Tag: Fruit

Tozer Talks

“The Mistakes of Israel and Possibly Ours”

“

“The Mistakes of Israel and Possibly Ours“

Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer

April 13, 1958

I want to talk a little about Israel and a mistake she made, and that you and I can make if we don’t watch out. It’s in Hosea, the 10th chapter. The first two lines in my Bible read like this, Israel is an empty vine. He bringeth forth fruit unto himself.

Now, the prophet Hosea was sent to Israel in one of her low times, or times of declension. Declension is a nice word for backsliding and that’s what Israel was doing. She’d forgotten some vital things. She’d forgotten her origins in the covenant of Abraham and she had forgotten in a large measure the God of her father’s. And according to this prophet, she had a divided heart. That’s 10:2. She had a divided heart. And wherever there is a divided heart there is a civil war. A house divided against itself cannot stand said Jesus. And a divided heart means civil war within, what Bunyan called, The Little Kingdom of Mansoul. Jesus said, ye cannot serve God–and. You cannot serve God and, but Israel was trying to serve God–and. She had not quite the courage to reject Jehovah, but she was adding other gods and putting up other altars and she was trying to serve God–and.

Now that’s to be double-minded, and James warned about being double-minded. Jesus said, a single eye. We were to have a singular, that is one, single focal point to which the eyes look. And another prophet said, son, give me thy hearts. God was speaking through this man. And Israel, according to 9:4 had put herself in a position where God rejected her offerings. And so the Prophet said about Israel. Israel is an empty vine. She bringeth forth fruit unto herself. Look at that a minute.

Now, what’s the purpose of a vine. It is to bring forth fruit unto. The fruit of the vine is never brought forth for the vine. The fruit of the vine is not for the vine. The fruit of the vine is a gift from God and the vine receives it as a gift for others. The vine is to bring forth fruit unto others. Israel’s mistake was she brought forth fruit unto herself. The vine is to bring forth fruit unto the food of man and the food of other creatures and for the creation of other vines. Every grape has two or three seeds in it capable of producing other vines, and so any given vine produces fruit, receives the sweetness and fragrance and nourishment from God in order that she might give it to others. She’s backslidden when she produces it to consume it herself. She brought four fruit unto herself. This was true of Israel and it’s true now of many, many churches and many people.

Many Christian people who claim to be God’s children, they nevertheless are bringing forth fruit unto themselves. Now, that was Israel’s failure. She kept her treasure within herself. For it was not God’s wind overhead nor God’s rain. It was not God’s soft soil. It was not the laws of nature nor anything that you could lay the blame to. It was something wrong with the vine, that instead of the gifts of God externalizing themselves and flowing out into fruit for others and for the production of other vines to come, they stayed within the vine. And the vine had nothing but leaves and no fruit. So the fruit was actually brought forth unto the vine for the vine, and this was the mistake. So, the vine missed the will of God and was an empty vine.

Now applying this to the Christian church, applying it to this church, I would say that our lives can become wholly selfish. Good, honest, Christian people can, unknown to themselves, little by little, become wholly selfish so that it’s all in-flow and no out-go. Remember those two rhyming words in-flow and out-go. Ye shall receive power and ye shall be witnesses said the Lord Jesus, and out from within him shall flow. There’s the in-flow and the out-flow or the out-go and this is normal. Because what you receive you do not receive for yourself. If the Lord’s people could only remember that.

We are not like the Dead Sea to receive always and give nothing off, except what is taken away by evaporation. But we are channels to give. We are not lakes not lagoons. He did not say, when the Holy Ghost comes, you’ll be like a lagoon. He said, when the Holy Ghost comes, you’ll be like a like a river, and the rivers always flowing. That is why you can hardly pollute a river. You can pollute a pond or lagoon or a little lake. But it’s very hard to pollute a river, because it’s always flowing.

There was a little saying back among the hills of Pennsylvania where I grew up, that if water flows over two stones and purifies itself. I think that perhaps was overstated. But that was the way we boys decided whether we could drink out of a stream we happen to come to. If it was flowing, and there were two rocks there, we said it’s clean. Well, the river keeps itself clean by flowing. And the Christian and the church, for what is the church? It’s a lot of Christians working together. And what this church is, is what we Christians are.

There isn’t any mysterious, mystical third thing called a mysterious church. There isn’t any invisible church here. The church is you and me in this congregation. And therefore, whatever we are, the church is. And the total cannot be greater than the sum of its parts. The total at the bottom cannot be greater if it’s properly added up, than the parts above it. And so, this church is what we are. It is no less than that, but is no more than that. So, it’s true of us that there must be in-flow and there must be out-go, out from within him shall flow. But we often are like the vine that brought forth fruit, but kept it inside of itself, and had nothing but leaves. Our lives are selfish, wholly selfish.

And then, the second thing is, that it reveals itself in this, that we’re careful to spare ourselves. I was thinking, somebody said to me last week in New York City, this doctor’s orders business; and he gave me quite a little lecture, not talking to me. He was talking about somebody else, but I was getting the lecture and I enjoyed it; this doctor’s orders.

There are so many preachers sitting around afraid to move for they’ll drop over. There were two men out on the West Coast. One of them, a great tall fellow, Robert Kilgore, a good friend of mine and a hard-working Christian brother. The doctor said to him you have, I forgot what of the heart, and you’re going to die. You take these little tiny white things. What is it? I started to say dynamite. No, not digitalis. Anyway, they put them on their tongue and dissolve them and that, nitroglycerin, that’s it. And he said, now, Brother Tozer, we were out to the council out there, and he looked down at me, for he was a great, tall fine-looking man. He said, Brother Tozer, there are three of us preachers out here on the coast, and he said, we’ve all got heart trouble. We are cardiac cases.

Now he said, if I slow down and take it easy, retire and don’t do anything, I may be can stretch my life a little while. He said, I’m not going to do it. I’m going to serve God. He lived about a year, and they found him lying quietly on the floor beside his bed. But he served God that year. He didn’t vegetate. He didn’t sit around and rust. He served God that year. Two other fellows are still out there waiting, waiting, looking every day down the street wondering if that long black car is coming for them, waiting. Doctor’s orders they say, doctor’s orders.

Now, brethren, I wonder if there doesn’t come a place in the Christian’s life when he stops listening to doctor’s orders and he begins to hear God say I count not my life dear unto myself. We talk about Dr. Jaffrey. Dr. Jaffrey never should have gone as a missionary in the first place. He had an enlarged heart and diabetes. And the AMMO, which has kept a great many people home, would never, never have sent him out, but somehow, they got him through in those early days. And you know what he did? He went over there and shook a continent and the islands. Then when he got old and they said it’s time for you to retire, he said I’m going to do that very thing. Retire means put on new tires. So, he put on new tires and opened another whole world, we used to call Indonesia. Doctor’s orders would have said you go back to Toronto, that beautiful Canadian city with all her parks and beautiful buildings. One of the cleanest, most beautiful cities in the world that I’ve ever seen at least is Toronto. And he owned stock and was part owner of the greatest newspaper in the city.

He could have gone back there, had a fine apartment or an estate outside the city somewhere on the edge where you could have lived in the suburbs and all would have been well with him. He might have stretched his life a long time, but he put on four new tires and went back to Indonesia. He died out there as you know. He died in a pig pen, where the Japs put him. He died, well, he didn’t actually die in it. He died in a poor homemade hospital on a cot. But he had been kept in that pigpen by the Japs. But in the meantime, he opened all that area, and there are Christians over there now because he went there. Ed Maxey’s out there with Shirley because he went and opened it up. Walter Post’s out there and Harry Post because he went out and opened it up after he should have according to doctor’s orders, gone back to Toronto and waited for the end. No, my friends, as long as we keep sparing ourselves to bring forth fruit unto ourselves, you are to bring forth fruit unto others. And then we refuse to inconvenience ourselves.

So, the Lord’s work is carried on like the birdwatcher’s society. The tattered edges and the leftover pieces of our time and strength and abilities, or like a crocheting guild, where when they’ve slept all they can and sat around and eaten all they can and nothing else to do and they’re bored with being at home. They go to the crochet guild and sit around gossip. And the crocheting guild gets the tattered remnants of their time.

Well, the church of Christ is being run, and mostly like a birdwatcher’s society or a tatters or crocheters guild, from the tattered remnants of what is left of people’s time. And so, because we refuse to be inconvenienced, we’re bringing forth fruit unto ourselves. When I heard that organ there with that offertory, I raised my eyebrows at Mr. McAfee and I said to brother Jake Hoeber, do you know what that is? That was one of Simpson’s numbers. That was put in my feet to go and put in my heart the woe.

Now, that doesn’t sound like a birdwatcher’s guild. That sounds like somebody given up to something. They have a word they’re using here and there in the world now. It’s too bad the world had to teach it to us. It’s the word committed. They say, he’s a committed man. They say of the communist leader, they’re committed men. They believe in their devil’s philosophy, but they believe so fully that they’re committed men, and they’re ready to be expendable and die for it. And some of them do. They put it across because they’re committed men. But we who know the Red Cross of God, who’ve seen Jesus die on it for our sins and know that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, we insist upon giving God the tattered fragments of our time. And Christianity for the most part is run by a bored, blaised, burned out people who’ve been Christians so long, the joy has worn off. Like an old, married couple sitting around behind their newspapers, the freshness and beauty of the dream has worn off and the glory has departed, or as Hosea said here in this book of his, thy glory has flown away like a bird and always centering around ourselves.

You know what the cure is my friends? The cure is found in the twelfth verse. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it’s time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you. I’m not going along with all of those who are saying, let’s meet and pray all night for revival. Let’s meet and pray for revival. I said to the man that approached me about it, all right Brother, the day that the evangelical forces of Chicago will come to me and say, we have been bringing forth fruit unto ourselves. We have been astray from the Scriptural pattern. We have added a thousand anti-scriptural gadgets to the pure work of God. We are careless about the Lordship of Christ. We are not living as we should live and I want you to join us in the prayers of repentance. And then we promise to go back to our churches and straighten out and get right and clean up from the ground, and from the bottom up. Clean up our churches and cast the money changers out of the temple and the sellers of bulls and cows out of the temple and start clean according to Book of Acts New Testament Christianity. I’ll join you. I’ve never heard from them since. Nobody wants to do that. We want to revival but we want it the cheap way. We want God to come roll over us with a huge wave of emotion. And if we have a huge wave of emotion, each go to the other and say I thought a bad thought about you two years ago, forgive me and everybody have a good cry, and then go back to our idols and back to our selfishness and back to our carnality.

No, there’s only one way to repent and that is to reverse our ways. And instead of doing the way we’ve been doing, do the way we ought to do. You don’t have to notify God. He knows. Those two boys that Jesus told about, the father said to the boys go work in the vineyard today. One of them flared up and said I won’t go. The other one said all right, Father, and then he went fishing. But the boy that had got angry and said, I won’t go, he saw sadness and hurt in the Father’s face. Twenty minutes later, and he was down on his knees saying, O God, what a scoundrel I was and he went right out into the vineyard and worked all day. The father came back and found the boy that said he would go didn’t, and the boy that said he wouldn’t–did, and Jesus said, that’s repentance. There’s repentance. We say, let’s meet and have an all-night of prayer. Yes, Father, yes, Father we’ll work in thy vineyard, but the next day we go back to the old rule again.

Now, I want to tell you about two men. Two men that talked to me this morning. Those two men never dreamed that I would mention it. And I’m not going to mention their names and I’ll keep you guessing for the rest of your lives. I will not tell you. Two men saw me today. And they’re men who are honored in this church and who are in official position. One of them met me and said, Pastor, my hours are such that if I work, I can’t attend the meetings of this missionary convention. So, I’m taking one week of my vacation now in order that I can stay home and go to every meeting of the missionary convention this week. Now, he doesn’t have to send a telegram to heaven. God knows that kind of activity. God recognizes practical doings. He recognizes actual doings. That man is doing his Christianity. He’ll be here at every meeting, because he’s taking his vacation now, part of it, half of it, now, so that he’ll be home able to, instead of sending back cards, wish you were here, he’ll be here.

Now I don’t say you have to do that, but I point that out. As long as we’ve got our hard cores, the Baptists call it, I’m a little afraid of that expression. I’m afraid it’s a little too hard, often, but as long as we got a hard core of that kind of spiritual men in this church, I’m not afraid to stay around here.

Another man said to me, and he’s in a position where he could have lots of lectures. He said to me, you know, Pastor, I think he included his wife in this. I don’t remember for sure, but I know he said himself, that I’ve decided on fewer luxuries. He said, I’ve decided on fewer luxuries. The work of God needs it. And I’ve decided fewer luxuries and more self-sacrifice. The kind of works I believe in.

One of my friends and I met last week in New York. He had written me a letter, one of the most wonderful letters about what God had been doing for him. And I saw him. He lost weight actually. He said, look here and showed me his belt and said, look, I’m losing weight. He said, you know why? He said, I’m getting up early in the morning and meeting God. I’m eating less. I’m missing some meals in order that I might meet God. And his church is going like a prairie fire. Lean godliness, that’s what we need ladies and gentlemen, lean godliness. We got too much fat in our spirit. We need lean godliness. Too much being careful to spare ourselves, and excusing ourselves on the ground that it’s doctor’s orders. I’d spend three fourths of my time in Florida if I listened to doctor’s orders. And I’m not going to listen to doctor’s orders. I’d rather die five years sooner and get something done while I live than to vegetate like an old cabbage.

So, let’s remember. Let’s reverse our ways of selfishness and let’s bring forth fruit not unto ourselves, but unto others. I have confidence in this church. You know this church has suffered over the last two or three years. You know what’s happened. It’s not been from within. It’s not been from the pulpit nor from the board nor from any of the congregation. It’s been from a changing social order here. And almost every other church has fled the neighborhood. We’re still here. And somebody would say, well, we’re down. This is going be a low convention. I don’t believe a word of it. We may, times ahead, we may have to relocate. We’ve got our committee. We’ll talk about that later next fall, but now we’re here and you’re here. And God has sent his messengers here. And we own this place and we don’t owe a dime on it. And in spite of the fact, we lost a whole church in numbers over the last two years who have moved away and out into the suburbs, into Wheaton and all over the country, we still had $36,000 for missions last year. So there isn’t any reason in the world why we will reverse our laziness and our love of luxury and all the rest. There isn’t any reason why this can’t continue to be one of the strongest and most godly and most Christ-like churches.

Israel brought fruit unto herself. Too bad. She had all the light. She had the sunshine. She had the soil. She had the rain. She had everything. But she turned in on herself and she never got a grape for some for weary bird. God wants you and me to keep pouring out of our life and love and sacrifice and money until instead of it saying, that Alliance Church brings forth fruit unto itself, it can be said that church brings forth fruit unto the ends of the earth. Amen. Amen.

Tags Fruit, Hosea, Israel, Vine

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date June 20, 2021

“Abiding in the Vine”

Sunday, February 12, 1956

Abiding in the Vine

We are very glad that Brother Cordeg could be with us today to take the place of Brother McAfee, who as I announced this morning is in Philadelphia, or at least singing in Philadelphia today, but he was at home to attend the wedding of his only sister. He will be back the early part of this week and will resume his duties with us.

Now in John 15, I want you to read with me responsively, all reading the tenth verse down to and including verse ten. John 15. Reading responsively, and then all reading the tenth verse. I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples. As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.

Now, I think this is three or four messages that I have brought from the Vine and the Branch figure that occurs in the opening part of this chapter about which we have read. Now I want you to notice what Jesus said about abiding. Abide in Me and I in you. He said, in verse four, they put it down as a command, abide in Me and I in you. Now, that is as they say in the service, an order. Then in verse five, we have an assertion: He that abideth in Me, the same bringeth forth much fruit. In verse six we have a warning: If ye abide not in Me is cast forth as a branch. In verse seven we have a promise: If ye abide in Me and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what you will and shall be done unto you. In verse 10, we have a condition: If you keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love even as I’ve kept my Father’s commandments and abide in His love.

Now naturally, when talking about the Abiding Life, we’ve got to define the word abiding. The word abiding here of course is a figure. As I’ve said several times already and explained at length, it is a figure, but let us not forget that while it is a figure, it is literal. There is not a contrast here between the figurative and the literal, because a figure declares literal truth. It is literally true that we are joined to Christ. But the figure that sets the literal truth forth is a figure of a vine. I hope that we can see that because there’s much figure in the Bible. Those who do not understand may get the impression that a thing is not actually true, that it’s only figuratively so.

Let me point out that when the Bible uses a figure, it always uses a figure to explain a real truth; and here is a figure “I am the Vine and ye are the branches”. Now that’s not a dreamy, poetic setting forth of a misty ideal. That is the stating of a truth that is as literal as the heaven and the earth. But of course, the figure under which it is set forth, it is not to be understood literally, Christ literally. Christ is not actually a vine planted in a vineyard. Neither are we actually branches on that vine. But Christ is actually a life that can be set forth as a vine, and we are joined as Christians to that life in a manner that’s literally true, that it can be said that we’re branches.

Now, the vine and the branch, we answer the question what it means by their abiding together. Now, the branches are joined to the vine by a union of life. “And abide in Me;” I’m rather sorry that beautiful word abide occurs here. Three hundred and thirty-four years ago, it meant a little different from what it means now. Do you remember that when Jesus was walking on the road to Emmaus with His two disciples, they said, the night is close and it’s getting late, abide with us. It was an invitation to come in and stay, to come in and dwell overnight, to come in and remain there, not just for refreshments, but overnight, abide with us. And that’s where the hymn Abide with Me came from I suppose. And here we have the word abide.

Now, this word abide means, continue. And since a Christian is one who is joined to Jesus Christ by a union of life, then abide means remain in that union, live on in that union, continue in that union. There is a great deal these days that will give the impression that our relation to Christ is an automatic thing. And that I do not need to think anything about it. It’s automatic. It is done. And therefore, it’s like your Social Security, it’s automatic, or it’s like your taxes, they will send you your your slip. It’s automatic. There’s nothing automatic in the Bible, brothers and sisters, because you see a grapevine and its branches are vegetable life. And that is the figure the Lord used to set forth a literal and spiritual truth.

Now a grapevine with the branches growing there in somebody’s yard, or in a vineyard, they have no will and no choice. A branch can’t will to remain in the vine, and it can’t choose to be in the vine in the first place. It was not that aspect of the of the truth that the Lord was setting forth. But, while the branch cannot make a decision, literally, that is, the branch out there in the field, that more real and literal aspect is that of persons. You see, you and I are persons, and Christ is a person. And therefore, we have wills, and we can determine and we can decide. And He said to us, now will to remain on in the vine. Determine to live on in the vine. You are in the Vine by an act of life. You’re joined by life. And now we rise, says He, above the vineyard, above that. We’ve taken that as our point of departure, our earthly figure of speech, how we rise above that. And we say to you that while you are the branches in Me the Vine, the relationship is still higher than that, and purer and more elevated. So that, you must abide, you must desire to abide in the vine. You must will to do it. Abide in the vine He said.

So, He warned us, and promised us, and laid down the conditions, and made His commandment that we should abide in the Vine. So, we are the branches by free, personal choice. With me, it’s not a small matter whether I’m a free agent or not. It is not one of those things that I can say, well, there’s another school of theology that says my will is not free, and therefore I must keep an open mind. And if those who believe that the will is not free are believers in Christ, I must accept it to not make anything of it. I can’t see it. I believe that there is a vast difference between whether I am in Christ because I can’t help myself or whether I’m in Christ because I won’t be anywhere else.

God gave to Adam and Eve free wills. I said on the radio yesterday, I’m waiting to get letters on that one. I said that the sovereignty of God and the free will of man were not in any wise inconsistent one with the other. If God sovereignly decided to give me free will, then the exercise of my free will is the exercise of the sovereign gift of God and does not cancel out God’s sovereignty. They say, well, if I exercise my free will, and it’s against God’s will, then God’s sovereignty is therefore automatically cancelled; it ceases to be, it’s annulled. For if God were sovereign, then my will would be bound to Him and I would have to do what He wills. But suppose God wills to set my will free. Suppose that the Sovereign God wills that my will should be free, and that I do have a right to decide for good or evil, for God or Satan, for heaven or hell. When I exercise that will, I am not violating the will of God, I’m fulfilling that aspect of the will of God which says, I’m free to choose.

So, the sovereignty of God remains inviolate and still I’m able to choose. There is no such thing as a moral life, except there is a free life. An automaton cannot in anywise be moral. There can be no holiness where there is not freedom. God’s perfect holiness is His perfect freedom. And if God were in anywise bound to be anything, then God could not be honored for being what He is. God is free, and thus has or had perfect holiness because he has perfect freedom. If I were bound to be good, then my being good would mean absolutely nothing at all. If you chain a man and make him pray, he hasn’t prayed. And if you make a man be honest, he isn’t necessarily an honest man. If you shut a man’s mouth and tape it up and don’t let him lie, he is not necessarily a truthful man. And any righteousness that is forced upon me, is no righteousness at all. There can only be sin where there can be freewill. And there can only be righteousness where there is free will. If my will is not free to choose, then I am not to in anywise get any credit, anywhere for choosing. And no man can be a holy man who is not free, because holiness means knowing what is right and knowing what is wrong, I will, by the grace of God, choose what is right. There’s your good man.

So, the very basis of morality is freedom. And the very angels in heaven are there because they want to be. The ones that didn’t want to be are in Hell or Tartorus waiting the judgment of the Great Day; roaming the earth as demons. But the ones who are there are there because they want to be. And there won’t be a conscript angel; there isn’t a conscript angel in all God Almighty’s heaven. And there won’t be a single conscript Christian in all the kingdom of God. There isn’t today and there never was and there never will be. And heaven itself will not be a kind of a benign glorified concentration camp where everybody has to stay in; where God locks the doors at nine o’clock every night, for there’s no night there, and says, now you watch it. And He says to the archangel, now keep your eye on this bunch because they had been known to wander. No, sir. Everybody that’s in heaven will be there because he wouldn’t be anywhere else, and he chose to be there. And everybody that’s honest is so because he could be crooked, and won’t be. Everybody that is decent is so, because they could be otherwise, and won’t be. And if a man couldn’t be otherwise and honest, then he isn’t honest; he’s just an automaton, a Mr. X, a guided missile, automatic man, run by somebody else’s will.

So, I’m a branch, or we are branches because we choose to be branches. He says, continue, live on in Me, abide in Me and exercise your will to righteousness, your will to freedom, your your will to serve Me. The doctrine that we get converted, click, turns over the little machine and punched and recorded and that’s it. I think it’s a mechanized view of the Christian faith, my Brother. A wife isn’t a good wife because the law makes her stay at home. No man proudly boasts of a wife that he’s got chained to the davenette. He boasts because he’s proud of the fact that she wouldn’t be anywhere else. She could have had ten others and wouldn’t take them. She chose him. Pride and the joy of possession comes only because we know our friends are free to leave us and won’t. They could leave us but won’t.

So, the Lord Jesus Christ, while our union is a union of life, it is also a union of will and we are in Him because we chose to be. That makes heaven the freest place in the universe. Men are in hell. They’re not free in hell, but they’re free in heaven. They’re in hell because they must. They’re in heaven because they will. They’re in hell because they’re bound. They’re in heaven because they are free. They’re in hell because God said, depart from Me. They’re in heaven because they chose to be.

Now that’s my concept of heaven, Brother. If I live to be 108 years old like that fellow, that 109 years old fellow, Wilson, who is the oldest soldier in the Northern Army, the only one that’s left. If I live to 109 years old, I’m going to write a book about heaven. But up to now, I’ve been very cautious. All I can tell you is, that the heaven that I read about and sing, I wouldn’t want to be caught in. I wouldn’t want to go there, brother. If I meet you in heaven, it won’t be that kind. The kind they sing about except of course, maybe, “Celestial City.” Maybe St. Bernard and his “Jerusalem the Golden” came near it, but I’m not even sure that Bernard saw it. But I do know that the essence and fiber and foundation of Heaven will be complete freedom, absolute freedom. A man is free within the framework of His creation, free to fulfill all the broad outlines of His manifold life, His complex existence, and God will never have to keep after him with a stick. And you’ll never have to have any policeman there to see that these fellows obey. They all obey because years before they chose to obey. So, we choose Jesus.

Now, being persons, we continually will to be in the vine. And we are there by meeting the conditions. Now the conditions are what? Keep Christ’s commands. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love. And I assume that abiding in His love and abiding in Him are the same. We keep His conditions,”If ye keep my commandments.” Now, His words are His commandments, for He says, “if ye abide, keep my words abiding in you.” So, His words, His commandments; there must be a continual fulfillment. But you say Mr. Tozer, a perfect fulfillment? And I say no, not a perfect fulfillment. We’re made of dust and our Father knoweth that we are made of dust.

A magazine that doesn’t like me very well, reviewed the latest book, “The Root of the Righteous.” I read it today and yesterday and it said that I was ninety-percent right anyhow. I thought it’s a pretty good batting average, ninety-percent. That’s batting .900. But it said, if there is one, just one in it that we think is the greatest of all and that is the little piece, “God is easy to live with.” They said, that’s beautiful. God’s easy to live with. Well, God said that to my heart a long time ago. Nobody taught me that. They taught me that God is easy to live in that He’s the most congenial companion in all the wide world. That’s not to degrade Him from being the high and Holy One that inhabiteth eternity. That is only to say that when He becomes our Father, and we his children, we the branches, and He the Husbandman, He understands. No branch brings forth 100% fruit. No branch comes up, I suppose, to its full possibilities. But it’s the kind, proud work of the Father and of the Husbandman to bring the branch up to the fullest output that it can, seeing what it was to start with.

So, when we say, when He said, abide in My Word and keep My commandments, He did not say, now, if there’s ever a failure, if you ever get a B on your card, if you ever get anything less than an A or an A-plus you’re doomed. He never said that at all, and never thought it. He knows that we are dust. It might be a good thing for each other to find that out. You might put up with some things from me with a good deal more grace if you remember that I am made out of dust. Here this dust here were made in Wisconsin. God scraped that up from the hills on Wisconsin, but I’m from Pennsylvania. He scraped me up out there and put me together and put a human soul in me. So, we’re dust and God knows it. We’re made out of clay and dust, and dust is dust, and God knows that.

But the point is that there must be at least an approximation; He said, keep My commandments. I’m not trying to edit what He said or to soften it. I’m only saying that if He had meant you must, when you’re converted, begin to keep my words without one single violation down to the end of your life, then heaven would be as empty as the inside of Bull Gannon’s head. There wouldn’t be anybody in it Brother except the angels, not one.

Now, what are the keeping of His commandments? Well, it means toward God, reverence and faith and worship. Towards God, reverence and faith and worship. There is such a thing as sort of lumping things and doing twenty things by doing one. For instance, the Ten Commandments. There they are, ten commandments. There they are. Do you know what Paul said we can do with them? He said, love your neighbor as you love yourself and you’ve kept the whole business. He lumped them all together and did them all by doing one easy thing so that all the Ten Commandments were kept. This is the fulfillment of them. He that loveth his neighbor has fulfilled the commandments.

So you see, reverence toward God covers a whole world of details. It’s just like a good American who has been well brought up and is well versed in his history of his country and is proud of it, and flies the flag every holiday and votes for one of the parties and is a good American, and a lawkeeper. Well, do you know there are a thousand laws he doesn’t know exist. He goes off down the highway in his car. He goes into business. He travels all around over the country and never gets into a fix anywhere he goes because the keeping of the law is inside of his heart. And if he should by any means get into a town where the ordinances vary a little bit, he might have to be talked to by a policeman, but he’d smile it off and say, “I’m sorry I’m a stranger,” and get by all right. He’s a law keeper by nature, he loves to, he loves his country, he’s familiar with its laws and the reasons for their existence. He’s a social man. And he doesn’t know about the laws. He just knows that as long as he does what comes naturally, because he’s a lover of his country and a lover of decency and righteousness, he keeps out of trouble all his life. He never gets arrested. I was never rested but once, never.

Mr. Chase took me out one time to get me bailed out. And they fined me a dollar because I traveled fifty-five miles an hour through a little town out there at 12:30 in the morning, and there wasn’t a cat on the sidewalk nor a dog on the street. But they said I was going too fast, so I paid a dollar and came home. That’s the only time I ever got into difficulty and that was more or less accidental. And if I hadn’t had R.R. Brown in the car, I wouldn’t even done that. Because you know, when you’re with R.R. Brown, you go to least fifty-five. You’ll never go much less than fifty-five. So, I was driving him in Brother Hine’s borrowed car, and we got arrested. But I’ve kept out of trouble with the law because I want to obey the law.

And you can, just by being decent, you can just take care of 1000 laws you don’t even know about. But the man who’s always trying to find a way to beat somebody or the law, he knows all about the laws. He has to know, because he wants to break them. But the man who doesn’t want to break them can be happy from the cradle to the grave and don’t know they exist.

So reverence and faith and worship; the man whose heart is reverential, who has true faith in God in Christ, and who worships God out of a pure heart fervently, he automatically keeps the laws of God. If ye abide in My words and keep my commandments. And then toward Christ, there’s faith and discipleship; doing the things He tells us to do. And toward His commandments there’s obedience and toward others there is love, as Jesus said as the love of Christ was. These are wonderful words. If a man keep my commandments, if ye keep My commandments ye shall abide in My love, even as I keep my Father’s commandments and abide in His love. This is my commandment that ye have love one to another as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends if you do whatsoever I command you.

Now, Christ and His friends. Let’s talk about it. A company of the saved ones, Baptists? Could be, but not necessarily. Methodists? Could be, not necessarily. Alliance people? Could be, but not necessarily. Christians churches are companies of friends of Christ. Companies of saved ones. And there always have been those companies in each age. For them, Christ laid down His life and for each other; they’re willing to lay down their lives. Ye are my friends if you do what I command you. Now, no one has any authority to amend the commandments of Christ though I’ve heard it tried. No one has any authority to delete anything, or do any editorial tinkering with the Word of God.

Here it is. We have the Sermon on the Mount. We have the truth of God as laid down in the Epistles of Paul and Peter and John and James and the rest of them. There it is, and a happy Christian is very likely to find as he reads it, that he’s been keeping it all the time out of the love of his own heart. Maybe out of selfishnesss, or a little up springing of the carnal flesh, he may find that he hasn’t; then he repents and asks God to help him to do it. But he has no authority to change it. For instance, he has no authority to change the Word of God regarding divorce. He has no authority to change the Word of God regarding, say, giving. He has no authority to change the Word of God on anything. No editors, no unmenders, no deleters, but it stands as it is. And as we read it, God shows us where we maybe have failed in it, and then we repent and begin to do the will of God. God understands it. We’re keeping His commandments, we’re abiding in Him and we are his friends.

Now, I want to test my profession. Am I abiding in the Vine. Am I abiding in the Vine by God’s own criterion, am I a Christian? We dare not introduce any other criterion. And I want to ask you to beware of the person who tells you you’re Christian. Nobody has any right to tell any other man, he’s a Christian, nobody. Nobody has any right to go and say, “oh, I think you’re a Christian all right, I wouldn’t worry about it. I believe you’re a Christian.” No, don’t you ever dare do that. You have no right to do that. The Bible says, let a man examine himself. It doesn’t say that I am to examine him and pronounce him alright. The Spirit witnesses with our spirit that we are children of God. If any man hath, believes in Christ, he has the witness in himself. So, it is by his own criterion. Am I living in obedience to His Word, not to the rules of my church necessarily? When the rules of the church and the Word of God conflict, then obey God, and let the rules of the church go, not the rules of my denomination, not the popular notion of Christianity; it’s a deadly, dangerous thing. It’s like skating on ice that’s ready to break up in the Spring, to skate on the thin ice of popular Christianity. No, sir, don’t you look at the rest of the people around you and say, I think I fairly well come up to their standard, and therefore everything is all right. Don’t you dare do it. That’s thin ice, that’s ice that may plunge you down into a cold and watery grave. You dare not judge by others.

The last final proof is Christ’s words. If ye abide in Me and My words abide in you, then you have a right in prayer. Then you’re on praying ground as they say. If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch. If ye abide in me and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what you will, to keep my commandments ye shall abide in my love. That’s volitional abiding, that is, the abiding of my own freewill. I want to be His. And I continue to want to be His. I abide because I want to abide. And if my poor, weak will flops sometimes, if I’m ill, or if something goes wrong, or if my faith deserts me temporarily, why, I’m still abiding because I’m joined by a life union. But the Lord wants me continually to will to do His will and to do, and to abide in the Vine.

Am I living in the obedience to His Word by the final proof of faith and love and obedience? Now, you can know you see, faith and love and obedience. Is there anything that I’m not doing that I’ve been commanded to do? Is there anything that I’m doing that I’ve been commanded not to do? Here’s the Word of the living God. We have the Holy Spirit as the teacher. We have prayer. We can go to God anytime and ask Him.

If I read Shakespeare until I find a passage that I don’t understand, I can’t go to Shakespeare because Shakespeare’s dead. And if I look at the critics, maybe they don’t know any more than I. But if I read the New Testament and I don’t understand it, I can go to the Author and say, excuse me, what does this mean? And God has shown me. The same Holy Spirit that wrote it, is here to explain it and apply it and illuminate it. So, there’s no excuse for not knowing. That is why all spiritual people agree in principle. That’s why you can read what Clements said, or Athanasius or Augustine, or any of the great saints down the years to this hour and they all talk the same language.

A Methodist preacher from Texas wrote me a letter and he referred to my series on revivals, on what a revival would be. Not that I’m a revivalist, but that what a revival ought to be. And he said, when you dealt with prayer, he said it was a strange thing. I’ve been preaching to my people and I came up to that subject that the same week that the Alliance Weekly arrived and I read what you said about prayer. And he said, I was astonished to find those were my notes. He said, I was going to say the same thing to my people Sunday morning. And I wrote this Methodist preacher and said, I can only explain it, that if a man will listen, God will say the same thing to every man. God, the Holy Ghost will say the same thing to every man, if every man will listen. If I inject my will then I put static in the loudspeaker, and I won’t half hear what God is saying, and I come to some false conclusion, but if I listen, I’m with great delight.

I read the old writers. And I find they’re saying the same thing we’re saying. The same Holy Ghost who taught them taught us. I wrote about dear Tom Hare, the Irish praying plumber, and I was, as I interviewed him and talked with him with long hours to get what kind of man he was. I was pleased beyond all measure to find him. He sounded like A.B. Simpson. And AB Simpson sounded like Meister Eckhart. Meister Eckhart sounded like Augustine, Augustine sounded like Paul. The same Holy Ghost saying the same thing to different people. And I don’t think outside of Paul that my brother Tom ever heard of any of these others; never heard of them. He just reads the Bible. But he prays and prays and the Holy Ghost said to him the same thing what he said to them and what he says to me.

So my Brethren, there’s the Word of God. You can abide in the Vine with all of its rich life, all of its glorious wealth and spiritual treasure, just by willing to abide and obeying the Word, keeping the terms of the covenant, which are very simple after all. Be reverent, be loving, be worshipful, and obey the Word as you see it and as you read it. God understands. And if you fail, why He knows where you failed. If you tell Him you’re sorry, He pardons instantly and wipes the tears away. Abiding in the Vine has branches to wonderful life my Brethren, a wonderful life. And I want to testify that I don’t need any religious trinkets to keep me happy in Jesus. If we had a five-headed alligator here playing the xylophone, I wouldn’t come to church to see it. I have what I need, I’m joined to the Vine and the sweet juices of the Holy Ghost that flow out of Jesus Christ are in the mind, perfectly satisfying me in my spiritual life. So I don’t need a circus and get along beautifully without it and cut down the overhead expense. Alright.

Now that’s all for tonight. And we’re going to close in prayer. Would you bow your heads?

Tags Abiding in vine, Faith, Fruit, God, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date June 13, 2021

“Life in the Vine”

Sunday, February 5, 1956

By way of emphasis, I would mention the coming of the Kings. Their purpose for being here is to examine missionary candidates. We’re hoping to send out 102 missionaries this year, which will run our list of missionaries very considerably over 800, which puts us up among the largest missionary societies in the world. We trust that God will enable us to do this. And these men are coming from the foreign department to meet and examine candidates, that is, give them theological examinations and other such examinations as you’re usually given for ordination. And that will be done in the daytime. Mr. McAfee is to sit in on that council that examines. And then in the evening in this auditorium, we will not meet in the old building; there will not be room, but in this room, and it will be not this coming Wednesday. Brother McAfee made that very plain, but just for those who might have missed it. It will be one week from this Wednesday, the eighth of February. And we expect everybody out.

Now, I’m continuing to talk about the vine and the branches. And I’d like to have you turn to the fifteenth chapter of John and we will read together. Oh, we’d better make it responsively because we do better that way, and then all read the seventh verse together. John 15:1-7, I am the True Vine and My Father is the Husbandman. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. “I am the Vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.

Now for the Sunday nights before us in addition to the two messages already given on the vine and the branches, I want one night to talk about the purging and what that purging is. And then of course I can’t pass up the seventh verse, If ye abide in Me and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what you will and it shall be done unto you. And so on, there will be very much rich truth here I am sure and I hope I’ll be able to unearth it for you.

Now, our Lord says every branch that beareth not fruit, and I want to talk for a little while about that. He mentioned it twice here, or mentioned it once and mentioned the abiding not in Him. Now to begin, we have before our vision the picture of a vine with its branches. Everybody has seen that somewhere. And let us note that the one purpose of a branch is to bear fruit. There is the vine, its roots deep down into the earth and it draws the sweet moisture from the soil. And it goes up into the vine and it contains tremendous potentialities. There’s the sweet juice with its nourishment, nourishment that if it were necessary, I think one could live on for a considerable length of time outside of perhaps starch and one or two other things. It has so many of the qualities necessary to nourishment. And in addition to the sweet tasting juices and the nourishment, there is the marvelous flavor.

Anything flavored with grape is satisfactory with me. I like the flavor of it and always have from the day that I used to climb up into the vines, up into the tree. We had them out on arbors as they have there, and as they do where they raise grapes really. Our grapes were the Isabel grapes they called them, The Concord, or the big blue ones, but these were a little smaller and a little more pungent. And we used to climb up into the tree and sit and eat until it was a wonder we didn’t fall out. And from that hour to this hour, anything with the flavor of grape is all right with me. But this is all in the vine, but it can’t get out of the vine. There it is, with all those potentialities, locked up in the vine.

Now, the vine can’t possibly express what is in it. No matter what its earnest desire might be; if such a vine could ever desire, it can’t get out of itself. It’s locked up there. It cannot express itself alone. A branch is the vine’s faculty for expressing itself. The branch is the vine’s outlet for its locked up juices, its rich nourishment, its wondrous flavor. The vine has it all, but it can’t get it out to the public so that the branch gives outlet to the riches of the vine. Now, we apply that to our Lord Jesus Christ, for He did it Himself and said that He was the vine, and we are the branches.

So, our Lord Jesus Christ stands the true vine in contradistinction to the false vines and all the artificial vines; He is the True Vine. But left to Himself and as He is, He cannot express Himself to the world. He cannot. The world never dreams what’s in Jesus Christ any more than a man walking by a vine who had never tasted grapes or seeing the beauty of the grape, or smelled the sweet flavor and fragrance of, have tasted the flavor and smelled the fragrance of the grape, would never dream what was locked up in that vine.

So, the world cannot dream, and does not, what is in Jesus Christ for them that love Him. He must have what He calls branches in order that there may be an outlet for Him to the world; that they might show forth the excellency of Him that called him out of darkness into His marvelous light. He must have someone or ones through whom He can flow; who can act for Him, what the branch acts in the same function that the branch acts for the vine, to be the bud and give forth a flower, and then finally, to eventuate in the fruit itself.

Now that is the indication that we’re necessary to Jesus Christ. Now somebody will immediately remember last Wednesday night’s message, and they will say, there he goes again contradicting himself, because I talked about the self-sufficiency of God. And I said that God didn’t need anybody, and that God didn’t need anything, and that God had no necessary relation to anything, and that God did not need any creature in the universe. Now I say, that Jesus Christ needs the branches that He might express Himself out to the world. You’ll find the contradiction there. The close thinkers will see there’s no contradiction, but for those who may be, have a headache and be foggy, I’ll explain what I mean.

God, the eternal God, or His Son, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity, considered in themselves, or God in Himself, as the self-originating, the or great original, needs nobody, needs nothing. Creation never set Him on a higher throne so that if all the creatures in His universe were suddenly to be snapped out of being into everlasting emptiness, and fall away into cosmic dust and cease to be, it will not affect God that much. Absolutely not, because God being God cannot lose anything from Himself. And if all vast worlds were to be swept away and rolled and beaten back into the vacuity out of which they came, God would still be God, for God needs no supports. But, if God is going to let the world know what’s in Him; if God out of the sovereign self-sufficiency is going to path out to the created world the beauties of His nature and is going to let them know what He is like, then God must have branches. Jesus Christ stands alone and stood alone and rose from the dead magnificently, and is absolutely going His undisturbed way, regardless of what men do, or angels or devils do.

So, Jesus Christ does not need for His own self-support anybody. But if He’s going to feed His glories out to the world and let the thirsty, dying world taste of His beauty, then He has to have branches. Now, there’s no contradiction. I hope you’ll see it, and if you can’t see it, then you wouldn’t be able to see it if I talk for twenty minutes on the subject. So, we’ll pass on and say that Jesus needs the branches. He does not need them for Himself, but He needs them if He’s going to bless the world with them. I wonder if I could give an illustration of what I mean.

Suppose that there is a river. The old mother or father of waters, I forget which, Mississippi. And there it rolls, rolled out and down and into the Gulf. Now that river doesn’t need anything much, if anything, it’s getting on all right. But suppose that that river got an impulse to bless a wheat field or an orange grove, or some other of the groves, orchards or fields. That Mississippi would have to have an irrigation canal. Somebody would have to come up there and stand and watch the old Mississippi rolling like the Jordan, on out to the Gulf into the ocean. He would stand in awe and say, what a magnificent sight, how broad she is, and how she rolls on in her calm majesty. She didn’t need him. She didn’t need anybody. But, if she wanted to bless the the country around about, she’d have to have canals that her water can flow out.

So, Jesus Christ, the great Lord of glory rolls on in His magnificence and beauty. And He doesn’t need anybody, but if He’s going to bless others, He must have somebody. So God has put branches on Him. And those branches are the people that He redeems. Now, it says here, if any branch that beareth not fruit; let’s talk a little while about that, the non-bearing branch.

Now what is that non-bearing branch? Think again about the vine. And if you’ve ever noticed closely you would see in the Spring that some of those branches were rooted in, or went clear in and joined to the life of the vine. And there were other branches that were stiff and shriveled, and apparently did not have connection with the life of the vine. The juice was not flowing into them. It was flowing into the others, but it was not flowing into them. They had not a vital connection with the vine. And so of course, the only thing you could do with them was to cut them off. That growth, that freak, that artificial branch, that branch that had not living union with the vine. For Jesus Christ our Lord cannot pass His life out to the world through those who are merely professing to be His children, or those who do not receive the Spirit from Jesus. They must be those who are joined to Jesus by a vital union.

Now when I say vital, I mean it exactly. I mean life union, union of life, life with life. Now, who is this person? Well, he is the Christian in name only. Revelation 3:1, if you will turn there you will find this passage. And unto the angel of the church in Sardis, writes, these things said He that had the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars, I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest and are dead. Be watchful and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die. For I have not found thy works perfect. Evidently then, it’s possible to be a branch in name and not be a branch in fact. Thou hast the name that thou livest and are dead; nominally a branch, actually approached protuberance, a growth, some sort of a freak there that was never joined and is not joined to the living, pulsating heart of the vine.

Now, that’s what it is. And you will find in Matthew 22:11, if you will turn there, this. Well, our Lord said this, that he there was a certain man and he made a feast, The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son, And sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come. Again, he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell them which are bidden, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and my fatlings are killed, and all things are ready: come unto the marriage. But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise: And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city. Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy. Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage. So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished with guests. And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.

Now there we have under another figure all together a picture of the gathering of the saints, apparently, and here was one who had not on a wedding garment. He had crashed the gate. He had pushed in. He was a guest that wasn’t invited. He was there by his own will, but had never apparently yielded to the will of the host, for he did not come dressed for the occasion. So, they threw him out. Now, that’s an illustration of what we mean here. That is, the branch that beareth not fruit is one that has some other relationship to Christ than a vital relationship. It has some other relationship than a living relationship. It may have a traditional relationship for instance.

Some people have a traditional relationship to Christ. Their grandfather was a Christian, and their father was a Christian, and they’re Christians. And they’re going to see that their children are Christians. But they’re Baptists or they’re Presbyterians or they are Alliance, or something else. And they say, my grandfather was one and my father and I am. And so they maintain toward Christ a traditional relationship. Maybe they don’t even go that far. Maybe they’re simply members of a society that’s called Christian as in England or Scotland or Wales or the United States or Canada; people that by nationality are Christian. So they’re traditionally Christians, but they have no vital union to Christ at all. They are not joined to Him by living union, traditional Christians and brother there are an awful lot of them.

Then there are ecclesiastical Christians, Christians that are Christians by manipulation. Somebody has done something to them when they were young, or a little later. And so they’re Christians by ecclesiastical manipulation or worrying of ecclesiastical machinery has made them Christians. They have been baptized when they were babies, or they have been confirmed when they were twelve, or they have had something done to them by the ecclesiastical authorities, but it has not made them members of the vine. It has not brought them into living union with the Vine, only church union, not living union.

And then some people, as I’ve pointed out, have an emotional relation to Christ. Their relation is only emotional. Oh, there’s an awful lot of that. You find a lot of that in hymnology, and a lot of that in poetry, and a lot of it among people. Jesus, I remember one time hearing a Jewish rabbi who was not a Christian. He was not a Christian at all. He said so and he lived and died a rabbi in the Jewish church, one of the great rabbis of his generation. I was always glad I got to hear that man, glad I got to look into that great face and see that tall forehead and hear that magnificent Oregon voice, Rabbi Wise who died maybe 15 years ago. But he was a great man, a great, great thinker, great man. I heard him preach.

And long toward the end of his sermon, this great Rabbi stretched out his arms wide and began talking about Jesus. And he said, “this Jesus is the finest product of the Jewish race, and I, for my part, though a Jew, I throw my arms around Him and embrace the son of Israel, the finest product of the Jewish people.” And yet he lived and died wholly without Christ. He admired Christ the way you would admire Lincoln. He admired Christ the way German admires Gathig. He admired Christ the way an Englishman admires Shakespeare. He admires Christ the way the Democrats admired Roosevelt, and Republicans admire the General, purely emotion. The heart goes out, and they say, well, this is wonderful, this, this Jesus. Let’s study Him. Let’s analyze Him. Let’s read His books. Let’s, let’s see what He wrote. Let’s read the Sermon on the Mount. Let’s integrate His philosophy into our living. And so they are emotionally attached to Jesus.

And they’re not true branches of the vine either; any branch in Me that beareth not fruit. Why doesn’t the branch bear fruit? Because it does not have a vital, living union with vine. So, it’s possible to have an emotional relationship to Jesus, and a philosophical. I have covered it all most. It’s entirely possible to have a philosophical relation to Jesus Christ. You know, there are two kinds of philosophy. There’s speculative philosophy and there’s moral philosophy. Speculative philosophers, such men as Spinoza and his type, they speculate on things. They think about the heavens and matter and atoms and stars. They’re speculative philosophers. Then there are the moral philosophers, moral philosophers. I quoted to the young people downstairs, old Confucius. He was not a religious man. He was a moral philosopher. So was Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Franklin and Seneca. So it’s entirely possible to take the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ, the moral philosophy of non-aggression and of non-defense, and of meekness and humility. That’s the philosophy of Jesus. It’s a moral philosophy.

I was reading to Ed this morning. He came bouncing in and was, Ed Maxey was talking to me about Plato. And I told him that one of the great men of the past, one of the greatest moral philosophers of the past, had been a great lover and follower of Plato, Marcus Aurelius. And I found a volume of Marcus Aurelius and I said, now Ed, when I get done reading these marked passages you won’t think you’re Christian. So I began to read Marcus Aurelius, a standard for a human character. My brethren, it was so infinitely lofty, so much higher than the average church member ever knows, that your ashamed to read it and compare yourself with the ideas of a common Roman pagan.

But of course, the Sermon on the Mount rises beyond anything Marcus Aurelius ever knew. It rises beyond Seneca or with any of the rest of them. Nobody, nobody had the philosophy Jesus had, the moral philosophy. And there are those who adopt Jesus’ moral philosophy. And their relationship to Jesus is the relationship of a patronist to Plato, of a stoic to Marcus Aurelius. That isn’t enough, he beareth not fruit.

Then there’s the aesthetic. I’ll be brief there because the average rank and file aren’t affected much that way. But some people love beauty. They’re greatly affected by beauty, the beauty of a sunset, the beauty of a starry night, the beauty of a poem, the beauty of music. It affects them, affects them emotionally, aesthetically. And there’s something about Jesus, the story of His life. The beauty of Luke’s beautiful story concerning Him.

The book of Luke is said to be the most beautiful story and the most beautiful book in the world. And it’s the most beautiful book in the world and that passage in the second chapter, There were shepherds abiding in the field keeping watch over their flock by night and so on, is probably the most beautiful passage ever penned by mortal man. And that gets a hold of some people. It just affects them. They’re aesthetically affected. Their sense of beauty and proportion and line and tone and color and form and perspective. Even if it never gets on canvas, in their own heads, they think of Jesus. How marvelously, He lived, how wonderfully He stood, how beautifully He taught, how charming was His effect upon His world, how He stands head and shoulders, and the cross of Christ towers o’er the wrecks of time. All the light of sacred story gathers around His head sublime.

There are whole churches in the city of Chicago, prosperous, prosperous churches. Well to do, prosperous churches. Their only relation to Jesus is an aesthetic relation. They can sing, in the cross of Christ I glory, and dream and wonder and look with aesthetic appreciation upon the beauty that is Jesus, but they’re not united to Jesus by living union. They laugh at you if you talk to them about it. They’d say, born again, new birth, get away, that’s old fashioned theology. We don’t believe in it.

Now, what is the test of the true life? It’s fruit bearing. The only way you can be sure that that branch is joined to the vine is if it bears fruit. We’ll believe there will be tendrils, there will be buds and finally there will be fruit. And if the true renewal is taking place, if the life union has been established, if we are joined to Christ by a living union, then we will bear some kind of fruit. Somebody says, what kind of fruit is it Mr. Tozer? Do you mean, get out and get busy for the Lord? Do you mean, run from house to house pushing bells? You can do that. That’s a good practice and it’s good and some people are won that way.

What do you mean Mr. Tozer? I don’t mean activity at all. We’re not talking about activity here. Fruit is not something the branch does. It’s something that branch exudes. The branch is passive, and the vine working through the branch produces the fruit. If He was talking about some other angle, He would use a different figure of speech. But He’s talking now about fruit. Now what is the fruit of the Holy Ghost? The fruit of the juices, the fruit of the vine, that which when it comes out, tells what the vine is like? What is it?

What is that which, when it appears in the Christian in any degree, tells what Jesus is like. I don’t have to guess. I can give it to you: love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. There they are, Galatians 5:22-23. You say that’s the fruit of the Spirit. Well, it’s the Holy Ghost that is the liquid, the juice that flows out of Jesus Christ through His branches and out to produce fruit for the world to see and smell and taste and touch and love and appreciate. Love instead of hate, joy instead of pessimism and gloom, peace instead of fear and anxiety, long suffering instead of impatience and churlishness, gentleness instead of violence and harshness, goodness instead of selfishness and sin, faith instead of doubt and unbelief, meekness instead of arrogance and self assertiveness, temperance instead of self-indulgence; the fruit of the Spirit.

If any branch bears not fruit, fruit of love, if any branch bears not fruit, fruit of joy, if any branch bears not fruit, the fruit of peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness. If any branch bears not the fruit, the meekness and temperance and faith, He taketh it away. It has not been indeed a branch and He doesn’t reckon it so. And He will say I knew you not. But Lord, did not we speak in Thy name? Lord, quoting now, Lord did not we do wonders in Thy name? He says, I never knew you because you’ve never been joined to Me in vital union. I’ve never known you as the vine knows the living branches. I don’t know you. You’ve imitated me. You’ve admired me. You’ve been a part of the traditional Christendom that’s named by My name. But I personally don’t know you. You’re not joined to me. You’re not, you’re not a part of my Living Life. And He knows it all the time, and we can know it by the absence of the fruit of the Spirit. That kind of teaching or school of thought that makes the fruit of the Spirit to be some far-off starry dream that we can hope for and never receive, I think that’s as bad as heresy.

The fruit of the Spirit is to the Christian, what grapes are to the branch and the branch that doesn’t produce fruit year after year, and still no fruit, it’s not a branch at all. It has no living union. So, they just wap that off and throw it away. But you say Mr. Tozer, I think I have some of that fruit. I think I noticed some things in my life. I have times of joy in the Lord. I have a peace I didn’t know before. I think I’m more patient than I was though I still feel impatience. I’m gentler than I used to be, though I still am afraid I’m a little harsh and I think I’m meaker than I was, but there’s still a little self-assertiveness. You say, does that rule me out? Oh, I’ll anticipate next week’s little talk and notice here, every branch that beareth fruit He purges it that it may bring forth more fruit.

No, it doesn’t mean that every branch bears as much fruit as every other branch. It doesn’t mean that if it bears, it’s all or none. It doesn’t mean that a Christian bears all the fruits of the Spirit in full degree or else none. But it means that it bears none, and they’re not true Christians and are taken away. He taketh it away, taketh it away. For a while it remains and hangs there. See, this is pretty familiar ground to me. I was fifteen years old when I left the farm. And I used to see those men work and I know how they did it. I never studied horticulture in a college or I wouldn’t know this much about it. But, I was there in person and looked on and saw it and lived with it. And I saw how men do with things. And I’ve seen, I’ve seen what we call them, “the corn suckers.” Some of you don’t know what that means. You think it’s a fish, but it’s not. It is a false thing that shouldn’t be there, and my Father used to set me to pull them away and I loved to do it. Get rid of them. Get rid of them and they’re no good. They never bear.

So, they got pulled loose because they didn’t belong there. And so with other branches, they didn’t belong, tomato plants even. A wise truck farmer will look at his tomato plant and know what’s going to bear tomatoes and what isn’t, then he’ll just use his prune. Why, why leave it there to clutter up the ground? He trims it back. So, he taketh it away. He trims back his vine.

Now, I have a little exhortation to you for the next five minutes. My friends, this is the day of synthetics. I’m not gonna have anything to do with what heaven is going to be like or the New Jerusalem or the Millennium. I haven’t anything to say. The Lord didn’t didn’t call me in on that. That’s one board I don’t sit on. He planned all that in Christ Jesus before the world began, and I don’t know anything, what anything is going to be like. But knowing God Almighty and how He runs things, I think I could kind of sort of deduce one thing. There won’t be any synthetics there. There won’t be anything that’s ersatz. Is that the right German word?

We got that during the second World War. It means artificial. They made artificial beefsteak and artificial leather and artificial everything. They all it ersatz, or that’s how they spell it in German, I mean, pronounced in German. Now. I’m sure there won’t be any up there. Knowing God, I’m absolutely positive there won’t be any synthetics there. There won’t be any plastics there. And when you lay hold of something wooden, it will be wooden. And when you look at something natural, it’ll be real. But we have learned how to make everything artificial to a point where we’re living like monkeys in the zoo. You can be born and live and die and never see a natural thing except a bird flying overhead, if you can see him through the smog. Born in a hospital, brought up on a sidewalk, die in another hospital, wheeled to a mortuary, taken to a field where they’ve got artificial grass on it. It fools nobody, put down in the ground, screwed down, covered up and forgotten.

But I don’t think God ever meant it to be like that my brother. I think old John Milton was right when he said God made the country, and man made the city. Some farmer down there said, amen. And I am sure I’m positive that God is going to give us a real heaven, a real heaven, whatever it is, it is going to be real. And the old man of God said in the Old Testament, better a living dog than the dead lion. So I would rather have a small piece of something real than a big chunk of something artificial. This is the day of artificial things. You don’t know anything anymore. Color and sound and motion have made fools of us all.

When you hear horses running on the radio, you don’t hear horses running brother. Get that out of your mind. That’s all from fellows sitting around a desk with rubber suckers doing that. When you hear it raining on the radio, it isn’t raining, sounds and colors. I got my eyes open when the World Fair was on back there so many years ago. We walked up to a building and tap it with your knuckles and go bong, bong, bong; hollow, completely hollow, and the whole thing was hollow. You can take nothing and turn a lot of highly colored revolving lights on it and you’ve got the kingdom of God and the angel Gabriel. Poor fools that we are we are taken in by colored lights in motion, by hollow, painted shells by artificialities and pretenses and sounds.

I can see God Almighty rolling up a rope and getting after these cattle and driving them out of the temple of His universe into the hell where they belong. And we’ll go back to the creation things as God made them. And I believe the trees that are beside the river yonder that have given their leaves for the healing of the nation are not going to be ersatz. They’re going to be the real thing. I believe the golden streets are either going to be gold or something more real than gold. If gold, that’s only a figure I don’t know, but if it’s only a figure, then it’s a figure of something more wonderfully real than gold and gold is one of the elements.

So would everything else. Brethren, are going to get taken in on our religion too? I’ve been hearing fellows try to sell automobiles. I’m just human enough, I wouldn’t ride in one of them. I wouldn’t buy one. Two or three or four, you never can tell, fellows all excited talking so fast that you couldn’t get a period or a punctuation mark in between words, yelling at the top of their voice, back and forth back and forth like the male three witches of Macbeth, yelling back and forth to each other about this automobile. They’re all excited everybody on the dead run selling an automobile. I wouldn’t buy one. I’d buy another one just because I wouldn’t want to be taken in. You know, to keep myself respect. Then I hear a radio, religious service come on, and the very same technique learned from the announcers. A fellow arrives suddenly in the studio on a dead run, panting with excitement. He’s got himself a religious meeting. Oh, you’re in too big a hurry Junior. Sit down and cool off. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted in the earth.

God Almighty wouldn’t allow any priests to serve in the Old Testament with wool undergarments on. He said don’t wear wool I don’t want you to sweat. God didn’t want any priests to sweat when he was in the holy place offering the sacrifice, as much as to say I don’t run my Kingdom on human sweat, human excitement and all that. That we do down here now in these terrible days of backsliding and all the rest, so that a person is very likely to grow old and die and find he’s been the victim of plastic religion, synthetic spirituality, ersatz worship, artificial. Boy, you can’t be too sure of yourself.

We have artificial color and artificial flavor and artificial wood, artificial silk and artificial smiles. I have never seen very many TV programs. I’ve looked at a few when I’ve been in hotels where they have them, and one or two homes. But I’ve often wondered how anybody could be as happy as those. Everybody has to be happy. Everybody has a smile, everybody. There isn’t anybody around that are taking life seriously. Everybody’s got a got a plastic smile. Artificial cheerfulness, artificial enthusiasm, artificial prayer, artificial godliness, synthetic piety, artificial spirituality. Every branch that beareth not fruit, He taketh away.

And if a man lives not in Me, that’s what the word abide means. It doesn’t mean continue to stay; it means live. If any man live not in Me, he is not joined to me by a living union, he’s cast forth as a branch and is withered. And men gather them and cast them into the fire and they’re burned. Here we are with a few hundred people on a Sunday night. Twice as much as some places, but certainly smaller than a few others in the city. If somebody wanted to be discouraged and say, I think the place should be packed out and we should have a bigger building.

Hold it Brethren, hold it. We better have a smaller group of reality than a vast number of synthetics. I’d rather know that a small number of people were joined in living union to the Vine and were being nourished there and kept there, than to have the whole world talking about us. Let the world pass by and think what they will. We know God. We want to know Him, and we want our religion to be real. No artificiality. No, no, no synthetics, no plastics, nothing created by the genius of man. Something that comes up out of the life of God and flows out through the living men and women, out to give forth fruit in some degree.

Don’t be discouraged if you haven’t gotten as much as Tom Hare say, or some other good man, you know, as much love as Tom has. He loves everybody. It makes me sick when I think how little love I got. Joy, I’ve met Christians that were so happy all the time. Peace, long suffering, they had in large measure these things, but you have them in some measure, maybe. If you don’t have them in any measure, then you may be sure that you’re a branch that never was joined to the vine and are not now in living union with the Vine. Where do you stand? May God help you. We’re going to pray in closing.

Tags Abiding in vine, Faith, Fruit, God, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date June 6, 2021

“Fruit, More Fruit and Much Fruit”

Sunday, January 29, 1956

I want to read again, maybe you could read it with me. John 15:1-7. Let’s not read responsively. Let’s read together and not too fast. John 15:1-7. I am the True Vine and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit, He taketh away. And every branch that beareth fruit, He purges it that it may bring forth more fruit. Now, ye are clean through the Word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in Me. I am the Vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in me and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit. For without me, ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch and is withered. And men gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned, If ye abide in Me and My words abide in you, ye shall as what ye will and it shall be done unto you.

Now, the will of God is that we should bear fruit. The will of God is a pressure. I have said this a number of times and I have no reason to change my mind, that the will of God may be likened to gravity, and the pressure of the will of God may be likened to the pressure of gravity on matter. Now, you know and I, that the tug and pressure of gravity, for it’s a tug rather than a pressure, is universal all over this world of ours. And that affects not only material, heavy things, that is, or hard things. It affects liquids and gases and even atoms. It affects everything where there is any matter, any surface at all.

The will of God is like that. It is a continual, moral pressure toward an end, or a continued pressure toward a moral end; and that end is chosen for us by a holy God. For moral creatures, that end is moral. For material things, that end is material. But for those who have moral perception and are capable of taking the image of God, capable of being holy or being made holy, capable of obedience and faith, this will of God is a pressure toward moral ends, and it is exerted by the God who is a perfect God of perfect love who therefore must act always out of goodness.

One of the slickest tricks of the devil is to teach us as he taught Adam and Eve in ancient times, that God isn’t quite fair, and that God is capable of being unjust and even cruel toward people. We’ve got to get back to the doctrines that God has a nature that makes it impossible for Him to be severe or cruel. God is a God of goodness, and therefore everything God does must flow out of His goodness. God is a God of wisdom, and everything He does must be done with perfect wisdom. There can be no mistakes. There can be no second great acts on the part of God. But all the acts of God are perfectly wise because God is perfectly wise. And God is not only good and wise, but God also is love. And God is incapable of acting except out of love.

Now, I want you to understand that everything God does, He does with all of Himself. So that when God, in any part of His universe, does anything, love is present. And all God’s will is bathed in love, springs out of love, moves out of love and toward love, and has love for its center and its beginning and its end; so that the will of God therefore, is the moral pressure that God is exerting upon moral creatures toward an end afore-chosen by Him out of goodness and mercy and wisdom and love. And that means the end that God has chosen for you is such, that if you later, when you are perfect, if you go on to know God and become one of these children if you’re not already, and God someday glorifies you, and you have a perfect mind, you will see that it is exactly what you would have chosen if you could have been choosing. You will see that the ways of God are so perfectly wise that you could not have added by one amendation, or amendment, one change of one sentence, one letter, one punctuation mark. You couldn’t have improved the high, wise will and purpose of God for your life.

Now, with that high purpose of God, with that constant pressure of God on our hearts, God wills that we should bear fruit. And what do we mean? I told you last Sunday night, something of what the fruit is. Can I condense it tonight and say that it is our re-creation of the image of God in lives that had been previously devastated by sin. The bearing, the receiving of fruit, the bearing of fruit, the production, the creation of fruit within a life, is one way of saying. And I explained last week what that fruit was. Tonight I say, that the high purpose of God is a recreating of His own image within the lives of those who have been devastated by sin. It is a doing it over, and a doing it better. It is lifting it up on to a higher level, even than Adam was, when God made Him in His own image and likeness, and set him in the earth.

Now, this will of God is an unremitting pressure. My friends, we sometimes leave the impression, and I think God’s people get the idea, that we have got to give God the noisy treatment. That we have to subject Him to a great deal of stirring up, that if enough people pray long enough and loud enough, and keep at it enough, that we will finally rouse the drowsy ear of God, and God’s heavy eyelids will open and God’s lethargic form will finally shake itself loose. Then, God will think our way, and perhaps if we keep it up enough and are noisey enough and persistant enough, and colorful enough and dramatic enough, we will finally get God aroused enough that He will be willing to do something for us.

Now, I don’t know what I can say to change this and to make us see how wrong we are in this, for it’s exactly the other way around! It is your ear that is heavy. It is your eyelid that falls shut. It is your heart that is lethargic. It is your will that is frozen and slow to move. And it is God who exerts the pressure. It is God who is the aggressor. It is God who takes the first step. It is God who does all this. And it is not our task to arouse the heavy ears of a lethargic God out of his century-old somnolence and try to get Him interested in us. It is God’s work to arouse us out of our 6,000 years of heavy-eared lethargy and indifference. The pressure of God is always there because the gravity is always here. There isn’t anything here anywhere, a grain of dust, there isn’t anything, no molecule, there isn’t an atom anywhere in this building anywhere that does not have a certain pressure, a certain tug upon it. I call it pressure, but as I’ve said, it’s really a pull. And it’s that pull of gravity, always everywhere, a leaf floating in the air, a rock on the hillside, the water, the rain, the mist, everything has that tug, that pressure, the will of God in the material world, moving toward an end.

And so, it is the will of God that we should holy be, and that will is always a moral pressure, like gravity, always pushing; everywhere all the time. Among the various races of the world, among the various denominations, in the various churches and in the independent groups and in the group who won’t admit they are in a denomination, denominational, and among the old people and the young people and the middle-aged people and sick people, unwell people, and educated people and ignorant people, always everywhere, and all the time. This moral pressure of God is wherever there are moral creatures, pressing, urging, always pushing and urging us on that we might bear fruit. That is, that we might have recreated within us, the moral image of God in these lives of ours that have been previously destroyed by sin.

Now, He says here, fruit and then He said more fruit, and then He said much fruit. Notice, fruit and more fruit and much fruit. And this fruit that He is talking about here, comes of course in degrees. There is an either/or method of preaching. I’m afraid I indulge in it myself sometimes. It is an either/or method. You’re either in, or you’re out. You’re either good, or you’re bad. You’re either holy or you’re unholy. You’re either mature, or you’re immature. I wish it was that easy my brother, I’d take a tape measure and fix my congregation up, or at least I’d know where you were. I wish that it were that easy, but it is not. A farmer doesn’t divide his trees up into, and say, well, these trees only bear a little fruit, these bear more. He’s always urging his trees toward more fruit. And he’s grateful for what fruit he gets. If there is no fruit, the axe lies at the root of the tree. It’s not a tree after all.

And Jesus said, going from the orchard to the vineyard. If the branch bears no fruit, it’s an evidence that it is not joined to the vine in a living union, and therefore it is taken away. But if it bears fruit, it is purged in order that it might bear more fruit. And He says “this is the will of God that you might bear much fruit. My Father wants that ye should bear much fruit” in verse eight. “Here in is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit.” So, there is fruit, and there is more fruit; and there is much fruit.

Now, I want to point out again, that God is easy to please, but He’s hard to satisfy. God is a Father. He’s a husbandman and the Father. And the husbandman who looks upon the branch and notices that for the first time it’s beginning to bear is a happy man. He’s glad and pleased that that branch is beginning to bear. And if it doesn’t bear so heavily that it’s in danger of breaking off the first year, He’s not going to feel too bad about it, because He’s waiting for that fruit, and He knows that there must be growth and development there. And He’s glad there’s any fruit at all. So, He trims it in order that He might have more fruit. And then, when it has more fruit, why he says, “now is the husbandman glorified if it bears much fruit.” And He goes on from fruit to more fruit to much fruit, and then, when we come to much fruit, again, we have no ending. There’s no place where we say, well, this is your limit, sir. You cannot go beyond this. There’s no going beyond it because I believe that the fruit a Christian can bear, that is, the amount of the image of God the human heart can take, I think that there is no limit to it until we see Him face to face.

Now, I’m going to tell you this. We say that there will be a day when we shall see Him as He is and shall be like Him. Do you hear me? I believe that that is true. But I also believe that we can be more like Him now. And I believe it’s possible that we can, by a daring act of faith and reckless prayer, and by a life of obedience and sacrifice and insistence, I believe that we can reach out into the tomorrow and in some measure pull back to them now, that which we’ll receive then. I believe that some men bear so much of the image of God upon their lives that they’re bearing much, very much, fruit. I have seen only a few in my day, but I have seen a few that I felt that when it was said, they shall look upon His face and His name shall be on their forehead, and they shall be like Him, and they shall see Him as He is. I have seen a few people who had upon their character so much of God, that all I can say is that they reached out by faith into the future and took a little of it ahead of time, and pulled it back into their own heart, So, that they took more of the image of God than the average Christian, even the average good Christian.

Does that arouse any desire within your heart? Or, is that simply a theory that I’ve tossed out here that means nothing? Does it arouse in your heart any desire, that you should walk on this earth and be a man a little more like God than the average Christian. That you should have a little more of the image of Jesus recreated in your character than even the best Christians round about you? The man or the woman who judges his life by the other Christians around him is already, and if not dead, at least he’s reached a state of stagnation. For it’s not the will of God that I should say, well, I’m not too bad. I’m as good as McAfee. I’m not too bad. I know Mr. Chase. I know him pretty well and I’m average along with him. Or, pick out some of the others of you and say I’m about like brother so and so, or sister so and so.

Oh, that’s no way to live my brethren. There’s only one Being in the universe that has such honor from me that I can say I’m approaching on being like Him. You dare not say, well, Mr. Tozer, I know him, and so, I think I’m fairly on an average with him. I am not your model. I’m not your example. I’m not the star of your hope and the gleam toward which you move. Jesus Christ, who is the image of God, and who would recreate the image of God in you and me, He is our example; and the longing to have the fruit, the image of God in these nine fruits of the Spirit recreated within us. This is the will of God, and you can’t escape that no matter where you go. God’s pushing and desiring, day and night, during meetings, and when meetings are over, in the middle of the dark night, and in the bright day, and when you’re young, and when you’re old, always this pressure, this moral pressure toward the image of God is upon the hearts of men. And God’s pleased when He sees it appears. He’s pleased even with a little bit of it. He’s glad. He’s glad when He sees a little of it.

There’s a passage in the book of Zephaniah. I never heard anybody preach on it in my life, never, and I don’t know why. I think it is one of the greatest verses I ever knew or ever read. Zephaniah 3:17: “the Lord thy God in the midst of thee is Mighty. He will save. He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will rest in His love. He will joy over thee with singing.” Now, do you hear this my friend? Here is the God who is easy to please, happy in His Father love, singing over His people, rejoicing over them with joy and singing over them with joy and love, and resting in His love.

Here is the picture of a Father of the family. This is not the picture of the judge, nor of the sovereign God, The High and Lifted up with a sword, or His train filling the temple. But this is the picture of the Father in his household. This is a picture of the husbandman in His vineyard, glad for the fruit that He sees, and pleased with it. And while He is easy to please, He’s hard to satisfy. While He is glad and will sing with joy when He sees fruit, He says this fruit is only a prophetic indication of what can be, namely, more fruit. And when more fruit appears, God sings the louder, and says this is an indication of what can be namely, much fruit. And so, He continues His pressure, on until fruit gives way to more fruit, and more fruit, to much fruit.

But now, how is it? How does He get fruit, and how does He get more fruit and He gets much fruit? He purges it that it may bring forth more fruit. Purgeth, and the various translations have four different words they use: purge, cleanse, trim, and prune. And of course, they all mean the same thing. If He sees that there is fruit in His child, He cleanses it, He purges it, He trims it, He prunes it. If we think about it as a person, it’s a purgation or a cleansing. If we think about it as a vine, it’s a trimming or pruning. The taking off of the things that oughtn’t to be there, in order that there might be more fruit. If there is no fruit on the branch, He taketh it away. But, if there is fruit, He pruneth it that it might bring forth more fruit.

And so, here’s the kind hand of the husbandman. Oh, if you’d only remember that. You wouldn’t squirm under the will of God. And you wouldn’t cry out in fear like a baby with his first haircut, or a child at the dentist, afraid to go in, scared to death because of that stranger with a long instrument that you’re, that he was afraid of. We go to God like that, and we forget that the Father is the Husbandman, and that He’s not out to destroy. He’s out to perfect. He’s not out to kill. He’s out to make it alive. He’s not out to humiliate. He is out to raise and elevate. God never humiliates people. He humbles them. There’s a vast difference between humiliation and humbling. There are those who preach the God humiliates, and you’ve always got to lose your dignity, and lose your poise, and go out of yourself, and be something other than human for a moment, and be humiliated until when it’s all over your red-face and wonder why you did it. No, God never humiliates, but God does humble a man. Job wasn’t humiliated when it was all over, but boy, he was humbled. All right, God humbles people, and He does it as He’s pruning. It’s the kind of hand of God that does it.

Now, I point out that pruning hurts. Christianity is not a painless religion. They’re trying to make it painless in the day in which we live. They’ve given us a rubber cross, and in place of nailing a man on with nails, they stick him up with plastic, and they put us up there with a scotch tape. And there we are, it was painless. Oh no my brother, the religion of Jesus is a pain-filled religion. It cost John the Baptist his head for preaching the coming of Jesus. It cost Jesus His head, not His head, but His life. He went not to the beheading, but He went to Calvary and went to a gallows and was hanged there in blood and tears and sweat and sorrow that He might bring salvation to the world. And every one of the Apostles but one, died a martyr’s death.

When Timothy was dragged through the city, it was by the tail of a cart until he was dead. And all down the years, men have suffered for the gospel of Christ. Not only as martyrs, but they that live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffered persecution. Jesus Himself learned obedience by the things that He suffered. And if it would bring forth fruit, He purgeth it, pruneth it, trimeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.

Now, if you have ever trimmed any kind of a tree or vine, you will notice that one thing invariably follows the trimming, and that is the bleeding. Now, they take it at the right time of year, so it doesn’t lead to death. If you trim certain trees at the wrong time of year, they’re likely to bleed to death. But they will bleed anytime, a little. And if there was any life in the branch, I know the branch would whimper and perhaps cry out in pain when the clippers snipped off something that didn’t belong there. That God in His kindness knew one leaf too many, one tendral too many, and so He clipped it off. And it didn’t kill the vine, but it did hurt the vine. Fortunately, vines have no nerves, but unfortunately, maybe you and I do. So when the Lord trims us, we bleed.

Some people want to be martyrs because they’ve had to give up something that hurt. They want to write a tract about it. Somebody sent me a whole box full of tracts, something the Lord has done for her, something she’d given up and she wrote a four-page booklet about it and send it to me, for me to distribute. I set it in a corner, and after it’s gathered dust long enough, I’ll put it in a furnace. I don’t know that I ought to have a crown on my head and be ridden into the city with police escort because I have suffered a little twang of pain here and there when the Lord is trimming things off for my good and His glory. I don’t think so. Christianity has some pain in it. This painless Christianity of the present day, this rock and roll stuff that we’ve got in the name of Jesus now doesn’t have any pain in it. It anesthetizes the victim, and he can’t feel anything. But the Lord never operates with a patient under ether. He always operates raw.

Years ago, I had a tooth pulled. The Dentist, after it was over, I said, “thank God Doctor for the anesthesia.” Yes, he said, oh, that’s some Dutchman, named him with long name, he said he invented this stuff. It has saved a lot of suffering. I had a deacon in my church in Indianapolis by the name of Mr. Daggett. One day he showed up looking rather the worst for wear and looked if he’d been through the wringer. Well, he said, Pastor, I had eleven teeth pulled, eleven teeth and he said I wouldn’t take any anesthesia. I told him no, don’t put anything in, take them out. He took them out alright, eleven teeth. He and I used to go out hunting. I haven’t hunted for, how long has it been? I guess twenty-five to seven years. But we used to go out and he had one eye and I had two eyes. We’d come in, he would had the rabbits and I had the experience. That was Daggett. God bless him. I hope he’s still alive and still happy in God. But he was a big, rough, tough fellow who would go out and knock a rabbit down with one eye and take even teeth out without even having Novocain.

Well, I’m a sissy. I haven’t gotten my bid in for martyr, not that kind of martyrdom. So I’m most happy for anything that will soften the pain a little. But in the kingdom of God, God has no Novocain. When He trims a branch, He just lets it hurt. And He does it because you’re you. He does it because you’re who you are and what you were. Jesus refused the sop. And the scholars say that there was a merciful pain deadener they gave to people, somewhat like our Novocain or like some of our pain killers, and that the Romans would give it when a man had suffered so much that the pain was becoming too terrible. They would give him this and he would take a merciful drink of it and then spend the latter part of his hours dying without much pain. Jesus refused it. He wouldn’t allow one bit diminution of the pain that He suffered to save us. And that was not from any heroics on Jesus part, that’s because He was what He was. Morality is what it is. Spirituality is what it is. God’s who He is, and people is what they are.

And therefore, God can’t give us any Twilight sleep. And He can’t deaden the pain. He has to let us suffer a little. But really, it isn’t suffering very much after all, because I read here in my Bible about what Paul had to say, blessed would be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort, who comforted us in all our tribulation that we may be able to comfort them which are in trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us so our consolation also bounded by Christ. And whether we be afflicted, is for your consolation and salvation, which is effectual in the enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer, or whether we be comforted, it is for your consolation and salvation.

I’ve had, oh, I don’t know how many people come to me. And in the course of conversation say to me before we prayed, Mr. Tozer, then tell me the story of what they’d gone through. And I’ve said to them all right now brother, or sister, you know what’s happened to you. God has let you feel the pruning hook in the sword, and the pang and the pain and the spear. And it was the only way God could ever prepare you to help anybody else. Doctors can go to school and learn the theory of medicine, but until they’ve had a couple of years in actual practice, nobody will go to him. You can learn on the field somewhere maybe the theory of aerodynamics and how to fly an airplane, but until you’ve had your so many 100 hours in the air, nobody will ride with you. And so, we as God’s children can learn the theory of suffering and consolation, but until we’ve suffered, we’ve served our apprenticeship to suffering, we can’t be any good to anybody else much. So, the Lord lets it hurt. But he says, fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer.

Now I notice and I’ll try to close this in the next seven or eight minutes. I notice how some of the Old Testament; it would be a wonderful sermon in itself if somebody would preach when God’s pruning the Old Testament characters. There was Abraham: take thee thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest and take him up onto a mountain that I will show thee and offer him there. I know the scholars have dodged and twisted and tried and turned every direction, but when they have had their contortions, it all comes back to one thing, Abraham thought God meant him to slay his son, and all the pain of it was in his heart. And Abraham took his boy and started. And the boy even had the wood on the back, on his own back what was to be burned with. And there was that stoical old man of God mounting up that hillside.

I don’t think there’s a nobler thought and nobler sight away from the story of Jesus. I don’t think anywhere there’s a nobler thought, not David kneeling at the bier of Absalom his beloved Son, and saying, Oh Absalom, Absalom, my boy. Would God I could have died for thee. We turn away respectfully, with hushed voices from that scene. But I think when the old man of God was on his way up the hill to be pruned and trimmed and purged and cleansed from a love that wasn’t pure, a love that was too idolatrous. I think the picture of the old man on the winding path up with rocky hillside to the top of Mount Mariah with his boy walking behind him with a load of wood on his back. If I was an artist, I could paint that old face, kind, but set, and those seeing-eyes and that stubbly beard with his jaw jutting just a little and the head up at the back just a little bout. He was caught, and he was being ground there, ground between the upper and the nether millstone and he was bleeding. He was bleeding. But he couldn’t have been Abraham, the friend of God, if he hadn’t bled. But he was bleeding. If it bears fruit, He cleanses it that it may bring forth more fruit.

And then there was Joseph, you know, of course, the sequel to this story. He didn’t offer his son. He raised the knife to do it, against the screaming protests of his father’s heart. And God said, Abraham lay not thy hand upon the lad. I never meant you should slay him. I only meant that I should be first, and he’s second. You didn’t know it Abraham my friend, whom I believe in and trust. You didn’t know it, but Isaac had gotten in between me and you. And your love for Isaac was a little too strong. And the only way I could take him out of your heart was to take him out with a knife. And he never let him use that knife, but he went through all the psychological heartache of it all. He went through all the tears and sorrow and pain of it all. He gave up his boy in his heart though he never actually killed him.

And there was Joseph, you say Joseph was a perfect character? There’s none perfect upon Earth and so Joseph wasn’t perfect either. Joseph was a nice boy. And he was bearing fruit. The Lord said, Joseph, I’m going to have to trim you and purge you in order that you might bear more fruit. So He let them sell him like an ordinary cow down into Egypt. And then when he got down there, He let him get into that ridiculous situation there in the house a Potiphar. If that wasn’t a face reddening, embarrassing situation.

And then He let him be wrongly accused and tossed into prison like a common bum. And here was Joseph, the boy that never had done anything wrong. The Lord knew what he done alright. He said, Joseph, you’re a fine boy, but you’ve got some, some little tendrils there and a few little, little excrescences here and there on you that I want to trim off. And so, He put him in prison for two years or more, and then let him come out.

And there was Job. We won’t develop that tonight, but you know about Job? Job was a good man and he bore fruit. And God even told the devil, he was a good man. He said have you seen my servant Job? He fears God escheweth evil, but Ed Robinson said it doesn’t say he fears God and cheweth tobacco. But he fears God and he feared God and escheweth evil and he was a good man and you couldn’t find fault with him. In the first chapter of Job, Job could have joined this church. The board would have said, I’d have said as chairman of the board, we’ve got a request here, an application for membership Brethren, a man by the name of Mr. Job Job. And he wants to join our church. Does anybody here know him? One of the board members speaks up and a deacon and says yes, I know him quite well, wonderful man, wonderful man. He’s got a nice family. He’s so conscientious, if they have a meeting or party, he offers a sacrifice and praise like they did something wrong, a wonderful fellow. He eschews evil. He hates it. And he fears God above many. Well then, don’t you think we ought to admit him? Oh, I move here Mr. Chairman, we admit him. In a couple of years, the nominating committee would have said, don’t you think Paster that brother Job Job ought to be a deacon; and he would have been elected deacon without a vote against him. Two years later, don’t you think a man of this godliness and reputation and spirituality ought to be made an elder? Yes, I think we’ll make him an elder. He could have been one of our finest men And if Job had died, boy it would have taken as an hour and a half to get him properly buttered up. We would have had them in from all around telling what had meant to thmm; what a saint he’d been, what a godly man he was, and how he escheweth evil.

But the Lord saw Job and He took a different view of Job. He knew that Job was a good man, but a proud man if that’s possible. We knew Job feared God greatly but was very sure of himself. And so, God put Job out on the ash pile with some kind of boils, scraping himself with a piece of broken butter crock, the potsherd was all it was called. And then he turned loose those sanctified hypocrites, called the three comforters. And talk about steel wool, if they didn’t give him the treatment. They trimmed him I tell you. If it beareth fruit, He purges it that it may bring forth more fruit.

Did that hurt Job? You and I you know, that’s just something we talk about. But job was a human being with nerves. That hurt. That hurt to get argued. That hurt to get accused. That hurt to get called a hypocrite. That hurt Job. And when his wife; the only time she appears in the picture, God bless her memory. The only time she appears in the picture she said, “why don’t you curse God and die?” That was tough too coming from your wife. And he turned to her, proved he was still ahead of the house, boils and all. And he said, “thou speakest as a foolish woman. Am I to receive good at the hand of God and not evil also? Naked came I into the world and naked I’m going out, bless it be the name of the Lord. And the old lady fled. And that’s the last we hear of her. But Job came through all right. He said, “when Thou hast tried me I shall come forth as gold.

So, the husbandman sings as he prunes and trims as he sings and sings as He cleanses, mops up the blood little goes on pruning and singing over his family. He has it to do, and he loves them. And he has all tomorrow to think about eternity ahead. We think only about the pain. But he thinks about Eternity, Eternity with all its years, and your place in eternity thinks about that. So, He doesn’t spare it because He loves you. He doesn’t hurt you because He doesn’t love you. He hurts you because He does love you. Now I asked you can you pray this prayer? Can you pray this prayer tonight? Your Christian? Can you pray this prayer and mean? Oh, God, prune me. I’m so delighted Thou has discovered any fruit at all. Father, Husbandman, I asked Thee, prune me to the last vestige of sin is gone, and the clear image of Christ appears. Anybody that can’t make that prayer will not grow in grace, never, because God can’t do anything with them. They won’t hold still for the knife. But can we pray, O God, prune me, Thy child, Thy poor, weak child until the last vestige of sin is gone, and the clear image of Christ appears. Please God, do this and don’t spare me. Have mercy upon me, but don’t spare me. I don’t want to be a stunted, retarded Christian. I want to bear fruit. And then I want to bear more fruit. Then I want to bear much fruit. I want the image of Jesus restored, the image of God restored to my devastated soul. And if it means the knife and the pruning, then O God, prune me until the last vestige of sin is gone and the clear image of Christ appears.

Could you pray that prayer tonight? Would you be willing to? Now, think with me about it? Would you be willing to enter into a contract with God, knowing that you’re His child, born of his Spirit, knowing your name is in His book of life, and nothing can take you out of his hand; knowing that His love holds above the highest height and down deeper than the deepest depths? Not death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers and things present nor things to come can separate you from the love of God. Knowing that, you pray, O God, purge me, cleanse me until the last vestige of sin is gone, and Thy clear image appears in my heart. If there are a substantial number of people here tonight who could enter into such a spiritual contract with God, I believe we’d be on our way to a real revival, real revival. I believe it.

Now I’m going to pray as we bring the meeting to a close and very sacred thing, and I don’t want anybody to be careless; I, 10,000 times would rather nobody would respond and that anybody would respond carelessly. So don’t respond unless you mean it, really mean it to the point where you don’t care. You’re reckless by you’d say “Mr. Tozer pray for me.” I’m going to stand and I’m going to by this act, I’m going to engage God in prayer and enter into some kind of a spiritual vow that I will want him to trim and prune and purge, until the last vestige of sin is gone, and the image of Christ appears clearly in my heart. And I want you to pray for me. Who will get up?

Tags Abiding in vine, Faith, Fruit, God, Tozer