“Bonus Benefits from a Big-Hearted God“
Bonus Benefits from a Big-Hearted God
Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer
June 22, 1958
Over the last weeks we have been dealing with the question of a place. Oh, what a wonderful place Jesus has promised to me. This is Dr. Simpson’s song, and we have been dealing with the 23rd of Exodus and showing that there are spiritual principles underlying it which are for the church.
Behold, I send an angel before thee to keep thee in the way and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. And I have shown that He brings us straight into the land of the enemy, and that He tells us then in verse 25, verse 25 to 26, and 26, ye shall serve the Lord your God. Or as another version has it, the Lord your God shall ye serve, Jehovah your God shall ye serve. And He shall bless thy bread and thy water, and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee, and there shall nothing cast there young nor be barren in thy land. And the number of thy days I will fulfill.
Now the idea before us is that God is bringing a people out that He might bring them in. He’s been doing that ever since Adam sinned and God brought blood redemption to save man from his reckless course. God is bringing out a people that He might bring them in, and there is no point in bringing them out if He doesn’t bring them in, and that to bring us into this place, He must lead us. And He chooses the place for us.
Our problem has been, as I’ve explained patiently, and met perhaps monotonously, that we try to choose the place and then try to get God to lead us in. But He chooses the place we don’t choose. And then He chooses the way into the place, and all we do is trust and follow.
Now He says, that if we’re going to be led into this superior place, this land of milk and honey, the Lord your God shall ye serve. We cannot make prayer simply a subjective exercise. We must serve the Lord our God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, as we know from further development in the New Testament.
Now the word, serve, here, of course, we’re going to have to look at a minute. And notice what it is. It has in our English dictionary, as a verb, serve, it has in the Webster’s Unabridged, twenty-six separate meanings, and as a noun, service, it has thirty separate meanings. But I have looked it up in the Hebrew, and the word basically means just one thing. It means to work for a master as a bondservant. That’s what it means. That’s what the Hebrew dictionary lexicon says it means, to work for a master as a bondslave.
As Jacob worked for Laban fourteen years, seven years to get Rachel, and you know how they tricked him, he served a master to get that wife. Then the Israelites served the Egyptians. And the old Pharaoh understood when Moses came and said, Israel wants to serve Jehovah. And he said, you can go out a little way and serve Him, and I’ll go out and bring you back. But they knew what the word serve meant.
And yet this word, even in Bible usage, has been greatly enriched, so it means more than merely to work for a master as a bondservant, though it retains that meaning. But it means to acknowledge the ownership of another. It means to own allegiance to that other. And it means to obey and trust and love and worship.
Now though the basic Hebrew word only means to serve a master, it has by its usage taken on these other meanings all through the Bible. So that the word serving the Lord means, I say, to acknowledge that God is our owner, to own allegiance to Him, to obey Him, trust Him, love Him, and worship Him. Obey is better, said the Holy Ghost in Samuel.
And many people want God’s gifts, but they do not want to obey. This is a marked characteristic of our day. We have cheated and rooked everybody that’s rookable, and advertising has refined the lie. The old horse trader that used to trade a swayed-backed, lop-eared, old balky horse for a good one has now changed his business and is making singing commercials on the radio. Same old horse trader, same old crook, same old liar, but he’s just doing it in a smoother way.
And we’ve even started trying to pull that on God, to get something from God, to coax God into a mood, or to do or say something that will persuade God to do something for us, never intending to obey, but to obey is better. So if we’re going to have this leadership, this guidance of the Lord, this angel before us into a better land down here, we’re going to have to serve Jehovah, our God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. And the first word means obedience.
Next means trust. God demands that we trust Him completely. Confidence is necessary to friendship. All you have to do to destroy the finest, sweetest, and most longest lasting friendship is to rumor it about that you no longer have confidence in the character of your friend.
Mr. Maxey and I have been friends fifteen years, and all I have to do to bring a dark shadow across our friendship is to whisper to somebody that I think he runs a bookie on the side. And that’s all I have to do. I don’t have to insult him openly. Just let him discover that I’ve lost confidence in him, and while he probably would be too much of a gentleman to say anything about it, our friendship is broken. And there can be no such thing as trust apart from friendship, apart from trust.
And God demands, God requires that we, His friends, trust him. And if we don’t trust Him, if we don’t have confidence in Him, it is equivalent to telling all the moral universe that we have heard something about God that makes us doubt Him.
And how can God then be friendly toward us? Though He gave His son in friendship, though His son gave His life in friendship for His enemies, how can He cultivate that friendship? How can two look into each other’s eyes and smile and shake hands or throw their arms around each other and say, friend, when they know that there is the shadow of distrust between them?
So, serving God is trusting him, and serving God is loving Him. God is love. God is all the love there is. And increasing intimacy with God means intensified love for God. The Lord thy God shalt thou serve, and that God whom we shall serve is a God of love, and we must love God and then worship, worship. That is letting our whole being go in trembling adoration toward God, our whole being.
So he says, if I’m going to lead you and you’re going to enter this better place, this better place, let me warn you against taking the average rank and file evangelical as your standard, my friend. That is judging ourselves by ourselves, weighing ourselves over against ourselves, and judging our progress by the progress of others. That’s always wrong. The result will be a slow spiraling downward to a dead level where everybody will be backslidden. Everybody will be wrong.
So, we’ve got to rise and take the Book and prayer and see where God wants us. And God says, if you want to rise, but somebody says, oh, you think you’re more superior, it’s holier than thou. I repeat that nothing could be more wrong than this.
Just let any man, just let any hillbilly lying with 12 other hillbillies on his back under a plum tree in Arkansas hills, let him get up and say, I’m going to take a bath and put on clean socks and go down and see if I can’t learn to read. And he’ll get the same thing. Who do you think you are? Grandpappy couldn’t read. Pappy can’t read. Mammy can’t read. Uncle Zeb can’t read. Where’d you get this crazy idea? You’ve got, if you’re going to be go beyond the average, you’re going to have to push past them while they’re cussing you and telling you that you think you’re somebody. Every Christian has this to do. If you’re going to be more than the average, if you’re going to rise into the privileges God has for you, you’re going to have to leave others behind you if they won’t come along.
John Bunyan knew that when he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. And he had the Christian, Mr. Christian, that man who suddenly became convicted that he, that the city of destruction was to be finally overthrown, and there was a celestial city waiting for him. He tried to get his whole family interested, and he couldn’t. And so he kissed them goodbye and said, if you won’t go, I go alone. And of course they said, Papa, something’s happened to Papa. And it’s always that way. And there never was anybody yet that ever made any spiritual progress that somebody didn’t come around and suggest that he thought he was somebody. Who do you think you are?
Well, now, many people seek guidance from God but seek it selfishly. You know, guidance books on how to get guidance and how to be sure you have God’s will and guidance for you. They are a dime a dozen; they’re writing them everywhere.
I wrote an editorial one time on how to find the will of God, and immediately it was printed in America, England, and Scotland, most at the same time, showing only one thing. Not that it was a good book but showing that it was a need the people had. They wanted to be guided. People want to be guided. They’re afraid of this big, dirty, crooked, dangerous world without a guide.
But our trouble is that we want to be guided but will not serve the Lord our God. The individual, I, you, this church, we can have His presence if we will serve Him. If we will obey Him, trust Him, love Him, and worship Him, we can have His presence if we will meet His conditions. And always remember that God’s conditions are never very strong, for His yoke is easy, and His burden is light, and His commandments are not grievous.
Now, we’re granting that God is leading us into a better land, that is, now down here, not in heaven. We’ve postponed so many things and put them over in heaven. You know, Bible teachers can get mixed up worse than a man with three legs trying to walk. They just get tangled up, just tangled up. And if they can postpone it into the millennium or some other vague period in the future, they can be happy. If they can give it to Israel or to Abraham or push it on into heaven.
When God wants to do things for us now in this life, now, down here in this life. Well, granted now that God is leading us into a better place, that He’s leading us into the place, the wonderful place that He has prepared for His own, we serve Him because we should. Let’s remember that. In saying, The Lord your God shall ye serve.
Remember, if we serve him, we serve him because we should. There is no merit in serving God. There is no reward in serving God, no merit, nothing that accrues to me as something fine that I have done for the simple reason that God being who He is, and I being who I am, it is only meet that I should serve God. It is only fair and right and just and equitable. It is only, it is a symmetrical thing, it’s a balanced thing in the universe that I should serve Him, a right thing.
And a man never gets virtue for doing only that which he should do, which is right to do. Paul noticed that, and Paul said, If I don’t preach the gospel, woe is me. He said, If I want any reward, I’ve got to go beyond that further than I’m commanded to do in order that I might pile up something for myself in the world to come.
So, let’s not imagine for a minute that we are earning anything by serving God, we’re not, that we are getting these things as a reward from God for serving Him, because it’s only right we should serve Him, and it’s sinful if we do not serve Him. Therefore, anything God gives us is by grace, sheer, pure grace alone.
Deliverance from the bondage of sin and all the whole land of promise and all the spiritual elevation which God gives to the yearning, thirsting, longing soul, all that guidance and protection, God gives us out of His grace. But there are supererogatory, that’s a long, seven-cylindered word, but it simply means this. I can’t think of another one, really, unless I use slang.
There are benefits that accrue to the child of God out of the bigness of God’s heart. God’s heart is so big, and God is Himself so good and His grace is so overflowing that there are benefits that accrue beside the guidance and the protection and the leading in and the angel before us. There are supererogatory benefits, benefits that more or less aren’t in the covenant for us, but God just adds them because He’s good and loves us.
Now, I want to mention them tonight. There are four of them here. You see, God being so infinite in goodness, He adds these extra benefits to us. He is far beyond our most optimistic hopes. You know, we, being what we are, we’ve been cheated and lied to and tricked and rooked so long that we never believe that anything very good is for us. Not one of you here, probably, would ever think you could win anything or that you’d find anything or that any great thing could ever happen to you, because it hasn’t, and because it hasn’t, you think it never will.
So, we get a sort of a psychology of defeat. And because we have been brought up in this gloomy, damp, dank cave we call modern Christianity, we just don’t believe there’s any place where the sun shines all day and the birds sing their little throats out and their little heads off, and where there’s happiness and joy and aren’t any flatworms, we’ve accepted those flatworms and queer-looking crawly bugs.
We’ve accepted this living spiritually in the cave. We’ve accepted it. We think that’s it. And we get a little bit worked up and say, I’ve been reading in my Bible that God says, I’ll go before you and lead you. Some brother will scrape a barnacle off his hip, you know, and kick a flatworm aside and say, my brother, don’t get too excited about this now. All this talk about sunshine and fullness and all that, that is just an ideal which God sets before us for some far-off time, but we never can really arrive at it. Somebody will argue you down, and if you don’t have a backbone enough to turn your back on him and start for the light, you’ll live and die in the cave, because that’s where they are.
When I was a kid, I visited a mine, a coal mine, in the state of Pennsylvania. My uncle William Williams, Bill Williams, took me down into the mine and showed me mules, little underbred mules, small mules that worked down there pulling—nowadays it’s all electrified, but then in those days they pulled the cars.
He said, these mules were born down here, and they have never been outside of the mines. They’ve lived down here, they were born down here, they have never seen the daylight. Now that’s almost unbelievable, but that happened back there. They bred them down there, they had stables, and of course they had these tall flumes where they could keep air coming in, not just for the sake of the health of animals and men and had great fans.
But these animals lived down there, and if you’d had one of them, suppose that one had strayed in from the outside, smelling of oozoo and fresh grass, and he’d have said, who are you? And they’d have said, we’re mules, we work for a living. And he’d have said, well, I do too, but I work out where the sun shines and the birds sing, a place my master has prepared for me. He turns me loose at night and I gallop around the field and lie down and roll over and get the loose hair off my back and they curry me down.
Oh, they’d say, you’re foolish, you’re foolish. And one would look at the other and lower a long ear and say, what’s wrong with that fellow. All because he had seen something, but the others were bred and born and reared and worked and lived and grew old and died in the artificially lighted caverns they call coal mines.
And my brethren, I want to say to you this, that the evangelical church as we know it now, and it affects this church too much, the evangelical church is living in the shadow. Partly because we’re a carnal bunch that won’t serve the Lord our God, and partly because our Bible teachers have tried to prove to us that there isn’t any place but shadows until the Lord comes, when the Lord comes, and everything is to be done. Everything is to happen when the Lord comes.
My Brother, there’s an awful lot that can happen to the insistent, believing child of God long before the Lord comes. Paul warned some Christians that they’d meet the Lord in disappointment, with tears. And I think a lot of us will.
So, God, I say, being so good, adds benefits. Here they are. I read it over here. He says, Ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he’ll bless your bread and your water. That’s the first one. You bless your bread and your water.
Now, of course, that is simply a brief, symbolic way of saying your food. He’ll give you enough to eat. These are bonus benefits, my brethren. They’re not rewards for serving him. They’re bonus benefits. If you want to serve God on a pay-by-the-hour or piecework basis, God will let you. If you want to serve God with the understanding that as much as you serve Him, He’ll bless you, He’ll let you. He’ll let you work piecework.
I worked as a boy piecework in the rubber factories in Akron. And I know what it is. Some of you work by the hour. And if you spend an extra hour, they give you time and a half. If you want to serve God like that, make God the employer, and you serve Him that way, okay. I suppose the Lord will work out something.
But brethren, there’s something infinitely better than that, and that is the knowledge that God gives bonus benefits out of His own great heart. And instead of our getting just what we deserve or what others have gotten, God will surprise us by opening His great, gracious heart and giving more than we’ve ever dared to hope.
Brethren, I have a little prayer book I carry around. It wasn’t published by the Episcopal people, either. I wrote it myself. Little prayers I put down. And I’ve had some of them written down for about 15 years or longer.
And it’s utterly astonishing how God has gone beyond what I’ve asked and given me. Because, you see, God being so big and so vast, and His heart being so big, these fringe benefits, these bonus benefits, are so great that if He could just get His people to believe it, we could all be walking around richer than Solomon.
First one is, you bread and you water. That is, God deals with our daily bread. Now, I’d like to say this to you, that there are two kinds of people who will deal with this passage. There are those that only have the faith to take it spiritually. And they will say, Well, God will give me the Word, which is the bread, and the water, which is the Spirit, and that’s about all I can expect.
Now, that’s very good. And if that’s as far as we can go, then I say, That’s all right. Go ahead. You’ve got that much. But you know what I believe, my friends? I believe, and I have proved it, that if we will dare to believe God for this, we can enter into a quiet, holy covenant with God that He will take care of His people.
One of the great curses of the church is the Reverend works for the church, and they pay him so much. And then some other church sneaks in around back and comes up through the coal chute and gets to the pastor and says, Pastor, we can offer you more. And he prays and gets called to the other place where he’ll get more. And as the little boy said when his father was called to another bigger and more lucrative church, he said, Is your father going to accept? He said, I don’t know. He’s still praying for light, but all these things are packed. And things are packed and we’re waiting for light.
And that’s the great curse of the church. And another great curse in the church is that official boards, when they don’t like a preacher, now this has absolutely no reference to this church nor the official board, because we get along wonderfully well. And they’re either twelve of the most magnificent actors ever to waste their time doing anything else but acting, or else they all want me and we’re all friends.
So, this is not talking out of school, it doesn’t refer to me here. But one of the things that I notice is that when a board or a church no longer wants a pastor around, they begin to put on the economic squeeze. Many a pastor has been squeezed out.
I knew a man who used to come and pray with me years ago in this city. And he said to me, Brother Tozer, my wife’s teeth are rotting in her mouth for want of care. My children are thin and anemic for want of food. And I am, well, he was thinner than I am, thinner, a lot thinner than I am. He was and is still. But I prayed with him and prayed, and he got out of there, thank God.
But you see, if they don’t like you, they put the squeeze on. Oh, brother, young fellow, if you’re going to be a preacher, if you want to serve in the kingdom of God like that and be a hired man subject to the will of people who want to pay you, go ahead and be a slave. But if you want to serve God and then have God run in with some supererogatory benefits, the bonus benefits so big that you won’t half believe it, God will say to you, listen, you serve me, and I’ll bless your bread and your water. I won’t promise you chicken breast always. I won’t promise you caviar, but I’ll see to it that you don’t starve.
Now I believe that my brethren. And I believe the time has come when young preachers ought to take that. They ought to get out on that. They ought to be willing to go and not have to always have a contract, how much you’re going to pay me, how much you’re going to pay me. They even talked about having a minister’s union. I’ve read about it. A minister’s union.
I don’t know whether they would have John L. Lewis or Dave Beck the head of it, but a minister’s union where the pastors could tell the churches, you must pay me union wages. Now that hasn’t gone through, but you can just believe anything, brother. Nobody knows who will think up that fool thing and then write a brochure showing the Lord led him to write it and led him to that thing.
Any jackass, you know, that hee-haws over the wire fence can write a brochure showing how he prayed two days and two nights and then the Lord showed him that thing. Well, there is such a thing as getting out of the hands of men. There’s such a thing as getting into the hands of God.
The Lord thy God shalt thou serve, and he’ll take care of your food. He’ll feed you. I may look as if I was hungry, but I’m not. Not only that, but my family’s also never been, except for a very little while when my wife and I were first married and we took our first little place and we got about three dollars a week. We confessed we did have to fry pickled corn one time. Now, if you want something to eat, fry pickled corn.
Now, pickled corn is just corn that’s been pickled, and then when you try to fry it. But that was just when I was finding my sea legs. But it wasn’t very long until that was all over, and I entered into this place where God looks after you, He looks after your financial, and you don’t have to worry about it.
So, I’ll promise you this, that if you’ll dare to believe God, you don’t have to worry about starving to death, and you don’t even have to worry about having a, what do they call it, sub-normal diet, a diet that doesn’t have enough calories in it. God will take care of His people if His people will believe in Him.
Old Brother Jerow, I remember hearing him, that great big old lion-headed, lion-voiced man, during the First World War when the prices began to skyrocket, he stood up on the platform, raised his great arms and said, I don’t care how high prices go, I’ll still eat. And those three words have rung down the years, and he did too. Last time I saw him, he wasn’t skinny. He went to heaven fat. So, he still ate.
God will take care of his people. Now do you believe that, or are you going to spiritualize that? Are you going to just take it spiritually in no other way? Just alone? Now remember, it’s a spiritual thing too, but if you just want to say, now this cannot possibly have an economic connotation.
All right, doctor, your degrees are in your way, so you go ahead and starve or serve God and churches and the rest for your pay. Go ahead. I won’t argue with you, but if you will just keep still, maybe some of God’s dear people will rise and get faith enough to get up and say, I believe this means me now down here. Give us this day our daily bread. This isn’t a spiritual prayer. It’s spiritual, of course, but I mean it isn’t solely spiritual. He meant your food, food.
Now, all right, now another thing is I’ll take sickness away from the midst of thee. Now again, this question is just how far you can go with this. Dr. Simpson said, if you can’t trust the Lord, get the best doctor you can afford. And I think that’s the finest possible thing.
Some people have written me or come to see me and said, Mr. Tozer, the Christian Missionary Alliance is known as believing in healing. Do they require a missionary to go to the field and promise that he’ll never take a pill? Brother, I’ll tell you, if we had all the pills our missionaries and preachers are taking, we wouldn’t be able to carry them away in any sack big enough, and the South Side isn’t big enough.
So, we don’t require that at all. But on the other hand, wherever faith rises and touches the hem of His garment, wonders are performed. I’ll take sickness away from the midst of you. Now you can make that spiritual and that’s good, that’s fine. But if you have faith to go further with it, all right. I had a sort of a, what would you call it, I wouldn’t know, I can’t think of a name for it at the moment, but I had a fear, a feeling, that I was going to die when I was 30. And I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t because when I was about maybe 28, I got a hold of this passage. I’ll take sickness away from the midst of thee, and the number of that days I’ll fulfill. And while I’m not a preacher of divine healing, and I’ll say frankly, I don’t believe in divine healing campaigns, I wouldn’t attend one, and I don’t believe in them.
And if you do, you and I don’t agree on that. We can still love each other and go to heaven, and you can prove, I’ll prove you’re wrong when we get there. But at the present moment, I don’t believe in divine healing campaigns. But I believe that there is a Lord who takes care of His people. Our bodies are for the Lord. And there’s no reason why we should not trust God to keep us going.
Oh, I could tell you stories here, I could stand for the next hour and a half, and I think you’d be listening. I don’t think many of you’d go and tell you stories of how God delivers people physically. But I am going to pass that over deliberately and say, it’s just up to you now.
You said, you take medicine, Mr. Toter, when I need it. Sure enough, sure enough. I take pills. One brother said the only pill he believed in was the “gos-pill.” But I believe in the gospel plus any good thing. And God says, lay some leaves on there, Jeremiah.
And take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake. That I don’t do because I don’t think wine would do my stomach any good, and I’ve never tasted the rotten stuff in my life. But I don’t have any objection to operations if you need them. I’ve kept knives out of my carcass up to now, and I hope by the grace of God never to have to have anybody stick a knife in me. But if he does, why, I will humble myself and say, dear Lord, help him to be skillful. So, I’m not being fanatic on this, but I’m just telling you that every child of God has a right to believe.
Our brother Chase has prayed a prayer too in my presence that I felt was divine. One of them was one time we were praying, and polio was hitting us right and left all around this city. And he prayed, O God, touch our people, and I don’t remember the wording, but give us a guarantee against this thing. Not a one of us, not a one, not touched our family anywhere. One dear little girl had had it and still among us here growing up, but that was before. And I believe it’s entirely possible.
You remember, friends, those of you who are left, when about 75 of our young men were in service during the Second World War, I had you rise one time, and we stood before Almighty God and took a covenant. And we covenanted that every one of our boys who’d ever been in our fellowship here would come back. Seventy-five of them went out, and how many came back? Seventy-five. They went through hell over there, but not one lost his life.
My eldest son, wounded by a mortar shell burst. My third son, wounded by flak burst in his face. Down on LaSalle Street any day you can see a boy crippling along, another son who was wounded in Korea, but he’s back. And he’s on top of it and happy as a lark with three lovely children, happy as a lark. I don’t mind a crippled leg, a crooked leg, because he’s back. I’ll protect you, he said. All right.
Now, the next is, there shall nothing be barren, nor cast their young. There’s fruitfulness. We’re going to pass that over because we talk about that an awful lot. And the number of thy days I will fulfill. There isn’t anybody listening to me that either isn’t now or hasn’t at some time been scared about when you’re going to die.
Now, I don’t want to seem facetious in any way. This is one of the most reverent passages in the Bible to me. The number of thy days I will fulfill. And you can take that passage and let the dispensationalist give it to somebody else. You’ve still got a hundred passages somewhat like it in the rest of the Scripture.
Jesus Christ could not die until His hour. Mine hour is not yet come, He said. And Paul had no fear until he knew his hour was come. And then he said, I’m now ready to be offered. And he laid down his life. How long do you want to live? If you have a set number of years out there and you’re frantic at the thought of dying, you’re not in this covenant. You’re not here. You ought to want to live just as long as God wants you to live.
There was one time a man by the name of Hezekiah, a good man, and he got sick. And a prophet came and said, you’re going to die, Hezekiah. And he sulked and turned his face to the wall and said, in effect, O God, I’ve been a good king and you’re going to let me die. God says, all right, I’ll add 15 years to your life. Had you ever read what happened in those 15 years? Hezekiah lived 15 years too long because he went to God and demanded that he live. If you want to live longer than you should, all right. But God will keep you going if you stay in His will.
The Lord thy God shalt thou serve. Obey Him, trust Him, love Him, worship Him. He’ll guide you and He’s got your number, He’s got the number of your days. I don’t want to know what it is. I don’t want to know. Some of you dear people, if you only knew, we’d all be pitting in, gathering around you and saying goodbye. Because some of you, your number’s just about up. By number, I don’t mean anything fatalistic. I mean the heavenly Father has given us, it’s nearly the time we’ll go.
Maybe I’m the one that you’d gather around. I don’t know, but you know it doesn’t make any difference. The number of thy days I will fulfill. My heavenly Father hears me say that I don’t want to live one day longer than He has planned that I should live. God, burn down to the socket long after our days is not a desirable thing. I would not live always, said Job.
The number of thy days, mother, the number of thy days, brother and father and sister and young people, in the will of God there is no failure. And in the will of God there is no accidents. And in the will of God there’s no premature deaths. In the will of God, thou shalt serve the Lord thy God, and I will fulfill the number of thy days. That’ll take away that frantic fear of cancer, that frantic fear of heart trouble. And dropping over on this sidewalk, I told this some time ago, but I’ll repeat it.
My dear friend Robert Kilgore, great, big, tall, learned, brilliant preacher, a mystic if ever one lived, that loved God. They told him he had heart trouble and tried to persuade him to give up and quit preaching. He said to me, Brother Tozer, they tell me my heart’s going to give out on me, but he said listen. Then he began to name them one by one, even in charity, but he named them one by one of the preachers who’d been scared by a doctor. If you’ve got a bad heart, reverend, better retire.
So, they all retired, and they’re all out in California vegetating. They’re all out there vegetating, getting old because they’re afraid to get up and exercise their heart preaching. Brother Kilgore said, Brother Tozer, I won’t do it. I won’t do it. I teach in a Bible institute. I’ve got them before me, and I’m going to teach and die teaching if I have to. About one year later, brother Kilgore’s wife found him lying quietly on the floor beside the bed. He’d gotten up out of bed and tumbled over. He’d gone to be with his lord, but he’d had one glorious year of teaching young people the truth. These other boys are still vegetating out there.
Do you want to live after God wants you in heaven? And uncle Sam wants to get you off of the rolls? The number of that days I’ll fulfill. I feel good about that. Do you believe it? Now you say, what’s that? What doctrine is that? Calvinism or Arminianism? I don’t know. Really, I don’t know.
All I know is that that’s a supererogatory benefit, a bonus which God gives to His children. I’ll send an angel ahead of you. I’ll lead you. All you have to do is push down the altar. Whenever you see one, go right on. I’ll lead you in. In the meantime, I’ll look after you. You won’t starve, and you’ll be fruitful, and I’ll keep you reasonably healthy so you can do your work, and I’ll keep you as long as I want you here.
Now that’s as long as I want to stay. I don’t know about you. We want the will of God, my brethren. He will set our time for promotion. We want the will of God. If we resist His will, of course, we may die lamenting. If we resist His will. I’ve found preachers that resist God’s will and are always going around over the country telling about how their district superintendents have treated them dirty. They say, ah, but he wouldn’t give me a chance. He wouldn’t give me a chance. Oh, brother. What an awful kind of godliness is that.
Any man who has the finger of God touch his shoulder and say, come son, preach the word. After that, he’s a man of pride, and no superintendent can stop him, and no bishop can stop him. Not even a cardinal can stop him. The Pope can’t stop him. You can’t stop a man when God’s laid his hand on his shoulder.
So, any of you young fellows that are going to preach, God help you. The first thing to do is get out of the hands of men. Work with everybody, work for nobody. You hear me? Work with everybody, work for nobody. I work for nobody except the Man who died for me.
Well, that blesses my heart just to know that’s here in the book. Anybody who wants to get me aside afterward and argue that’s not for me, go on home. I don’t want to see you at all, because you’d sour milk by looking at each other.
Believe it, brethren. Believe it. Believe it. Believe God. Dare to believe God. And if you make any mistakes, the Lord will correct you. Amen? Fruitfulness, daily bread, length of days are all as a bonus benefit out of the big heart of God, without money, without merit, and without price. Not because we’re good, but because God’s heart is good. Amen?
Amen.