a very beautiful thing. It can be artistic.

Then there’s self-confidence. And you know, self-confidence can be compatible with all the language of humility. We can feel deeply self-confident while at the same time we’ve learned the language of humility. We’ve learned the testimony and we’ve learned to weave into our sermons how humble we are when at the same time, we can be quite confident in ourselves.

And there’s self-sufficiency in life and in heart and in service. And there’s self-love, which indeed, is the source of all other evils, I suppose, the source of all hurt feelings. Hurt feelings do in the church of Christ, what certain diseases do for children.

You know, they say that children’s diseases are not injurious, not harmful. I know better than that. One of our boys can hear out of only one ear, because when he was a lad he had scarlet fever. It wasn’t the fault of his parents. We went to a child specialist. He didn’t know what he had. He told him to go back to school, let him go back to school because he was able to stagger. Then the rest of them got it and got it, and pretty soon we found what we had. We had scarlet fever. So, we imagine that these children’s diseases don’t hurt our children, but they do. They affect the eyes. They affect the ears if we don’t watch it.

So, self-love, is like it brings about hurt feelings, and hurt feelings in a church. They’re the children’s diseases for all the immature Christians, all the childish Christians that haven’t grown up yet. They get their feelings hurt because they’re subjected to it because they’re filled with self-love. They love themselves.

And they wear their feelings on their sleeve and they’re ready immediately to take umbrage if anybody said anything against them. And then those hurt feelings get into the church and then gets into the choir and then gets into the board and into the Sunday school, and pretty soon, you find that that little flare up of hurt feeling that you thought wasn’t anything, was a disease that has injured the body of Christ in that locality. And it all comes out of self-love.

We quote, I am crucified with Christ, but we haven’t been. We say, but we’ve crucified drunkenness. Yes, we’ve crucified gambling. Yes. We’ve crucified lying. Yes. We haven’t crucified hurt feelings and so we get it, and churches die of it. This thing goes on and on in churches until it divides whole sections of the church against each other. I never had it happen under my ministry. God’s good hand over these years has never allowed a division ever to happen under my ministry, and any hurt feelings, we got rid of very quickly. So, I’ve never seen it. But I’ve listened. I listened no later than a week or two ago to a long recital of a man who was sick inside because of what he’d had to go through in a certain church with hurt feelings, self-love, self-confidence, self-righteousness, self-pity. The source of all resentment is self-pity, so we pity ourselves.

God says this has to die. Go slay the Amalekites, and we say Lord, I used to smoke. I don’t smoke anymore. God said, I didn’t tell you to slay filter tips only, I told you to slay self-pity. You say, I kept that Father. I wanted to keep that around. I didn’t think that would be so bad. It’s a luxury to pity yourself sometimes.

Many a man, the only time he feels good during the day is when his wife bawls him out in the morning and he leaves home feeling he’s a martyr and goes off to the bus or train, feeling real good. He enjoys himself. If my neighbors only knew what I have to endure. I am a good man who makes a good living. I’ve been true and faithful and kind and look at the way she treats me. He enjoys shall self-pity. He picks up his newspaper down at 95th, 107th or 111th or wherever he lives and reads, family of six wiped out on highway 90. He reads it casually, never pities them. Too busy pitting himself. Self-pity, I say, is the source of all resentment; and resentment in the church is like another kind of disease in a family.

Then there is self-seeking. The source of much religious activity is self-seeking. If we could only know how often we serve God out of self-seeking and how often we serve God out of a desire to glorify God. I admit, I admit that bothers me sometimes. I admit that I have periods when I have to go to God and get light and help on it so that what I am doing that seems so good and right and all, won’t turn out to be self-seeking gone underground. The self-seeker can go underground and gnaw from underneath, and we’ll never know he’s there. The grass grows over him and we can’t hear him under there but he’s there, like a mole burrowing in the lawn. Many a book, many a sermon, many a song, many a school, many a church, gets their inception in self-seeking.

And there’s self-indulgence, not in low evil things of course. I am amazed when I go about and find how God’s people live. Maybe I was brought up wrong or brought up in a situation. I was brought up in a home where five cents was something you carefully laid on a shelf and reminded Mother it was there and you didn’t spend it without permission. And if you got candy, it was one penny’s worth. And if it was really a big day, was two pennies worth.

So, when businessmen take me out to lunch, “have a steak now Mr. Tozer, have a steak.” Six dollars and a half.  No. But, have a steak, we want you to have it, have it now. I look at the right-hand side of the column and whatever it says is the cheapest I take, even though it’s being paid for. I can’t bring myself to indulge myself like that. Maybe that’s a form of self-aggrandizement or self-confidence or self-righteous? I don’t know. But what I started out to say was, that I’m astonished at how people pamper themselves in the name of the Lord. They put up at the best hotels. We have everything, the very best, and never seem to ever think of money long as they’ve got it. They can talk about God continually over a six-dollar and a half steak. And for $2, they could have had a hamburger. And there’s just as much nourishment in a hamburger as there is in a steak. Anybody knows that, Brother.

I don’t want you to think I’m after you, brother, just because you’re bigger than I am, doesn’t mean you eat $6 steaks, but I’m just trying to say that God’s people are so self-indulgent. We don’t take dope. But we indulge ourselves other ways. Self-aggrandizement, everything has to advance me, advance mine.

I talked to preachers, and I can’t talk to them five minutes, not one minute until they’ve taken off, revved up their motors and gone off into the wild blue yonder. And for the rest of the meal, I have to sit and listen to what they did, who they are, what they’ve written, where they’ve been, how they’ve traveled, self-aggrandizement. Poor people at home paying the bills while they go all around over the world and collect stories. I don’t like that kind of stuff. I never did and I can’t and I’m not any near to it now than I was when I was much younger.

Now, there is a path. There’s a path to life and power, and it’s the path that Paul knew here. He said, I have been crucified. He said, I have gone to Jesus Christ and by faith of the Son of God, I have so identified myself with Christ that I consider myself to have suffered what He suffered, to be an outcast from society. I consider myself to be what he was, and by faith identify myself with Him as He identified Himself with me.

I said one time that Christ identified Himself with Christians in the incarnation, and a good Plymouth Brethren came down and he was right. I admitted it. He said, Brother Tozer, never say that. Never say that Christ has identified Himself with us in the incarnation. He identified Himself with us in the crucifixion. And he’s right. But that’s what Paul says. He identified Himself with the human race and the incarnation. He identified Himself with God’s people in the crucifixion and the resurrection. I am crucified with Christ, he said. I have been. Nothing had happened to His body, nothing like that. He wasn’t even present when our Lord died it isn’t supposed. But he said, it’s by faith of the Son of God. I have gone to Jesus Christ in faith, and I have so identified myself with Him that I have learned to suffer along with Him, and I cease saying “I,” he said in effect.

Now we say, yes, Lord, I have put away these things, Lord. I have put them away, Lord. But what meaneth then the bleating of the sheep. The man Saul didn’t know that the sheep would bleat at the wrong time. If he’d had any sense, He would have known that sheep bleat continually. Any flock of sheep anywhere, are bleating all the time. Cattle, except when they’re feeding, are lowing all the time. These are not all at the same time lowing. They’re not all at the same time bleating, but there’s always one of them. The fine, thin voice of the lamb or the heavy authoritative voice of the old ram or the plaintiff, appealing voice of the ewe calling her lambs in, but they’re bleating.

And Saul overlooked that fact. He overlooked that these sheep would bleat just at the wrong time. If they can only shut them up just at the right time, he might have got away with that dirty deal, for a while. But, just when he was saying most eloquently, and being a Jew, I suppose he was using both hands, saying, oh, but I have done what you told me to do.

About that time, “Baaaa” was heard over there. He said, what’s that I hear? Oh, well, he said, excuse me, but that’s a few that my people insisted on keeping. He said, I know you, you’re a tyrant and when you want a thing you get it. You’re responsible for those sheep. About that time, an old cow let out a trombone blast that echoed down the hills. He said, What’s that? He said, there we are again. I’m sorry to have to tell you but the people insisted. And Saul said, I know you, you liar. You claim to serve God but you won’t obey Him, and God has cast you out, taking your kingdom from me and he’s given it to a neighbor better than thou.

I wonder how long the church is going to have to go on like this. I don’t mean this church, but the church of God. You say we believe in Christ. We’re saved from sin. We have eternal life and can’t lose it. Everything will be alright. One of these days the Lord will come and take us from one kind of fun to another kind of fun. He’ll take us from being happy down here to being happy up there.

Believe me what He’ll do to those liberals and moderns. We’ll lick up our chops when the Lord will trample those moderns under His feet. It is awful easy for us of the orthodox persuasion to talk like that, friends, forgetting that right while we’re making our pious protestations, the bleating of the sheep and the bellowing of the herd may be coming across the meadows to say to God they’re not telling the truth, Father. They think they are, but they’re not. What about you?

I’m supposed to come and preach at Keswick again this year. What does Keswick teach? Only this, that’s all, only this. Sometimes I think even Keswick gets you dead and doesn’t get you alive again. Dr. Maxwell, “Born Crucified” and some of his other books, that’s what he teaches. What do they teach, and Turnbull teach and the Sunday School times? What did Dr. Simpson teach of this? Dr. Simpson taught that when you rise again in newness of life after letting your evil nature die with Christ, you can be anointed with power to go out and do the will of God and live in the fellowship of God and the power of the Spirit. That’s why the Christian Alliance ever was born in the first place. It will be a bad day for us when we forget that. It will be a bad day for us. But how about you? You can’t help what 1100 churches will do, but you can help what you do. You can’t even help what this church will do, really.

But you can decide what you will do. What about it? The Lord says, put that self-righteousness to death. Pass sentence on it. Identify yourself with Christ on the cross and let that self-righteousness die. Let that delicious self-pity that you like to lick on, let that die, stop pitting yourself. Stop seeking aggrandizement, your self-advancement, stop seeking it. Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God and He will exalt you in due time. Up out of our stony grief of humility, God will raise us to newness of life.

Somewhere I preached, I don’t remember where, in fact it was in Brooklyn a couple of Sundays ago. And I told them there that if they would put themselves in God’s hands and ask God Almighty to set a chain of circumstances in motion in their lives, He would lead them to be nothing and God to be everything, that they’d be surprised, that’s what will begin to happen. And then I had to tell them this as I tell you tonight, the strange thing will be that as you get better, you won’t know you’re getting better. As you get more powerful, you won’t know you’re getting powerful. As you get more God-like, you won’t know you’re getting God-like. For it is a strange contradiction that the most god-like man is the man who feels least like a God-like man.

And the most powerful man is the man who feels less power. It’s not the little fellows with their light up ties that think they’re bad. It’s the Spurgeons and the Augustines and the Pauls and the Simpsons and the Wesleys, who say, I’m no good. I’m no good God. I’m no good. The little guys with the light up ties, they say, God and I just had a little huddle together. And God said to me, son, let’s do it this way. That kind of Christianity is a million miles from the faith of our fathers. The further you get into the Kingdom and the closer to the cross of Christ, the further you’ll feel away and the less you will trust yourself.

And the more trust God can put in you, the less you’ll put in yourself. And the more trust you put in yourself; the less God will trust you. And the more you seek advancement, the less God will advance you. And the more God, out of your humility advances you, the less you will feel advanced. It’s a strange contradiction, a strange anomaly, but it’s there; power where death was, peace where turmoil was, life where weakness was. This is it, brethren. I guess it isn’t any wonder that this kind of preaching doesn’t bring mobs around here. But it does excite people all over the continent who want to hear about it. Small groups here and small groups there, and people who will gather in and make large groups and say, come and talk to us about this. I suppose I’m the poorest example of it there is on the North American continent, but at least I’ll do my best trying to tell people this is the way of life.

Wesley said to Peter Bowler, Peter, my heart hasn’t experienced grace. What will I do? He said preach it till you do experience it. Preach it because it’s in the Bible. Then when you experience it, preach it because you have it. And Wesley went out and did it. It wasn’t very long until he experienced grace and set the world on fire.

Let’s pray. We are assembled here tonight, Lord Jesus, as Thy disciples. Thy servant has tried from the New Testament and from the Old to explain the way of power and life. Now, Lord, Thou knowest how much easier it is to stand up here and explain it, than it is to go out tomorrow and live it. And yet, it’s possible to live it, otherwise Thy word would be confusion and more confounded. We pray, O Christ, while the church goes on without power, without holiness, without radiance, plugging along, we thank Thee, Father, for everyone that’s plugging along.

Thank Thee, Father, for everyone who says any good thing about thy Son. Thank thee for everyone whose testimony, however hollow, still may be on Thy side. We remember Thy servant who said, I thank God that Christ is preached regardless of how He is preached. So, we’re glad for everybody, but O Lord, we mourn. The weakness, the carnality, the selfishness that’s in Thy church among Thy people. We mourn that we don’t grow up, that we don’t advance. We stay little when we could be great Christians. O Lord, help us now.

Before we conclude our prayer, dear people, how many would say, Mr. Tozer pray for me that God will teach me the meaning of this text, this doctrine, this truth which has been so wonderfully taught and lived by so many of God’s saints down the years. I want it in my life. Would you pray for me? Would you raise your hand? Yes. Yes. Who else? Yes. Who else? Yes, I see your hand back there. Others, who would like us to pray?

Father, we pray for those who have requested it. Thou hast said, pray one for another. And there’s a reason for Thy saying that. So, we pray Thee for these who have said, pray for me, men and women. We pray for them. We pray that they may tear themselves loose if they have to do it, do it by violence from the green briars and the barbed wire and get themselves out of all that, and escape the snares and traps of the flesh and follow Christ. And by faith, put themselves with Him on a cross and see themselves rise with Him into glorious light and freedom. Grant this we pray. Lead these dear friends on. Put the right books in their hands. Lead them to the right Scripture. Help them to find time during the day or night that they ordinarily don’t have, to settle some of these things privately. Grant it we pray.

And let this, we pray Thee, spread not only here to these who raised their hands but all among Thy children. Begin we pray Thee, O God, soon to draw a line between the swaggering, smiling, self-assured, self-confident, bold, Christians and the lowly and the meek and the humble and the merciful who deny self and follow Thee. Let the Holy Ghost come upon some people, the humble, the lowly, the crucified, that they may rise to newness of life to shine and be an example to the ones that aren’t. Let it be so, we pray. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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“The Chief Cornerstone and Us as Stones”

The Chief Cornerstone and Us as Stones

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 31, 1954

As you are aware, I am bringing sermons from First Peter every Sunday morning. We are now in the second chapter. I spoke last week on laying aside all malice and guile and hypocrisies and envies and evil speaking. As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word that ye may grow thereby. Then he continues without pause: If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. I think those three verses will be enough for the morning. Beginning with, if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.

Now, what he has to say, the following, rests upon the, ‘if ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.” One great error that we make in coming to the Bible is to assume that because a thing is true, it’s true of us. If it is in the Bible, it is true. But the error is to assume that it is true of us. It is not necessarily always so, even that which follows the truth of God, Peter conditions upon the little word “if” and says, if ye have tasted, then what I say from here on, is applicable to you. But if you have not tasted, then you should go back and taste before you go any further.

Now, this is required of us to be called New Testament Christians at all, that we have tasted the good Word of God and the powers of the world to come. That we have tasted that the Lord is gracious. And I want that word “tasted” to mean what it means in the Bible and not what it means when we mean we experiment. We mean that we test a thing by putting it to the tongue as a woman tests her cooking. They used to. I don’t know whether they still do, but they used to test their soup with a little spoon, taste of it, to see if it was salty enough and was all right. I suppose that’s ordinary.

But that’s never what the Bible means, to test the thing to see if it’s all right, with no intention maybe of eating it; maybe never going on to eat it at all, but at least knowing what it’s like. Now, that is not what the Bible means. We have only to look it up in its original and find that the word taste here means experienced, lived through. To in order that a thing may be real to us, and everlastingly ours, it must be experienced. It must be lived through.

Now that same word “tasted” that Peter uses here, the precise word is used about our Savior in the book of Hebrews. It says that Jesus was made a little lower than the angels, that He, by the grace of God should taste death for every man. Now those who teach the tasting doctrine ought to give this some attention here. If the word taste in the New Testament means tested with the tongue to see if we like it or not, then that’s all Jesus did with death. For the same word is used that He tasted death for every man.

So, you see, my brethren, the word taste here does not mean experiment–try it by a touch–but it means experienced, gone through, encountered, past into and through. And that’s exactly what happened to our Lord when He died on the cross. He did not experiment with death and see whether He liked it, taste it to see whether He dared go on. But He threw Himself recklessly out and gave Himself to die; and experienced death in the fullest sense of that word.

Now these believers had experienced, and they had experienced not the grace of God only, but that the Lord was gracious. I do not want to split hairs. I never was much of a hair splitter. But where there is a difference, we ought to note that difference and distinguish things that differ in the language of Paul. And here I do know the difference. He does not say, if so be that you have tasted of the grace of God. But He says, if so be that you have tasted that the Lord is gracious. There is a difference between testing or tasting or even experiencing the Word of God or the grace of God and experiencing the gracious God.

There is a difference there, my brethren. We never should separate a gift from the source of the gift. We never should say, I have forgiveness. We should say, God has forgiven. We never should say I have eternal life. We should say God has given me eternal life. And Christ is my life.

The point there is that God does not divorce Himself from His gifts. He gives Himself in whatever He gives. If a man has been forgiven, what has happened to him is that God, the forgiving God, has touched him and thus forgiven him. But it is God that matters more than the forgiveness. If a man has eternal life, it is that he might know Jesus Christ, God the Father and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. That word “know” is experienced there again.

So that we must be very careful that we do not divorce God’s gifts from God Himself. I think that is what’s wrong with this in our day. We have the gifts of God, but we forget the God of the gifts. There’s a difference between noble, strong, vigorous and satisfying spiritual experience and the other kind of spiritual experience, which takes the gifts of God but forgets the Giver.

An example of that, a most ignoble example, is found in the gospels where 10 lepers came to Jesus and were healed of their leprosy. Now, they did receive healing and they were delivered. The old spots went away. The old sores disappeared. The old symptoms were gone. They were 10 healthy men, and with this new gift of health, they all started away. And nine of them kept right on going, satisfied with the gift of health, but the 10th one happened to remember that he had received a gift from the Giver and his eyes went from the gift to the Giver. And he came back humbly and thanked the Lord Jesus. And Christ said sadly, where are the nine? The others were satisfied with the gift, but one came back to get better acquainted with the Giver.

It was Campbell Morgan that said, we ought never in our gospel preaching to offer men peace. We ought never in our gospel preaching to offer men repose from their conscience. We ought never to offer them anything short of life. And I repeat, that we should never divorce any gift we offer to men, we never should divorce it from the Giver. We should hold it for the Giver as we sing. So that, he did not say, ye have tasted the grace of God, though they had. But he said, you have tasted that the Lord is gracious. And that’s quite something else again.

Our selfish praying, when we come to God with a long grocery list and petition God to do this and do this and do this and do this. And if God answers our prayers, then we cross it off and go on down to the next list, and so on we go. It seems to me that it’s very saddening to the heart of God to be thus used as a convenience.

It seems to me that the Lord Jesus must be very heavy hearted, be times, when He finds His redeemed people more taken up with the redemption than they are with the Redeemer; his forgiven people more taken up with forgiveness than they are with the Forgiver, His living people with whom He has given life, more taken up with the life than they are with the Life Giver. We ought in our preaching and teaching and personal experience, to make a strong return to God himself, to the person of God. In fact, I am not sure but we could condense everything that we want into sentences beginning with God, or having God in it somewhere. God is. God is present. God loves. God’s Word, that God’s Holy Spirit, God’s Messiah, everything belongs and begins and ends and continues with God.

Now, he said, if you have tasted and experienced that the Lord is gracious. Your experience has been with the gracious Lord unto whom coming. Now this was true of them as it’s true of all real Christians everywhere. I give you four prepositions. I am not unmindful of the fact that I sometimes poke good-natured fun at the prepositional preaching. But I give you four prepositions, inconsistent or not, as you like.

You know what Emerson said about consistency. He said, It was the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. So, we’ll throw it aside and point out for prepositions here. First, they came out and then they came away and then they came together, and then they came on to. Now, not in that order, probably, and they didn’t do it together. They might have come one at a time or two at a time. But taken all together, these four things can be said about these Christians.

First of all, they came out of the world. We are now trying to take the world into the church, sanctify it, baptize it, anoint it, and try to hide its skulls and crossbones. I preached last night to a Baptist Men’s Fellowship on the North Side with 408 men were there, and I talked to them about coming out and separating ourselves from the world. Not this sermon, certainly. But I did introduce the idea there, and I repeat it to you now that there must be a coming out.

Israel had to come out of Egypt before she could come in to Palestine. Always Abraham had to come out before He could come in. And so, with everybody else, there must be a coming out. And any kind of Christianity, however orthodox it may sound, that does not major on the doctrine of coming out, that is, coming out of the world, is inadequate and imperfect.

And then after the word out, we have the word, away. They came away from the old life, whatever that old life might have been. To one person, it’s one thing to another, it is another. But whatever it is, the old life, we come away from, when we come to Jesus Christ. To taste the good grace of God and that the Lord is gracious there must be a coming away from the old life.

And then naturally, there is a coming on to Christ. That after all is–it’s what the gospel is–it’s a coming unto Christ. And then there is the word, together, a coming together. That is, they’re coming on to each other. As we gather unto Christ, naturally we gather unto each other. And the nearer we get to Christ naturally, the nearer we get to each other, so that the way to get Christians together is not to form some kind of a political united front. The way to get them together is to bring them close to Jesus Christ. Just as if we had something down here at the front of the church, some curio or missionary exhibit, and I wanted to get you all together, closer together even than you are now. And I invited you to come down and see it. Well, as you came onto it, you would come unto each other, and the closer you got to it, the closer you would be to each other until finally, shoulder would touch shoulder, and you’d be pushing close together to see this exhibit.

And so, when we come unto Christ, it’s automatic that we come unto each other. That is what I have never been able to understand this, monkish errormitic, if I might. I don’t know if there is such a word. There ought to be, and there is now. But this word that covers the idea of going off by yourself to be a Christian. There are people like that. They’re antisocial, or rather unsocial in disposition, so they do not like the fellowship of the saints. I remind you, my friend, that if you have heard, Jesus is, you’re surrounded by Jesus’ people. And therefore, we ought to make the fellowship of the church the biggest thing in our lives.

And I’d like to say right here at the risk of hurting somebody, for that isn’t too important after all. It may hurt a little, but it may do some good, that the important thing in the world today is the presence of an invisible spiritual entity called the church. And the Holy Ghost never works outside that entity. He works through that entity in some manner or other. That is why I’m a church man. I’m going to preach this week at a Bible school or Bible college, it is now. And I believe in them, of course. But I remember a Bible school president that once smiled good-naturedly and sort of kiddingly to me and he said, you’re church minded. You’re not school minded.

How could a minister of the church of Christ become school-minded? A school is simply an instrument with a temporary value which may for time serve a purpose. But it is not the school he said. I did not say on this school I will build my church. Or take the very many laymen’s organizations. I do not say but what they have some value in the world. I believe they do. But remember, they get their value from the church. And if God works in them at all, He works through His church. It is the church, that group that comes together unto Him.

And whether they’re red or yellow, black or white, whether they lived in the first century or the 20th, the coming together unto Christ makes the church. It’s a called-out assembly. So, those four words, they came out of the world, they came away from the old life, they came unto Christ, and they came together relative to each other.

Now he says, you’ve come unto Christ as unto a living stone. Now, this is a frequent Bible passage or a Bible figure, this stone or rock as it’s sometimes called. And it almost invariably, if not invariably, refers to a building. I think there may be a few places where David uses it as a great craggy rock where he hides. But for the most part, the figure has to do with a building. And because the Jews were a God-conscious people, their thought ran to a temple building. I should think somebody ought to write about this or talk about it, for the church, and make the people of God see that the Jewish nation, above all nations of the world, were a God-conscious nation.

America is not a God-conscious nation. We’re a secular people. We have what the Bible calls a profane mind. And even those who may toss God a sop when making a political speech, to get the votes of the religious-minded people. If you probe in far enough, for the most part, you’ll find that our leadership is composed of secular-minded people. I don’t use the word in a wrong sense, but in the sense that Esau was secular-minded. This world was the the point of interest for the man. And that’s all right, provided that we have another and higher interest. But Esau didn’t have it, and the nation of America doesn’t have it much.

But Israel had it. Israel, in fact, had nothing else. Have you forgotten that Israel had no civil laws at all? There was a day in England when she had two sets of laws, the ecclesiastical laws and the civil laws. Whether that’s still true, I don’t know. But they did for many centuries. And a man could be tried before the civil law and then turned loose and tried before the ecclesiastical law. The church could try a man for certain offenses and the civil law for certain other offenses.

And there were two kinds of officers, civil officers and ecclesiastical officers. And there were two worlds within, worlds mingling there, wheels within wheels. But not so in Israel. Israel had no civil officers. Israel had no civil law. Israel had no code, no code of jurisprudence. Israel had no statutes on her books, except those that were of God. The Bible was her code of law, and her priests and scribes were her officials, and her high priest, her leader and her king anointed of God was her ruler. So that Israel was a sacred nation. A people who were God conscious more than any people that have ever lived in the world. And never has been a nation as a God-conscious as Israel, so that Israel’s science was all God-founded.

We turn a telescope into the heavens now and we look at the stars. And we separate the stars from the God who made them, and we have astronomy. We dig in the rocks, and we have geology. And we monkey with the little flying, microscopic or sub microscopic matter, and we have physics. So we separate nature from God, but Israel never knew how to do that. God was everything. If an Israelite looked at a hill, it was God’s Hill. If he looked at a tree, the tree clapped its hands. If he looked at it raining, it was God who sent the rains.

So, a Jew never complained. He said, it was miserable weather, isn’t it? God sent that rain, and God was in everything. So that when a figure of speech occurred, it was a divine figure speech. And when they talked about a rock and a stone, they were talking about a building that was a temple building. Now, they had a temple building there, of course, but it was composed of dead stones, laid one upon another. They were hewn out, and then laid one upon another and joined to each other by cutting and mortaring.

And that was a dead temple. And God knew it was a dead temple. And the only living thing in it was the Shekinah that dwelt between the wings of the golden cherubim. The temple itself was a dead thing. And our Lord knew it. He pointed to its stones and said there will be a time when everything all that you see will fall to the ground and be no more, passed over; and they even plowed the place where the temple had been. That’s because it was a dead temple.

But this new temple unto which we are come, this new temple is composed of living stones and is a living temple. And its cornerstone is Christ, and its stones are redeemed men and women who are alive by the gift of eternal life. He says, ye also are living stones.

Just a side here, not a part of the sermon, but just for your ecclesiastical education, I might point out that this King James Version, which is supposed to be always inerrant, makes a cute little mistake here. It says that ye are come unto Christ, the living stone, and you are lively stones. Now I wonder why the translators did that because in the Greek, it’s exactly the same word. Both words mean living. But when the translators were translated in 340 some years ago, the word living and lively almost meant the same thing, but they don’t now. Lively means, you know, what your boy is, hopping around, never in one place twice. Like the Irishman who was sent out to count the chickens. He came back and said there were 37 and one that he couldn’t count. It traveled around too fast. And that’s what the word lively means. It means moving about so rapidly you can’t get it in one place long enough to count it.

But that word lively has lost its meaning. It doesn’t mean what it meant back there. It says the same thing about the church member as it says about the head of the church, Jesus Christ. He is the Living Stone and the members that make up the great temple are also living stones. There is a plural and a singular, but there is no difference in the adjective itself.

Now, Israel had a dead temple. And because Israel had a dead temple made of dead stone, she couldn’t use a living stone when she found one. And for that reason, He was disallowed indeed of men. And Israel could not use Jesus Christ when He came. He was the headstone, the living headstone of a new kind of temple, not one more stone to go in the old temple, but the headstone of a new kind of temple. And they looked at that stone, and the builder shook their heads and said, He doesn’t fit anywhere. We’ve got our temple. There it stands, stone upon stone, tear upon tear, stone upon stone, stone joined to stone. And it’s got a top on it and it’s there and it is set with beautiful jewels.

And they said, where does this man fit in? Jesus Christ could not fit into Israel. And so, Israel rejected Him and crucified Him because He wasn’t shaped right. He was the stone that was to be, the Guiding Stone for the new temple to come. And He didn’t fit into the old temple at all. But nevertheless, God says that He was chosen and precious. Look at this Stone. I think that it begins way back there when Jacob had that sleep in the wilderness. I will never know. I suppose until I die, and I am able to question Jacob himself, why he wanted a stone for a pillow. He took up of the stones of that place and set them for his pillows. I don’t know why he would use a stone for a pillow, but he did.

And when he saw that vision, he waked out of his sleep and turn that stone over, stood it on end and anointed it and it was called Bethel, the house of God. Then when Israel had come out of Egypt and had gone into the wilderness and were traveling about those 40 years, that same stone says, the Holy Ghost followed them. If it was not exactly the same chunk of rock, it was at least the same symbol, the same figure following through.

So, one day, they were thirsty, and Moses smote the rock and they all drank out of that same rock, at least symbolically, upon which Jacob had laid his head, and which he anointed and called Bethel.

And then when our Lord came, he said that if you fall upon this rock, you shall be saved in a word to that effect, but if it falls upon you, you will be crushed to death. And that was the same stone. And he said, on this rock, I will build my church. And let men say that’s Peter if they want to, but every figure, every type, every symbolism, every suggestion, every simile in the whole Bible indicates that that rock was none other than Jesus Christ Himself.

And then in Daniel, we read of the rock, or the stone that was cut out of the mountain without hands. That’s the second coming of Jesus, when He comes back to put down communists and fascists and all the rest, and to rule in the earth. So, there is our Savior, the Rock.

Now, what is the function of the house which is built around this new rock? It contrasts, I’ve said, with the Old Testament temple, in that the Old Testament temple was made of stones that were dead, and the New Testament made of spiritual stones that are live. And the priests of the old temple, walked into the temple and performed the functions of their office. But the priests of the New Testament are the temple. There is the difference. We have a movable, portable temple, a temple made of living human beings, and every one of those human beings, a priest in his own right.

And we have a great high priest at the right hand of God. And this temple of which we are a part is a temple of priests so that we do not need to have anybody run interference for us when we go into the presence of God. We can come straight to Jesus Christ ourselves. They tell us poor misguided friends, that Jesus is too great and wonderful. We can’t go to Him. But we can go to his mother, and she can go to Him. We don’t have any pull with Jesus, but she has. And if we get to her and get her ear, she’ll go and have a talk with Jesus and then it’ll be all right. We don’t need her, my brethren. She has performed her function, this lovely little Jewish lady. She brought into the world the man, Christ Jesus, and gave Him a body which was later offered as a sacrifice on Calvary. And she did her function when she brought Him up and fed Him at her breast and looked after Him and loved Him until He was a man. Then she passed out of the picture and Jesus Christ filled the horizon of believing men.

So, we are priests, and we need no other priest to help us. This temple is a shrine where God dwells. And in that temple, we offer not goats, not lambs, not doves, but spiritual sacrifices, says Peter; loving service and praise and song and worship. You know, the critics call us song singers. They called the old Scotch people, they said, a bunch of sam-singing Scotsman.

Oh, my brethren, those sam-singing Scotsman have made their mark in the world, I’m telling you. And our forebearers who walked the rugged shores of New England, and who stamped America with their noble character once, they were sam-singers too. They met in little groups, log buildings, dedicated to the worship, and there they sung songs and offered the fruits of their lips, praises unto God. But they didn’t stop there, they shouldered their axe and went out and felled a forest and established cities and build a civilization the likes of which the world had never known, those psalm-singing Puritans.

God hears songs when they’re sung in His name and for His glory. We’re offering up psalms to our Lord, and songs and spiritual melodies in the Holy Ghost. And the critical, cynical world sees us come, close our eyes and talk to someone we can’t see and say, what’s it all about? We answer, this is a temple of God, dedicated to the God of the temple. And we, the priests of the temple, sing these songs to God, the Unseen. And make our prayers to God, the Unseen. Though unseen, He is real, and though unseen, He is nigh, and we’re not such fools as the world would make us out to be.

Now, I’m almost finished. He says that these praises and songs and spiritual sacrifices are acceptable to God. He accepted the Cornerstone. He accepted the living stones which are gathered to the Cornerstone to make a temple for the Holy Ghost. And He accepts the service that is wrought in that temple and performed in that shrine.

So, you haven’t wasted the morning, brethren. You haven’t simply followed a custom, like mistletoe and wreaths at Christmas. You’ve done an act. You’ve performed an act that God accepts through Jesus Christ. If you’ve really prayed this morning. If you really sung a true song this morning. If you have made your gifts out of the love of God this morning, you’ll go away and you have nothing to show for it, certainly. And the world laughs and says you have nothing to show for it.

But remember, not every precious thing shows the same time it’s received. Remember, there is a time when the invisible things will be the only real things. And the visible world shall dissolve in smoke and pass away and God will roll them up as a garment, and as vestures, they shall be changed. But the invisible things of God from the creation which we have in Christ Jesus, will continue as real as heaven itself, forever and forever. Now, if this is true for you, he says, if so be that you have tasted, if so be that you have experienced that the Lord is gracious. I repeat, a thing may be true but not true of me.

So the most vital thing to settle, you religious-minded people, the most vital thing to settle, is not the trues of the Scriptures, for these have been established beyond peradventure, world without end. The Scriptures are already established by two immutable things, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and the down-coming of the Holy Ghost.

Everything hinges on Jesus Christ. The truth of the whole Word of God rests on the shoulders of Mary’s holy Son. And if he failed us, the whole thing collapses round our ears. If He’s who He said He was and rises from the dead, then He supports all the rest of the Bible itself. That’s why I’m not afraid of modernists and critics and higher critics and fault finders and cynics. That’s why I’m not worried about Jonah and the whale. I never spent five minutes in my life trying to decide whether a whale could swallow Jonah or not. God Almighty could make a whale that would swallow not only Jonah but the whole ship and Nineveh thrown in.

The point isn’t whether Jonah was swallowed by a whale. The point is, what did Jesus Christ say about it? And he said, as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so shall the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of the earth. He tied Himself up with the truth of the Jonah story. Therefore, the Jonah story is true because the Truth said it was.

So, your business is not to determine whether the Bible is true or not. The resurrection of Jesus Christ and His ascension to the right hand of God, and the down coming Holy Ghost, forever takes apologetics out of the hands of men and puts it in the hands of the Spirit. And we know the Bible is true, not by long, painful reasonings. We know it is true by a flash of inspiration from the Throne and from the Holy Ghost who brings the flash. So, your big problem isn’t whether the Bible is true, brother. Your big problem is whether it’s true in you. It isn’t whether the Bible is true, but it’s whether these things are true in me.

The old German poet said, though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, if He’s not born again in thee, thy heart is still forlorn. If I were a poet, I’d add some more stanzas and I think he did. Scheffler, I think he added some more. I think Scheffer added some more which I can’t quote verbatim, but they run something like this, that if Christ die a 1000 times on a cross, if we do not accept and receive, He died in vain as far as we are concerned. And though the Bible be the very rock of God’s Gibraltar, if it isn’t true in us, it’s vain as far as we’re concerned.

So, what do we need to do today, brethren, is not to go home and overeat and sit around and look at television. What we need to do today would be to go home and eat modestly, and then some of us at least ought to go to our rooms, open our Bible, get down on our knees and say, O God, are these things true of me? You know, you can be an awfully nice person and still not be a true Christian.

I told my Swedish friends last night, my good Baptist friends; there were only four of us foreigners there that we knew of. Myself, a Scotsman, an Irishman, and another man, unidentified, I think, English. Outside of that they were all natives. But I told them that I like Swedes. They’re all nice people. But you can be an awfully nice person and not be born again. You can be an awfully nice religious person and never have tasted that the Lord is gracious.

Oh, my friends. Let’s not waste this holy day. Let’s search our own hearts. Let’s see for ourselves if these things be so in us. We don’t need to see if they be so. I repeat, a resurrected Savior and a down-coming Holy Ghost confirm forever the fact the Bible is true, but is it true in us? That’s the big question. And I want you to take it home with you. Search yourself and ask, in the light of God’s revealed truth, O God, I believe this, but is it true in me? If it isn’t, it can be. Faith and repentance can make it real in your heart.