Tag: Christian

Categories
Messages

Tozer Talks

“That in All Things He Might Have the Preeminence“

PDF Formatted TranscriptDownloaD

“

“That in All Things He Might Have the Preeminence“

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 2, 1956

For a meditation before the communion service, a familiar section of Scripture, the book of Colossians, the first chapter. There in verse fifteen where it says, Christ, His dear Son, God’s dear Son, is the image of the invisible God. The first born of every creature, for by Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were recreated by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. And He is the Head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things, He might have the preeminence.

Now, that’s what Paul said, breaking into it and breaking out of it again. That chapter where it clings together by a tight logic, that one has all but to do violence to it, to select anything from it. But here in verse eighteen particularly, I want you to see that He is the head of the body, the church. He who is the beginning. He who is the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He might have the preeminence.

Now here is Christian truth. Not all Christian truth is here, but all that is here is the proper object of Christian faith. Our Lord Jesus Christ gave us to understand that after His going, some unnamed person or persons should receive new truth, which He could not give them because they were not spiritually in a position to receive it yet. That’s found in John 16. And it seems that Paul became the principal one of those so honored to receive and transmit truth that even our Lord was unable to transmit, because of the condition of the people’s hearts before the coming of the Holy Ghost. Paul was not one of the original twelve, but he was called and prepared under most extraordinary circumstances that he might receive the revelation. And now he tells us in this book of Colossians, it’s 1:18 that I have read twice now in your hearing, what we are to believe.

And so, out goes our vaunted independence. And out goes our appeal to reason, because bluntly, this is above all ability of reason, to receive, or at least to discover. And this is above all the powers of the enquiring mind ever to reach or to learn. And out goes our liberty to pick and choose. A heretic they say, is one who picks and chooses. That’s what the word means. He likes certain passages, and so he picks them and chooses them as his creed. He dislikes others and he rejects them. But there is no liberty for any Christian at any time to decide what he wants to believe.

This is the book of God I hold in my hand. And when an apostle moved by the Holy Ghost, says, that He is the Head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, and that in all things He, Christ should have the preeminence because it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell. And that He, having made peace through the blood of His cross, reconciled all things unto Him, whether they be things in earth or things in heaven. We are therefore not to pick what we shall like and what we shall choose to believe or emphasize. This is Christian truth to be received, whether we understand it or not.

Now, there is no coercion here however. No one needs to follow Christ. It is not incumbent. It rests not upon anybody. There is no obligation there except the high obligation, which the sinner does not admit. But no one need follow Christ and no one will be forced to do it. All nature obeys Him. And so all nature holds together, and in Him all things consist. But the creatures who kept not their first estate, chose not to obey Him. And all the long history which antedates even the history of mankind, is strewn with wrecks of their lives, and mankind has chosen not to obey Him. And the price man has paid for his refusal to obey is written in tragic letters across the face of the world, written on the bloody highways over this weekend, written on the police blotters, written in the death cells, written on the charts of the hospitals, written in the wild walls of the insane asylums, written all over the world that men would not obey Him. But you and I, as His professed followers are to obey Him. We must. It’s not a question of whether we understand it. It’s a question of, He said it, and therefore we obey it, and we believe it.

Now, faith and unbelief stand together outside the temple, and they look in and there in the dimly-lighted, mysterious recesses of that many-roomed temple, they find mysteries. The mystery of the Trinity stands at the beginning. And the mystery of sin and Adam’s fall, and the mystery of incarnation and Christ’s Atonement, and the mystery of salvation by faith, and the mystery of the resurrection. All this is there in its beauty in the dimness of the temple. And unbelief sees it and walks away, and says, I cannot understand it. I will not walk into the soft-lighted temple. I want to be out where I can see where I am walking. But faith bows reverently and walks inside. And the mysteries instantly flame up and become a bright and shining light that lights them more and more unto the perfect day.

So, you and I are to believe what God says about His Son, not stand outside in our human pride lighted by the sun of reason alone and say, I can’t understand it, therefore I reject it. We must come on in. And when we get inside, we’ll find we can understand it at least to our heart’s content, if not to the pride of our intellect.

Now, it says about Him here, that He is the beginning, the original, of the old creation. You see my friends, there are two creations extant and they coexist, to use a modern word, in the world in which we live. There is the old original creation and the new creation, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, and of that old creation, He was the originator. And that old creation through sin is moving toward dissolution and judgment at last.

And you can’t get away from the word “world.” Hardly a newspaper, I suppose there hasn’t been one printed in the last 20 years that hasn’t had the word world and in some place. I suppose scarcely a sermon has been preached or a prayer made, but what the word world has been used in it, that word. And what is it after all? But there is a new world and He is the original of the new creation. The new creation is moving away from death, and the old creation is moving toward it. And the new creation will finally displace the old, and be there with eternal permanence.

The world is a collaboration between men that die and forms that perish. And that’s all we have in the wide world, men who die with an unbelievable shrewdness and skill, take forms that perish and recut them and shape them, and arrange them and put them together and come up with astonishing things from the simple wheel to the hydrogen bomb. And that we call a world. The men die and the forms perish. That is the world. That’s the old original world.

Now, my feet are down on that rock, I believe that. I couldn’t rest on isolated texts my friends; I couldn’t possibly do it. Those who want to isolate a text and give it to me and say, now you believe this text. I believe it alright, if it’s from the Bible, but if I can’t relate it, it won’t do me very much good. So not an isolated text, not one doctrine handed to me, but this is the foundation, the rock upon which everything else is built, that there are two creations and that one of them is on the way to perish and the other is on the way to immortality. That one was the old creation which was ruined by the fall, and the other, the new creation, which was made one in Christ Jesus. And it’s made up of all who have believed down all the years of every tribe and tongue and color and nation and language and level of education or culture, from the time that Abel offered his acceptable sacrifice, down to the latest convert in Borneo or Peru.

So, this is the message we have that Jesus Christ is the original of the new creation. He was the originator of the old creation, but he is the original of the new creation. And because the new creation is to be born out of death, He is the first born from the dead. And because the church is the first of the new creation, along with her Head, Jesus Christ, why He is said to be the Head of the body, the church.

Now, Paul leads up to this, that in all things Christ might have the preeminence. And I, whenever I get hold of a word like preeminence, instinct tells me if nothing else, but that’s an important word. And I went into the original to see what it might mean; and it just means preeminence. It just means that He’s the most important one. It means that He is the Chief One. It means that He is the top one and that there can be no higher. It means He has authority above which there is no authority. It means that. It just means that. So, we’ll not to try to display any Greek here. We’ll just say it means preeminence. Everybody knows what that means. Eminent, eminent, they say, on a high, rocky eminence means a mountain, way high there. And then, when you put the word “pre” on it, why you have elevated it, so it looks down on everything. And this is our Lord Jesus Christ. In all things, He might have the preeminence–all things.

Now, the term, all things, includes the philosophic universe, the totality of existence. It means life and matter and form and substance and law and spirit and intellect. It means the physical, the material. It means relations. It means laws. And it means all the totality of created things. And in all things, He has the preeminence. And it also denotes heavenly and invisible bodies; persons and spirits and creatures of which you and I know so very little; and the strange beings with four faces and six swings, and the fiery burners before the throne of God. And those watchers and holy ones, those beings that race with the speed of light through God’s vast creation and run to the help of the people who shall be heirs of redemption. And it means all that and of all things He shall have and does have the preeminence. He is the preeminent One. Rise as high as your imagination will lift you, and when you have gone to the highest eminence, there is one that stands on the preeminence above all the highest eminence you can conceive.

I smile sometimes at the names, the grandiose titles we invent for each other. Plenipotentiary. I always thought that was a lovely one. A plenipotentiary, I don’t know what that is. And still, let’s break it down here a little bit. Let’s see, plenty means full in all, and potent means powerful. And the ary hasn’t anything to do with the penitentiary, Brother McAfee. But plenipotentiary means that somebody who has all the power there is.

And the little fella has hardening of the arteries and fallen arches and he’s lost his teeth and he’s on his way to die, and yet he comes in robes and everybody knows. And the speaker gets up and introduces him. We present the plenipotentiary, the man who has all the plentiful power there is, says the Word. There isn’t anybody like that, only one man and they called His name Jesus. And the only plenipotentiary there is, is Jesus Christ. No, we daren’t use the word. Oh, if you put it in lowercase letters I suppose and printed real pale on the page, and have an understanding that we know what we mean, I suppose that we could without sin, call some old king or czar, a plenipotentiary.

But there is one that’s above the all the plenipotentiaries and all the kings. Now, when I think of the kings and the mighty men that have walked over the earth and with the wave of their scepter have condemned thousands to die. I think of that story told us by the missionary of the tribal chief, I think in Africa, who managed somewhere to secure down at the coast, a barber chair, and he put that barber chair in his hut and sat in grandeur and regal dignity in the barber chair and received the plaudits of all of his followers.

And after all, what’s the difference between the tribal chief in a barber’s chair and a plenipotentiary surrounded by all the culture and tradition of mankind. There is only one about whom it can be said, in all things He has the preeminence, and that all things fall down before Him, the philosophic universe, the totality of existence, the heavenly bodies, the kings and those in authority, and the princes and the holy ones and the watchers and the seraphim and the cherubim and the angels and the archangels and all the creatures about which we know only dimly or know nothing at all. By virtue of what He is and by virtue of what He did and by virtue of what God did for Him, He sits supreme in majesty above them all.

That’s why, and I speak with apology to any of you whose feelings might be hurt by this. But, that is why I never could refer to the man who sits in Rome as a holy father. That’s why I never could call him a holy father. He’s a bachelor to start with, and how he could be a father and not be married is beyond me. And how you could call him the most holy father, I will never do it, never do it. While there sits One high and supreme on an eminence elevated infinitely beyond the highest man or angel or seraph. There sits our Lord Jesus Christ. He has in all things the preeminence. And since He has the preeminence, and since for a little time, we can’t see it, but God is working out a plan that will display it. And since it’s true, that in all the moral world He has the preeminence, and all the physical world, He has the preeminence. And in the fallen world, He’ll take the preeminence when His time comes. In all this is a powerful argument for giving Him the preeminence now, in our lives. It argues with an unanswerable logic, that if He’s preeminent in heaven, He ought to be preeminent on Earth.

And I read again yesterday, that which I think I quoted here years ago, that wonderful, strange saying to come from a man who doesn’t claim to be a Christian, Aldous Huxley. That stream saying where he said this, that our kingdom go, must be always and forever the proper corollary to, thy kingdom come. And there cannot be, thy kingdom come until there has been my kingdom go, for no two kings can sit on any one throne.

So, if His Kingdom is to come, my kingdom must go. And prophetically and literally, when the kingdoms of this world go, the kingdoms then become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of His Christ, and He shall reign on the earth. But there will have to go the rule of man before there can come the rule of the God-man. And what is true in society and in prophecy in future events, it’s true right now in my life. My kingdom has to go. Nothing, nothing, nothing that this little dying man would like better than to sit on a throne. Nothing, that he would like better than to be called by magnificent titles and sit on the throne. And if he has to compromise with the barber chair of his own little ragged life, he nevertheless wants to sit on that throne. But my kingdom go before His Kingdom can come.

So, His preeminence in His universe argues and pleads and sings and preaches, that we give Him preeminence now. The wonder and the mystery of the human heart. How wonderful is the human heart. Bunyan called it, the kingdom of man’s soul, and he thought of a single human heart as being a whole kingdom. They used to call it a microcosm, the little world, the whole world in little, lying in the bosom of a man. And I can’t prove this, and so don’t ask me for the verse yet, but I feel and sense and intuit that there isn’t a law nor a beauty nor a loveliness nor a glory anywhere in the created universe that hasn’t been compressed into the human heart. God said, if nothing else, let us make him in our image and after our likeness.

And when God made man in His own image, whatever sin has done and however died, the human heart now may be through sin, potentially lying there is all the wisdom and all the beauty that God put in all in his creation, and He compressed it into the human heart. How wonderful is the human heart. Who has a right to preeminence there? Who has a right to sit there in relaxed majesty and rule the kingdom of man so? None other but He who was born of the Virgin Mary and be crucified under Pontius Pilate and to rise again from the dead the third day, to take His seat at the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens, preeminent above all, preeminent in our hearts, the mysterious wonder of the heart. And He wants to move in there and become its King, its King.

I’m too democratic ever to wish we could have a king back. His Majesty is too big a mouthful for me. And if you are from Canada or England, don’t feel bad, please. I’m just an old American talking. And I understand of course about those things. And I know what you mean when you say, his majesty. You’re simply doing what custom requires, and you have as lofty a view of God as I have. But from my American tongue, his majesty doesn’t sound smooth, unless I’m talking about the One who by a life laid down and taken again, Who by the holy mystery of virgin birth, Who by the deeper mystery of incarnation, and Who by the awesome, dark mystery of death on a tree, could be raised to the high preeminence so that archangels would fall on their faces before Him. And could take our form and our manhood and our blood and flesh, or at least our humanity, to the right hand of God, and look down on all the vast universe. If you meant His Majesty, I would gladly bow with you until my knees were callous before that Majesty. That in all things, He might have the preeminence.

In all our thinking and feeling and willing, in all our thoughts and word indeed, in our home and business and work and money and service, and you think for a second that it’s easy for me to give the preeminence to Christ because I stand here in the pulpit, a bit elevated, a bit removed. It’s harder or just as hard for this old heart to give Jesus Christ preeminence as it is for the man who drives the truck that picks up the ashes in the alley.

Jesus Christ wants preeminence, and He wants it in homes and business and work. He wants it in your monetary affairs. And this, to this glorious project, this church is dedicated. I pray that God will let me die or will let me move, or some providential arrangement will take me out of here before this church ever, ever allows itself, ever there’s a member on the board, ever there’s a superintendent in the Sunday school or teacher in any class, ever there’s a young people’s president or a prayer band officer, ever there’s anybody that wants anything else except Jesus Christ to have the preeminence. When that time comes, we’re not only no longer an Alliance church, we’re not even a church. We’re not a church at all.

For a church is an assembly, met and gathered unto Christ. An assembly of redeemed people of all colors and classes, met unto Jesus Christ to worship Him. And to pray, and when need be, fast and hear God say, separate me Barnabas and Saul. That’s a church. And when this church becomes less than that, I don’t want to be its pastor. And in our service and in our worship, that Christ should be glorified. And in our all in all, in the service of the Lord’s Supper this morning, we trust our Lord Jesus shall be glorified. Don’t let’s stare at each other, please, nor let’s wonder who that is two seats in front. But let’s, if not with closed eyes, at least with reverent hearts, think on the Lamb of God. Think on Jesus as we take of the body and the bread, the body and the blood, the blood of our Savior.

Now, Lord, Thou grant that this whole service today, everything, might reflect the honor, the honor, the Triune God, and that Jesus Christ might have high priority, top place in our thoughts and our feelings and in all are willing and doing and saying, for Jesus sake. Amen.

Categories
Messages

Tozer Talks

“How to Think as a Christian“

PDF Formatted TranscriptDownloaD

“How to Think as a Christian”

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 17, 1957

Now, in the 16th chapter of the book of Matthew, the second of two talks on that, where Jesus began to show His disciples how He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. And Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him saying, be it far from thee Lord. You’ll notice the margin says, pity thyself, Lord. This shall not be unto thee. But He turned and said unto Peter, get thee behind me satan. Thou art an offence unto Me, for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

My almost invariable method is to consult anywhere from five to a dozen or more translations in order that I may be sure I know just what the man said, or what Christ said, or the prophet said, or the apostle. And what Jesus said here was this, you’re not thinking like God, you’re thinking like a man. Last week, I talked about that and showed that human sympathies and affections can get in and make us think like human beings down on the earth instead of spiritual beings born from another world. And I closed with the question, how shall we escape the world’s influences, and think the thoughts of God, we Christians?

For you see, the world has all of the techniques of brainwashing. The world has all the techniques. They have literature, schools, the general-accepted mores of society; they have history and tradition. They have every kind of sort of communication now, the two new methods of communication, radio and television. And they have all this.

And so, the world creates a mentality, but it is not the mentality of heaven. It is the mentality of earth. And the work of the Holy Ghost is to create on earth a mentality of heaven in the hearts of people who are on earth, but whose interests are in heaven.

Now, how shall we escape the debauchery of our minds by the world? And how shall we gain the mind of Christ so that we shall think like God? Well, briefly, there are I said, three, I said four last week, but I want to give you a fourth one. The first is revelation, the Scriptures of truth. You see, there are two kinds of theology abroad. There are three kinds. There’s a theology of the world, which is simply paganism. That’s all, nothing else, just paganism. They may name the name Jesus or God or the Bible or have some Biblical words, but their theology is that of the world. It’s been influenced by Christianity, but not controlled by it. So that while it is not Greek or oriental, it’s pagan. Nevertheless, it’s American paganism and we must, then there’s a second, we must correct that, there’s a second. We’ll never be able to correct the world’s theology, but there is a second, and that is, the church’s theology.

And the church’s theology is a compound of badly, infrequently read and badly understood Scriptures, along with what has been called, chimney corner Scripture, and what Paul called old wives tales. And when you shake this all up together, you have a strange and corrupt mixture which is neither one nor the other. It is neither Christian nor totally heathen, but it’s a mixture in between.

Well, how are we going to get to the truth, the Word of God? This book that I hold in my hand is the Word of God. And we correct misconceptions and cleanse our minds and deliver ourselves from wrong thoughts about God and ourselves and the world and sin and the future by reading the Scriptures themselves. There never was a time when so many Bibles were printed. It’s the world’s best seller, everybody knows it. And I read just this week, this last week, that the librarian down at the main library down in the city said that the Bible was the most asked for and the most read book that they have down there. That is true and that’s good. But it’s not good enough. In going to the Scriptures, we are not to go to them to criticize them nor to bring anything to them, but to find out what they teach about all these things, and what they teach about God and Christ and creation and man’s relation to Himself, and man’s relation to God and man’s relation to the future. And all of these things that we must know, we’ll have to go to the Bible to find it out.

There is a sentence used by, I think the Baptists, which ought to be true of everybody, that it is the, what do they call it, the source book of faith and practice, the only alone source of faith and practice. What we are to believe and how we are to live is given to us by revelation. And the Spirit breathes upon the Word and brings the Truth to sight. And we must go to the Scriptures themselves, the Word of God and read the Word of God.

How much Bible reading do we do? That’s an important question. Because I well know how much newspaper reading we do. I well know how much reading is done of other things. And remember, whether you know it or not, if you do not constantly correct your thinking and purify your mentality by the Word of God, you will be thinking like a man and not like God just as sure as you live, and nothing will change it but that. There’s revelation. That’s first.

Then there’s inspiration. And what do we mean by inspiration? We mean the Spirit’s impulses within the mind to correct any wild notions that we might have. Job talked about the wild ass’ colt, the untamed wild creature given over to its impulses and whimsies, that puts its nostrils in the air and snorts and bays and races across the fields untamed and uncorrected. And so with the impulses of the human heart, even Christian impulses, unless we have what the old men used to say, the sweet influences of the Holy Spirit, you know, when we came under the domination of the imagination-less, inspiration-less, beauty-less culture, we got afraid to talk about the influences of Spirit because they said while the Spirit is not a thing, the Spirit is a person.

Well, of course we know it’s a person. We can quote the creed’s. We know what the Bible says about it. We know the Holy Spirit is a person and not an it, though even the King James version uses it once or twice. But the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. But, shall we say, that because He’s a person, He can’t have influence? They talked about the influences of the Spirit. And they believed that there was a divine inspiration that came on men, and came through the Scriptures and by means of the Scriptures. But that it put within the hearts of Christian men, impulses to righteousness, the influences of the Spirit, they called it. We will rule that all out. Nobody will talk about that now. But that’s one of the things we ought or bring back into the church again, and, and dust it off, and polish it up, and make it mean what it used to mean, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the heart to correct the wild notions that we have; the impulsive, Adamic notions and ideas, and bring them into line with revelation.

Then there is a third word and that is illumination. It’s not quite the same as inspiration, for inspiration has to do with impulse and influence, while illumination has to do with Divine Light that falls upon the Scriptures. The Spirit breathes upon the Word and brings the Truth to sight. And it was our father’s belief that the word of God could not be understood unless the Spirit breathed upon it. The Methodist believed that. The early Baptists believed that. The Salvation Army believed it, and the Lutherans used to teach it. And it was true taught in the Presbyterians. All Protestantism once believed it, that it took an illumination of the Holy Ghost to make us see Truth. And the German said, the heart is always the best theologian, always better than the head, because it’s there the illumination falls.

So, illumination is the third word. And we must have the illumination of the Spirit on the Scriptures. Saw through the Word of God. Saw through it and read it through, and yet never have any illumination on it. It’s like walking in the night. But when we have the illumination of the Spirit, breathing on us, then we know we know. And it saves us from the darkness of reason, for reason is dark, don’t forget it. In the world they tell us, and this is part of the world error; they say reason is a lamp. And there is a sense in which that is true. Reason is a lamp.

When I was a boy, I went fishing with an old fellow named Billy Q as I recall, an old man. And we fished along a creek, or run, we called them there. It was very dark, very dark. We had no lights of course, of any sort, and it was very dark. But he had a fire going. And I said, Billy, how are we going to get home? How are we going to get out of here. We were really in the bushes. And he smiled in front of the fire there. He was an old woodsmen and an old fisherman and he knew. So, he picked up a firebrand. And you know, a burning firebrand gives off very, very little light. But Billy knew what to do with it, so he just began to swing it. And swinging it around his head, he walked ahead of me. And as he swung it around his head, the flame went out, but the glow came on, and Billy enlightened our pathway. Illumination took us clear up the path and back onto the road so we knew where we were out of the bushes. He did it by swinging around this brand that glowed by the wind, in the wind.

Now, that is one kind of illumination. But there’s a better kind, and you know what it is. We have now the electrical lights, various sorts of electric lights. And we have artificial lights which aren’t really artificial. They’re actually, they go back to the sun, but they’re caught and funneled in another way and we call them artificial. And that kind of illumination is infinitely better than swinging a firebrand round your head.

Well, now about all the light that you and I can have by nature is the light of the firebrand we swing around our head. But there is a better light than that, and it is the illumination. Reason is a firebrand, and it’s better to have it than not to have it. And if we do have it, it’ll help us to walk right and stay out of jail and look after our families and be decent. Reason will do that. And we can by vigorously swinging a little stick we call reason. We can get enough light to walk right, but we can’t get enough to save us from the torch itself. We can’t get enough to save us from the world itself. It takes revelation plus illumination that our minds might be illuminated by that which is above reason. If you think that Paul ever fell on his knees before reason, and Paul was Greek-taught, don’t forget it. Paul knew the Greek and was taught by the Greeks under the Greek philosophers and knew about them and could quote them. And yet, if you think that Paul was on his knees before reason, read 1 Corinthians 1 and 2. That’s all you have to do. Just read 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, and you’ll know better from that time on. For He said, where’s the wise man? Where’s the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world and the reasoners, that God made them all foolish, and He has by the Holy Ghost through the gospel given us the real light. And then I mentioned a fourth, and that is the presence of the Holy Spirit Himself to create the mind of Christ in us.

But I want to issue a little warning right here, and it is that no single act of grace will do for us alone, and we with finality, what we want. I picked up a hymnal here, my old 108-year-old hymnal. I go to it sometimes as a source of inspiration. Here was a man of God and they used to sing this in the Methodist Church and other churches. Jesus, plant the root in me; all the mind that was in Thee. Settled peace I then shall find, for Jesus is a quiet mind. Anger no more shall feel, always even, always still. Meekly on my God recline, Jesus is a gentle mind. I shall nothing know besides Jesus and Him crucified. Perfectly to Him be joined, Jesus is a loving mind, I shall triumph evermore, gratefully my God adore. God so good, so true, so kind; Jesus is a thankful mind. Lowly, loving, meek and pure, I shall to the end endure. Be no more to sin inclined, Jesus is a constant mind. I shall fully be restored to the image of my Lord, witnessing to all mankind, Jesus is a perfect mind.

Now they used to long for that, and when a young preacher came to be ordained, they said, have you succeeded in entering into the experience of this perfect mind, perfect love? And he said, no sir, I haven’t yet. And they said, are you seeking? And if he could say, yes sir, vigorously; earnestly seeking they would ordain him. They wanted to know that he either had had some kind of an experience or was earnestly seeking.

Well now, I want to warn that no single act of grace, and it’s never meant to teach it, no single act of grace will do this alone. The mightiest, overwhelming anointing of the Holy Ghost that ever came on a man, will not do this work finally and alone. We can undo the work of God and do it in our own hearts. God wants to baptize us with a spiritual mind and He will do it, but it requires that we live by the Word, that we study the Word, that we fill our minds with the Word, that we look to Him every moment for illumination.

And then there comes our fifth word, cultivation. There is something for us to do. We must cultivate the Spirit’s mind, the mind of Christ. Let this mind be in you, said the man of God. Bent is really what He meant rather than intellect. But let this mind be in you. We’ve got to cultivate. It’s a great mistake to think that we can get converted and then because we have it in Christ, we have everything and from there on we can give little attention to it. It’s a great mistake to think that if we go on and are filled with the Spirit of God, that’s the end of it, and that there’s nothing nowhere from there.

My brethren, when Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit, anointed is the word that was used by Peter, anointed with the Holy Spirit. Do you know the next thing He did? What was it? He was led of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. That was the next thing. So, don’t think for a second that the anointing of the Holy Ghost in any degree or measure that God may give or may have given it to you is sufficient. There must be cultivation. And by steeping our minds in the wrong things, we can undo the work of God in making the mind of Christ.

I wonder if I could dig up kind of a grotesque illustration. Suppose that there is a very fine interior decorator. He has consulted the finest, most artistic minds that he can could locate, and he is busy decorating a room. And he has his various colored paints there, and he’s doing it slowly. And this room is evidently going to be a beautiful room, beautifully designed and beautifully done. And then quitting time comes and he goes home and in the middle of the night, some scoundrelly little vandal-ish boys come in and to have themselves a good time, and I wouldn’t have been above it when I was a kid. They pick up brushes and go to work, and undo everything up to that moment. And it’s repeated the next night and the next night. That’s exactly what you and I can do my brother. The mighty Holy Ghost can bring a thankful mind, a noble mind, a pure mind, and begin to teach us to think the thoughts of God. And we can walk right out and fall into the hands of influences like bad boys that will paint weird pictures and make our ugly faces all over the walls of our hearts. And instead of the walls of Zion, standing in their beauty, they will be defaced by the mischief of the devil.

So, you and I have to cultivate the mind of Christ. You cannot without the Scriptures have the mind of Christ, and you cannot know the Scriptures without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. But even these will not keep your mind heavenly unless you cultivate a heavenly mind, by prayer, by meditation, by dreaming over the Scriptures, by deliberately thinking God’s thoughts about things, and by deliberately eliminating the influences that make your mind either impure or worldly.

I sometimes don’t care whether I’m with some certain Christians or not. They don’t do me any good and I can’t do them much good. For everything from the time, you get with them until you leave is the world. It’s the world, it’s a nice part of the world, but it’s the world nevertheless. But there are some thank God that when you talk to them, the conversation swings around as a needle in the compass swings around to the north magnetic pole. And pretty soon, you’re talking about wonderful things. They that loved the Lord met and talked often one with another. And the Lord heard it and wrote it down in a book. And they shall be mine, saith God in that day.

We can be too jocular. We can be too worldly. We can know too many things, and we can be interested in too many things, and thus scatter our mind. Jesus talked about a single eye, and Paul said, this one thing I do. So there must be a unifying of the forces of our minds and a settling of our minds on the Lord Jesus Christ. And then we’ll think like Jesus. Would you say that narrows our minds, narrows them terribly? Oh, my friends, just what little experience in a small, imperfect way that my own heart has had, I want to tell you that it doesn’t narrow them at all, but it releases them into a vast world of freedom, our minds I mean, into a vast world of freedom that we never knew before.

He is not a caged-bird, who looks heavenward and moves toward God. He’s released. He’s in the cage who thinks as man thinks. Peter was in a cage. His mind was in a prison when he said, Lord, that isn’t the way we do it here. Don’t go get yourself killed. You don’t need to. Pity yourself, Lord. He was in a cage, and it was the Lord who was free when He turned on him and said, you’re thinking like a man instead of like God. That’s not good grammar, but that’s the way we say it now. We’re thinking as a man thinks instead of as God thinks.

Now,  my brethren, may we not these days, don’t go home from church this morning, or wherever you’re going, and by remembering the latest Reader’s Digest quip, or the funny thing somebody said, or some worldly thing, dissipate the influences of the Holy Ghost. But, rather go and live in line with them. And then you move upward into freedom. And it’s the centered mind that is the free mind. It is the scattered mind that is an imprisoned mind. And the mind of the world is imprisoned, but the mind of the Christian is released upward into God, upward into infinitude, upward into the vast sea of being we call the Godhead.

So, that is how we escape the evil influences of the world and get a mind like Christ: revelation, inspiration, illumination, the indwelling Holy Ghost, and cultivation.

I hope you’ll be back tonight. There will be a lot more here. If things go as they have been, I think they will. Some are coming that I know from out of town. And I want to talk tonight and give the 10th in a series which I’ve been following Sunday nights and we’ll have one of those gracious, wonderful song services. I don’t ever hear anything like it anyplace to go. And I could come and sit and listen and join in with my cracked baritone and when time comes to preach, I could go home and say, well, I’ve been to church. So you come tonight. Breathe deep before you get here. Get your lungs ready. We’re going to have a great evening by the grace of God. All right.