Tag: Grace

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date November 10, 2024

Through the end of the year, we will be digging back into the Tozer Talks archive for some messages that struck a responsive chord in many viewers.

November 17 – “Each of Us Matter to God”

November 24 – “What do we Mean by Accepting Christ?”

December 1 – “Prepare by Prayer”

December 8 – “Consider Your Ways”

December 15 – “The Kingdom of God Lies Not in Words”

December 22 – “The Theology of Christmas”

December 29 – “Take Heed How Ye Hear”

“The Reason for Paul’s Commandments“

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The Reason for Paul’s Commandments

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
June 8, 1958

As most of you know, I am preaching a series of messages Sunday nights called The Angel Before Thee. And tonight, I want to talk about how to make your enemies work for you. I’d like to have you here and bring others here and learn, literally, this is not a trick sermon, this is literally true, and I shall develop it and show how it can be done, how I think I do it, make my enemies work for me. While they think they are getting me down, they’re getting me up.

Then don’t forget that next Sunday night, we’ll continue with it, next Sunday morning I’ll be present and then we’ll introduce the president of the Alliance Churches in the Philippine Islands, Mr. D. Jesus. But in the evening, I’ll resume my series.

And on Wednesday evening at 7.30 sharp, we teach for about 40 minutes on the Sermon on the Mount. The rest of the time is spent in prayer. We have fine discussions. It’s a class, which of course the teacher always ends up by being right, but we do allow discussion. I enjoy it myself; I believe others do, Wednesday at 7.30.

Now, the words of our text. You know I am going slowly through the book of Titus. A tightly packed little book is filled with theological meat, as a boiled egg is filled with meat. In verse 11 of chapter 2, there is the little word “for.” For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

Now, it would be a total impossibility for any man, I don’t care who the man might be, to treat this all in one sermon and do it any justice at all. So, I am not going even to try. I am going to allow my thoughts to wander a bit around the word “for” there, for the grace of God.

Now, that little word “for” is very important. I don’t go along with that type of Bible teacher that takes some unimportant verse, looks mysterious, and says, this is the key to the whole Bible. I have heard that so much that I have become immune to it. Immune to it would be a better word because I don’t believe it.

Some expositors take that 117th, isn’t it, Psalm, that shortest of all the Psalms, and they look very wise and say, undoubtedly this is the most important Psalm in the entire Bible. It says, O praise the Lord, all ye nations, praise him, all ye people, for his merciful kindness is great toward us, and the truth of the Lord endureth forever. Praise ye the Lord. And they want me to believe that that’s the most important Psalm and that all the rest of the Psalms center around that.

Well, I believe in faith, and I also believe in skepticism. I think a good hearty dose of skepticism is the only way to treat some teachers. So, I don’t want to fall into this trap and say that the most important word here is for, for it isn’t by any means the most important, but for my purpose this morning, it’s quite important in that I want to show you something here. This is, of course, a preposition, but theologically it’s a conjunctive here. It’s, it joins two great thoughts.

Now Paul had been saying above this, that aged men should be sober and brave and temperate and sound in faith and in love and in patience. And that older women should be, be as becometh holiness, not gossipers and not given to wine, teachers of good things. And that young women should be sober, love their husbands and their children, be discreet and chaste and good housekeepers and obedient to their husband. And that young men also ought to be sober and that Titus himself should show himself a pattern of good works, and that employees should be obedient to their masters and to please them and not steal from them and should be faithful to them. And that, that doctrine might be adorned.

Now that’s what he had been saying. Now we say, Paul, wait a minute here. We don’t believe in just being pushed into things. Uh, you want the older men to be grave and sober and righteous. You want the older women to be holy and good and pure and tight mouthed. You want the younger women to be good housekeepers, love their families and be an example to others. You want employees to work for their employers faithfully and well, and not be guilty of stealing little things here and there, but remember that stealing is wrong at any time. Now, why Paul, uh, this isn’t the way the Romans taught, nor the way the Greeks taught.

This isn’t the way the average American looks at things, Paul. Why, what can you say to us that will give us a reason for this? What’s the reason that you want us to live like this? Paul said, well, this is the reason, this is the reason. And the word for gathers up all of that.

It means this which I have previously required of you. The reason for it is this, that the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, or for all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for the blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ.

When the Bible makes a statement or lays down a commandment without any reason being given, it is the immediate duty of all Christians to believe that statement and obey that commandment and wait to know why God made that, gave that commandment and made that statement. But it is very rare that God requires anything of His people that He doesn’t either before or after explain why. God knows we’re intelligent people and a Christian should be one of the most intelligent of all persons.

I have never accepted the implied creed that a Christian is one who, he’s retarded. And the Lord comes along and puts him in a home for retarded children, that the church is a home for retarded children. I never have believed that. I still don’t believe it. I well know that a wild intellect, uncontrolled and egocentric and filled with sin can be a very dangerous and terrible thing. I also know that a brilliant intellect filled with the Holy Ghost can be a very wonderful thing as David and Isaiah and Paul and John and Augustine and Luther and Wesley have taught us.

So, I believe in the intelligence. I believe the Bible is an intelligent book. It goes beyond intelligence. And that is one of the glories of the Scripture and one of the glories of Christianity, that we go beyond intelligence. We never go contrary to it, but we often go beyond it. The prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New, heard and saw things which their intellects were never able to equate with anything else they knew or with anything taught by mortal man. They saw visions and dreamed dreams and looked into the face of the awesome God with a rainbow around His shoulders and they rose above the power of the mind to climb. But it was never anything they saw, never anything was contrary to good sound reasoning. It was above it, I repeat, but never contrary to it.

So, God has given us reasons for things and has said here, take this book and you’ll know not only that you should be good, but why you should be. Not only that you should believe, but why you should believe. It was Anselm that said, we think because we believe, not in order that we might believe. In the believing man, faith is always first. And the believing man believes and then he can think as deeply and intensely and widely and imaginatively as he wants to do it because he has faith to start with. And he never goes beyond faith and never rises above faith. He rises above reason, but never above faith.

So, Paul gave us the reason here. He had been exhorting. Paul didn’t do it that way usually. Usually in his epistles, Paul begins with heavy theology and lays the foundation down, good and solid, and then builds up on it exhortations and commandments and urgings that we’re to do this and thus and this and live this way and go there and do this and we’re to live in this way and that way in order or because these other things are true which were previously stated. Here Paul reverses himself and gives us first the commandments and then gives us the reason for.

Now he said, for the grace of God hath appeared to all men. I think it should read, for the grace of God hath appeared bringing salvation for all men. Now what does this mean? I find a very convenient and I believe helpful way of going about Bible study and Bible teaching to find out what a thing doesn’t mean. If you can’t know what a thing means, you can save yourself a lot of confusion by finding out what it doesn’t mean. And some people not knowing what this doesn’t mean, they have read into it meanings that it does not contain.

As a young Christian on attending a church over on Locust Street in Akron, Ohio, I used to pass by every Sunday, used to pass by a great expansive imposing looking church. It said Universalist Church. I don’t know whether they’ve changed their name, I haven’t seen a Universalist Church sign for years. But the Universalists weren’t wholly bad. They believed in the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. They believed that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son. They believed that Jesus Christ, when he died, paid the price for all men. At least I think this is a fair statement of what they believed.

But they took verses like this in this chapter, the grace of God hath appeared bringing salvation to all men. And they said, well, that just means what it says, that God’s grace is so vast and infinite and all comprehensive that it leaves nobody out and therefore everybody will be saved. They believed in universalism.

Now, I didn’t intend to tell you this, but it fits in so beautifully that I must. A man said that he was a Universalist preacher, and he said he went into a neighborhood and decided that he wanted to establish a Universalist church. So, he went around finding if he could find, looking about, seeing if he could find any Universalists of the Universalist persuasion.

He finally ran on to a man and he said, yes, I’m a Universalist. Oh, he said, that’s fine. Perhaps we can interest you. We want to establish a Universalist church. Well, he said, I think it’s fair to tell you though that I’m not quite the kind of Universalist that you are. He said, you are a Universalist, and your creed is that everybody will be saved. Now, he said, I’ve lived in the world a long time and I have mingled with men, and I’ve mixed with them everywhere, all out over the world. I’ve watched them live. I’ve had them lie to me. I’ve been cheated and skinned and sold down river and deceived and betrayed. And he said, I’ve decided that I believe in the universal damnation of all men. He said, I’m that kind of a Universalist.

Quite a shock, I take it, to the brother who believed in the salvation of all men. But the Universalists and others believe in the universal salvation of all men, grounding it upon such passages as this.

Well, I say they’re not wholly bad, but they’re not certainly right about it because this doesn’t mean it. You say, well, how do you know that it doesn’t mean it? I know it for this reason, that the Bible is to be understood not by what this verse says, but by what this verse and this verse and this one and this one and this one says. And when you get a dozen of them to agree on something, then you have Bible dogmatics.

And when these dozens agree, and then you find one you can’t understand, and if he doesn’t agree with these plain ones, then you say, well, we’ll put that aside as Gypsy Smith did with the bone when he was eating fish. You ask him what he did with the passage, he couldn’t understand. He said, the same as when I’m eating fish, and I ran into a bone. He said, I just lay it on the side of the plate.

And so, when you find a passage that seems to contradict the plain teachings of 25 other verses, lay that on the side of the plate because you don’t understand that. And always remember there’ll be some blazing-eyed fanatic rushing in and telling you that because you don’t know what that teaches, therefore he is now sent to enlighten you. And what he says it teaches is what 25 other passages deny.

So, I know this doesn’t mean that all men are to be saved, that the grace of God has appeared to all men savingly, and that the grace of God is working actively in all men. I know better than that, for the man who wrote this said, not all men have faith, and said that evil men and seducers should wax worse and worse until the end came.

And then I know also that it doesn’t mean that all men have heard of the grace of God. It’s appearing. The grace of God which bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, and that would leave us with the false impression, if we don’t watch it, that everybody in the whole world has heard of the grace of God. I wish that were so. I wish that everybody that lives everywhere from the youngest inhabitant of the jungle to the oldest man in London or Paris had heard of the grace of God, but it just isn’t so.

And I might add that it is perhaps one of the great and serious crimes of all time that the church of our Lord Jesus Christ has failed so dismally to instruct the world that the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for everybody that will take it. That we’ve had nearly 2,000 years to do it, and that we have succeeded not in doing it.

The revolution, the Bolshevistic revolution, came in 1917, and 31 years later, one-third of the earth’s population are under the hammer and the sickle. They did in 31 years what the church has not been able to do. That is, they did for the devil in 31 years what the church has not been able to do for God in 2000.

Now, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s heard. If it meant everybody had heard, Christ would have been back long ago, and this terrible nightmare we call history would have ended, and Christ would now be reigning from the river to the ends of the earth, and every man would be sitting under his own vine and fig tree, and no man should be wicked nor sinful nor harmful all over the earth. From sunrise to sunup, and from sunup to sunrise, no evil would be anywhere about. So, it doesn’t mean that.

What does it mean? It means that there has been a shining forth, epiphany, a shining forth. The word is used here for the shining forth of the sun, for the grace of God has appeared. This is the epiphany, the shining forth of the grace of God like the mighty sun in the heavens. It has shone forth around the person of Jesus Christ our Lord, shone forth in His love and pity and mercy, shone forth in His willingness to die for His enemies, shone forth. It was not a gleam of light, as some would say, but it was a shining forth, as the sun at ten o’clock on a June morning, shining forth in its glory all over the earth, wherever the clouds will withdraw and let the sun shine.

So, that’s what it means. The grace of God has shone forth like the sun, and this grace brings salvation, and that salvation is for all men everywhere that will receive it. That’s what this passage means. And the grace of God has appeared teaching us. I want to bear down a little on that. The grace of God has appeared teaching us.

Now, in what way can the grace of God teach anybody? The answer is that the word grace has at least two meanings, and two meanings here. It means an attribute of God, a quality in God, of love and mercy and kindness and goodwill that predisposes God always to be kind to those that don’t deserve it, and to be good to those that deserve only judgment, and to pour out Himself and His love and even the blood of His son for the salvation of those that deserve nothing but hell. That is a quality in God, a characteristic of the heart of God.

Now, I am conscious that both when I use the word quality and characteristic that I am humanizing God because we can’t rise to the elevation where we can talk about God in divine terms, we have to talk about Him in human terms. Actually, there’s no such thing as a quality in God or a characteristic in God. God’s unitary being has about it a unicity, a oneness.

And anything we say about God is simply our minds attributing things to God, for God dwelleth in light that no man can approach unto. But this is an attribute, this grace, and of course this can’t teach anybody anything. An attribute of God can’t teach a man down in Grant Park on a park bench anything. An attribute in God can’t teach a Doni in the Baliem Valley anything, or an Indian in Columbia. The grace of God as an objective thing, objective to us, outside of us, an external thing, cannot teach us anything. It can move God to act in our behalf, but as long as it’s outside of us it can teach us nothing.

But the grace of God has another meaning too. The grace of God means a divine influence upon the heart. It means an inward enabling; it means an active moral force. Remember in 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul told us how he had been praying that the thorn might be, he might be delivered from the thorn in the flesh which caused him great distress. He said he prayed three times about it, and on the third time the Lord said, Paul, my strength is made perfect in weakness, for my grace is sufficient for thee. He didn’t mean my attribute of grace which lies in me, in the great undulating infinite sea of the Godhead.

That would do Paul no good at that moment, but he said there’s another kind of grace, another aspect of that grace, which is an active working force that enters the heart of a man and does things for him. He said my grace is sufficient for thee. My grace, my active grace, this influence, this moral power within your bosom can lift you above the thorn which you’re trying to get rid of.

Paul caught it in a second. Paul was a spiritually intelligent man, and as soon as God said it, Paul added his own comment. He said, therefore, I will glory in my infirmities, that the power of God might rest upon me. And he knew the grace of God and the power of God were all one.

So, the grace of God is a teacher. It is a moral force. It gets inside the intelligence, gets inside the will, motivates the life, gets inside the heart and disturbs the emotions and excites them. So that’s what it means, the grace of God that bringeth salvation, teaches us, teaches us.

Now, my brethren, it was a low moment in the orthodox church when the word grace lost its second meaning and was forced to take only the first one. It was a low moment, I say, an awful moment in the history of fundamentalism when the word grace lost its second meaning, that of a divine power working within us, and was forced to be satisfied with its first meaning, that of an attribute of God flowing out of kindness and love and mercy which sent God’s Son to die for the lost.

So, the grace of God, for most people, remains in God. And it leaves the recipient of grace unchanged by grace. But do you notice that Paul taught that grace changed people? He said grace changed them. He said the grace of God has appeared teaching us, inwardly teaching us, that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world. It was a very slick trick of the devil indeed when he disassociated the two meanings of the word grace.

And everybody goes out now teaching, grace, grace, grace that is greater than all my sin. Do I believe it? Oh, with everything in me, I believe it. Do I preach it? Well, you know I preach it. Do I believe in the grace of God? Nobody, nobody can sing with a worse voice and a happier heart, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saves a wretch like me. Nobody, nobody can sing it worse, and nobody can love it more. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.

And that grace in God, that’s why we’re here, brethren. I’d like to prove sometime that everything God ever did since the beginning of time, he did out of grace. I’d like to prove, and I believe I can show you, that everything God does is grace, that God never did anything by law, never did anything by law, all is by grace.

The Psalmist used to pray, have mercy upon me and hear my prayer, be gracious unto me and hear my prayer. He knew that God’s willingness to hear prayer was God’s grace in operation. The very stars and sun overhead are the grace of God in operation. Nobody deserves anything from God. If they could only get that. One time more see the sovereignty of God, that God owes nobody anything and gives everybody everything, and therefore we owe him every gratitude in all the world. And all is by grace.

When God made the heaven and the earth, it was by grace. When he laid the foundations thereof, it was by grace. When He girdled the earth with the firmament, it was by grace. And when He made man upon the earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, it was by grace. And everything that God has ever done has been out of the goodness of His heart.

But if the grace of God was only a principle of which causes God to operate, it could never get to me. But the grace of God is more than that. The grace of God enters human hearts and other hearts, I suppose.

I believe that the very angels in heaven are motivated by the workings of God’s love and grace in their own hearts, although they never understand it quite as you and I will. The grace of God teaches us, enters our hearts and teaches us. But you know, the devil has, through false teachers and ignorant teachers and persons who will not think nor pray about things, disassociated the two meanings.

And we have only one meaning, and that’s the one I’ve been talking about here now for a few minutes. The wonderful goodness of the heart of God, which gave us everything that we have, which gave us His Son to die, and gave us eternal life without money and without price, gave us mercy, gave us forgiveness, and gave us a place in heaven itself, all this by grace. And you can’t overdo it.

You know, you can’t sing too loudly or too often of the grace of God. But here’s what you can do. You can misunderstand the meaning of it, and you can forget that it has its second meaning. The second meaning being, I repeat now for the third time, the divine influence upon the heart, the inward enabling, the active moral force working to teach us morality, spirituality, ethics, inward goodness. But anybody that talks the way I do now is attacked by these one-definition boys. They say he’s a legalist, or they say he’s seeking to be saved by works.

I read that passage once more, not by works of righteousness which we have done, according to His mercy He saved us. I read that, and I believe it. Or they say he’s mixing law and grace. No. I’ve never mixed law and grace in my life consciously, and I don’t think I’m doing it unconsciously.

You know, the habit is now to blame everything on the Schofield Bible. And I’ve said a few sharp things about some of the notes myself, but the Schofield Bible can’t be blamed for this. The Schofield Bible’s 100 percent right in its attitude toward grace. Let me read a note on 2 Peter 3:18. I don’t know who wrote it, of course, one of the half-dozen editors.

But it says under the caption, Grace Imparted, here’s what it says. It says, Grace is not only dispensationally a method of divine dealing in salvation, it is also the method of God in the believer’s life and service. Having by grace brought the believer into the highest conceivable position, God ceaselessly works through grace to impart to and perfect him in corresponding graces. Perfectly right. The grace of God that set him as high as it’s possible to set anything above the angels, ultimately, ceaselessly works in him to impart to and perfect him in corresponding graces.

Grace, therefore, it continues, stands connected with service, with Christian growth, and with giving. So don’t let’s blame the Schofield Bible for that one. The brethren have gone far beyond in separating grace from grace, the grace of God from the grace in man.

Oh, my friends, let’s not be satisfied to keep all God’s qualities in God. God wants some of His qualities to get into us. There are attributes of God which no man can share. For instance, His eternity, His self-sufficiency, His infinitude, His incomprehensibility. Those are attributes which belong to God, and God cannot share them with creatures. But there are other attributes that God can share with creatures, kindness, love, mercy, grace, goodness, wisdom.

Now I close, or rather just break it off here, and any preacher’s presence will know this is no way to close a sermon. But I’m going to close it this way, that we have every Scriptural reason to believe that if grace has saved us, it has also changed us.

We have every scriptural reason to believe that if we are not changed by grace, we are not saved by grace. For the grace of God that bringeth salvation has appeared, teaching us, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts. We should live soberly and righteously and godly, and I shall show in a succeeding sermon that soberly and righteously and godly takes in the triangle of man’s possible existence, God and man and self, and all the ethics of an Aristotle, or all the righteousness of a Moses. The holiness of a Paul can’t take the man out of that triangle. He’s there, but it’s as big and vast as the heart of God.

So, remember it, that if you believe you’re saved by grace, but there is not a corresponding working within your heart toward holiness and righteousness, I must in honesty tell you, you’re probably deceived. For the grace of God, when it’s received, when a man says, I accept salvation by the grace of God through Jesus Christ, God smiles and goes to work inside the man. If the man really receives God, He goes to work inside of him to produce the very graces that the New Testament is chock-full of.

And so, if a man says, technically, I am saved by the grace of God, and then goes his own way and isn’t changed, I believe he is a deceived man and completely deluded and will be lost at last. We’re saved by grace under good works. We’re saved by grace, and the same grace by which we are saved now becomes an active force working within us to make us pure and good and righteous.

May God grant that we’ll not miss this, that we’ll not go so far out on a limb in our committal to the one meaning of the grace of God that we forget there are any other meanings. There is at least one other. Let’s trust him. If He saved us by grace, let’s trust Him to save us in grace, and that grace may operate through us to make us the kind of Christians that will adorn the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

Tags Grace

Messages

Tozer Talks

“Things Permitted by God for Growth in Grace“

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Things Permitted by God for Growth in Grace

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 28, 1958

Outline

The Bible and the nature of the world.

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

Church conflicts and sin in early Christianity.

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

The Presence of Sin in Religious Settings.

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

Sin and its presence in the church.

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

God’s use of suffering to perfect believers.

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

Facing and dealing with sin in the church.

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

Message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags Grace, Growth, Sin

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date February 11, 2024

“Be Ye Kind Tenderhearted And Forgiving As God“

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Be Ye Kind Tenderhearted and Forgiving as God

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

June 14, 1959

Everybody, The LORD reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; The LORD is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: The world also is stablished, That it cannot be moved. Thy throne is established of old: Thou art from everlasting. He floods have lifted up, O LORD, the floods have lifted up their voice; The floods lift up their waves. The LORD on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, Yea, than the mighty waves of the sea. Thy testimonies are very sure: Holiness becometh thine house, O LORD, forever. Let us pray.

We would this morning, Father, join the psalmist and with 10,000 and thousands of thousands who worship Thee this morning, and with the spirits of just men made perfect, and with the General Assembly in the Church of the Firstborn, whose names are in heaven, we would unite and add our tiny little sound to the sound that’s like the sound of many waters, praising and worshipping, Thee, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who made us and who pitied us and Who sent Thy Son to redeem us, and who waits to receive us in the day when we shall have redemption completed in us and Thy work of glorification shall make us worthy to gaze upon Thy face.

Now our Father, we join to ask Thy mercy upon our world. We join to ask Thee, O God, to spare us, to spare the reckless, to spare the worldly and the careless, to spare those who today will not darken the door of any church, who have not thought one holy thought today, and will not, during the whole day. But who will indulge in everything the flesh can offer them and will have no thought of death or judgment or the world to come. We do not scold them, nor do we come before Thee and say we’re not as other men. We are just as other men, and we’re all like, O God. But Thou hast in great mercy found some of us and made us want to love Thee and made us want to be right and made us want to serve Thee in a world where the service costs us something.

Father, we pray that Thou wilt bless our country. Bless the land that Thou gavest to our fathers, who came from bondage beyond the sea to establish a church here that would be free. Father, we thank Thee for our land. We thank thee for our country and pray that Thou wilt bless it and bless those who are in authority in it.

We pray for the health of the people, the leaders of the church. We pray God for Bible schools and for seminaries and Christian colleges and missions and church schools and great churches and small churches, and celebrated pastors and evangelists and men who are obscure and little heard of, but who love Thee as sincerely and as truly as those whose names are on everybody’s lips. Bless Thou all over to Thee, Our Father. Breathe Thy breath of life-giving power and animating grace upon a church that’s fighting and struggling and having a hard time, but still is going on.

Bless behind the Iron Curtain. Bless behind bamboo curtains and all curtains where it’s difficult to pray. God bless Thou our Christian brethren who are caught in the terrible grind of communism. We pray, bless the church, Thy church and hasten the hour when Thy Holy Son shall return to glorify the living and raise the dead and make us like unto Himself. This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I ask you to notice a verse in the Ephesians epistle, chapter four, verse thirty-two: Be ye kind, one to another, tender hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. Be ye, even as God. Now without anywise doing violence to the syntax, we hear a man say to Christians not too long converted out of paganism, be ye even as God. God was tender-hearted, kind, forgiving. And be ye as God.

Then of course, there’s that well-known verse in the Sermon on the Mount: Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. I know how we try to get around that one. We say that means mature. Be therefore mature, even as God is mature, which is nonsense. Maturity means the arrival at the full possibilities of a growing organism.

And you can apply thought like that to God. You’re thinking of some other god, but the God of the Scriptures. God just is. I Am that I Am. God never matures. His Son, the Man, grew up from birth to manhood, increased in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man; with maturity in Jesus, but that was the manhood.

The Godhead does not mature, as He does not grow. He is. I Am that I Am. Can you imagine how the steel beam would go out of the universe if God had said, I will soon be what I hope to become? That’s maturity, that’s maturing. No, no, that is simply a Greek teacher’s way of getting out of the point. Be perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. God calls us to perfection, and we enter perfection, if we ever do, kicking and squalling and begging and saying it’s not so. I don’t mean to claim perfection, but I mean to claim that God says we are to seek to be perfect as our Father is perfect.

Now, this word, this verse, declares an most astounding fact, that we have as our example none other than God Himself. He says that we are to take the prophets, for an example, who suffered. He also tells us that we are to keep our eyes on good men and try to be like them. Paul, the man of God, would quote one, something good about one church in order to excite another church to seek to be good also like that church. That is all relative. The absolute and final model for men is God. God made us in His image first. We sinned and spoiled that image. He redeemed us in order that that image might be restored. Conversion does not restore it 100%

It gives us what all Dr. Bach used to call the root of the matter. It puts the seed at the beginning of things in us. And then the work of the Holy Ghost is to mold and fashion and shape us until the image of God is restored to us again. And Paul says, be imitators of God.

If I might quote again what I heard William Jennings Bryan said, you know the size of a man may be known upon him by the impression he makes upon you, having heard him only once. I can easily repeat a sermon I preached two months ago and most of you would not remember it, because I don’t impress you.

But this great man impressed me. And I heard him say that the difference between a born again Christian and an evolutionist was this. All the evolutionist had to do on Sunday morning was to go out to the zoo, stand in front of the baboon cage, and congratulate himself upon how far he had evolved upward from his fathers. But he said, the born gain Christian goes to church and sits and listens to the preacher tell him how far he has to go yet before he is perfect as his Heavenly Father is perfect. There’s the difference. Take your choice.

We are comforted when we look at the cage of monkeys, but we’re a long way from being comforted when we look at what we might become. And yet, I think I quoted this on the air yesterday and I’ll quote it again now. Browning’s words: What I aspire to be and am not, comforts me. A beast I might have been, but I would not sink in the scale. Thank God, you’re as far along as you are. And where unto thou hast attained, there abide and cast not away thy confidence which has great recompense of reward. But never mark a marker there nor drive in a stake nor stake a claim and say, this is where I live. There’s perfection yet before you, even as God is the astonishing thing here. We Christians have God as our example.

Now, godliness is attained by first having life. You might just as well try to be, say, Chinese without being born of Chinese parents, as to be a Christian without being born of God. A man may imitate a Chinese, but let’s suppose that he’s a Spaniard born in Chile, or let’s suppose he’s a Swede born in Stockholm. And he determines he wants to be a Chinese. And he learns the Chinese language. He shades his eyes to make them slant a little differently or seem to. And he slides around on slippers with no tops to them. And he does everything he can do to be Chinese. But the trouble is, he will live and die a Swede, because he was born one. And so, a sinner may try to imitate God, seek to be God’s child, try to be like God, but he’ll never be God’s child without being born of God any more than a man can be Chinese without being born of Chinese parents.

So, there must be life there. There must be a deposit of life there, given to us by faith at the time of our conversion to and trusting Jesus Christ our Lord. Then we have this deposit of life which Peter calls the divine nature. Then after that, there can be growth unto perfection, just as the Chinese baby born into the Chinese home, that’s granted, the culture in Chinese and educated in a Chinese home. By the time that baby is 20, 24 or five, he probably will have absorbed, that is, in the Old China it would have. I don’t know too much about this terrible modern China. But he would have learned the classics. He could quote Confucius and the rest of them, and would have learned all the niceties, social amenities, would be worthy of his parents. So, you and I are God’s children, born as God’s children if we are Christian, but not fully grown yet. And it is the work of God to make us like God.

Now, there are so many things that could be said about God; and I’m in the process of writing a book about God. But I shall say nothing here today that’s going to be in that book. You could pick out, I suppose, 100 qualities in God that you would want to imitate and try to be like and seek to be like, but I want to speak about one, and that is persistence.

Did you ever think about how impossible it is to discourage God? God goes right on persisting. He lays His plans and then He continues right on. So many of us don’t know where we’re going and if we got there, we wouldn’t know we were there because we didn’t know where we were headed for when we started. And when we left there, we wouldn’t know where we have been. But the great God who made the heaven and the earth moves according to preordained plans which He purposed in Himself before the world began.

Therefore, revolutions and earthquakes and tidal waves and floods and wars and intellectual and theological rebellion, don’t mean anything to God. He’s undisturbed in these affairs, as a poet said, and cares not what men do. The latest bit of mischief that we’ve gotten into, we young children of the house, this world we call this playhouse, we call Adam’s world, is to throw rocks up toward heaven. And we have gotten an affair that we can shoot them higher. We used to be satisfied just to shoot slingshots at birds, but now man is able to shoot rockets way up into the air.

I heard last night on the news broadcast that they’re going to have two or three monkeys now, I think, and one of them larger than the monkey. And they’re going to put them into a space capsule and shoot them up into the air. Really up there, not just 300 miles up and come back, but way out into orbit to see whether they can’t recover them. And then the next thing would be a man. Well, this has frightened some people tremendously and they’re worrying about it, but it never bothers me at all. If you were to see, if you were to be able to understand or comprehend, even slightly, how vast space is, though the little Sputniks and explorers and monkey capsules that we’re sending up on the earth, looked to God like dust.

There’s nothing, nothing. God is moving on. His plans are unchanging. His purposes are not in anywise modified. And there’s never an instance where an angel rushes into the Holy Presence and salutes and says, O God, you know what’s going on? You know what’s going on? They’re going to be able to go to Venus and Mars. God’s eyelids never flicker. The great God who keepeth Israel never slumbers nor sleeps nor does he worry about anything. He came down as a Man and suffered once. But He is in His holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before Him. He persists. He goes right on. And I believe that you and I ought to catch this from God.

The reason God can be so nonchalant is that He has eternity to work in. There will never be any whistle blowing nor any sundown. And God will never get old and never retire. And they’ll never be any stopping because there’s no reason to stop. My father worketh hitherto, and I work. And that’s how you and I ought to keep that in mind, that we have eternity to work in too.

I said to my friend, Paris Reidhead when he was here the last time. I said, Brother Reidhead, I don’t read as much as I used to read, that is, philosophy and all that. I said, you know, when you get along older, I wouldn’t have any use for it. Man, he said, how foolish. He said, you’re learning for eternity. This is only the kindergarten, and what I learn now, if it’s true, I’ll have it for eternity. I took the rebuke with a smile and was glad.

Then, the second thing is, well, I think I’d better bear down there a bit and say, that if you’re inclined to give up or be discouraged or quit or say, well, what’s the use? Remember that we are to be like God, in that, we have our plans before us, divine plans and were to persist in the carrying out of those plans. So, keep on believing,

Then there’s magnanimity. That means size. The world is filled with trifles, just filled with trifles. I said to somebody recently, that during the Great War they closed back there in the 40s, one of the things that used to discourage me, would be to ride on a train with soldiers. Now, I often did. In those days you were glad if you could get on at all. And sometimes you got on and stood the entire way halfway across the state, or all the way across the state.

And here were these fine-looking young fellas in their uniforms, the various uniforms of the services. And uniforms always make a fellow look better. I can understand why girls go wild over uniforms. They do improve a man’s looks. And here, there were fine looking fellows. But do you know what they were reading? Almost every one of them had a bunch of crumply, limp, wrinkled, badly beaten comic books. And they were young fellas anywhere from 18 to 25 or 30.

Think of the trifle. Think of a man who makes his living sitting down and making up nonsense and building that nonsense into fictitious characters and putting it in a comic book and then selling it to people. And they read it and soldiers read it, maybe on their way to die, but reading comic books. Now, I read Lil’ Abner sometimes. I’m not saying that I object if they’re decent, you know. I’m not that rough. But I only say that some never get any higher than that, never go beyond it. They live in trifle. Never get out of it. Never have a thought above it.

Dr. Wilbur Smith, one the greatest scholars and bibliophiles in evangelical circles conceived the idea of editing a library of books to be called the Wycliffe series. Moody Press published it. They brought out some of the finest books of the Puritans, the great books. Great masterworks. Do you know what happened? They sat on the shelf and gathered dust. And the last report I heard, it’s not the latest, but the last report I heard was that they discontinued them because they couldn’t move the books.

God’s people made for eternity, with eternity in their hearts, created to be like God, to move from galaxy to galaxy, to walk with broad-winged angels and stand in the burning presence of Seraphim, are satisfied with comic books and religious fiction, and the great books stand on the shelf and gather dust. We’re little, so little. Church quarrels are almost always over little things. I’ve never known a church division yet, ever, to be over anything big.

Years ago, several years before I came to Chicago, this congregation had divided. There wasn’t anger, but there was division. Part of them went one place and parted. And do you know what the difference of opinion was? It was where they should build the building. So, they divided. Part of them went one place and part of them stayed here, and I came to what stayed here.

I remember hearing of a young man. He was a very healthy young man. You can be religious and be healthy, you know. He was a very healthy young man, a young pastor. He went to a new charge, and he just felt so good, you know, that it wasn’t lawful. He would get up in the morning and eat and pray and chuck the baby under the chin and then start out for his study. And they had a low white fence in front of the parsonage.

And he felt so good that he had the habit of when he came to the fence, he never stopped to open the gate. He just jumped over the fence and went on whistling. And it wasn’t long until he was waited upon by the deacons and elders of the church. They wanted to know how it was, they said, now, Reverend and pastor, we love you and you’re doing good work, but we feel that we owe it to you to bring you this word of reproof for you’re young. Well, he said, what have I been doing? Well, they said, you have been jumping over your gate instead of opening it. Well, he said, I just feel good and it’s a low gate and I’ve been athletic.

And so, I just jump over the gate. He said, I haven’t thought anything of it. Well, they said, Reverend, we’re sorry, but we’d like just to ask you kindly to desist. And so, after that, even though he felt so good, he had to walk out there solemnly looking down at his feet, open the gate, walk out, turn around, shut it and go solemnly on to the study. They wanted that kind of fellow.

Well now, if he’d jumped that gate a few times after that, he’d lost his pastorate. Over what? Over jumping a gate. Now, he was a nicer man than I at his age. Do you know what I would have told those elders? I’d have told them to go climb a gate. And I’d have jumped what I wanted to jump, if I had the strength to do it. I don’t jump gates now. But it’s not religion that keeps me from jumping gates. I was 40 years old before I ever took all the steps on a pair of stairs. I always went up two at a time. They say that a man reaches middle age when what he takes two at a time is not steps, but pills.

Now, what I’m trying to tell you is that church quarrels come over trifles. I’ve known of churches that divided and had an ugly time of it, over whether they should take communion out of one cup or have several cups, so it go, whether they should paint a certain room blue or green–trivialities.

God is magnanimous. God is big. And the saints were big and understanding and raw, and you couldn’t lead them into quarrels over things that didn’t matter. The great souls knew what mattered and they were willing to fight to the death for what mattered. But there are only a few things matter after all really, only a few things. And if we find those few things that matter and major on them, we’ll get large inside. Everybody ought to be bigger on the inside than he is on the outside. Everybody ought to have space and time and eternity in his heart, even while he’s limited to a little body that’s running around down here on the earth.

Well then, there’s what is found in the text, forgiveness. Life is filled with mysteries, but the most astonishing mystery of all is, how can God forgive us? To hear a friend talk to the children this morning made me again take notice of sin–that everlasting, ubiquitous, persistent, perpetual devil that tags the heels of men. How can God forgive us? I don’t know. I only know that amazing grace, how sweet the sound.

Did you read that pathetic thing of the boy who had failed in school and was ill, shot himself and asked them, please sing Amazing Grace at my funeral. I only know that I don’t feel good about such things. My heart hurts; sympathy and pity there, the poor kid. I don’t know. God knows. Let’s leave him as the poet said, his frailties and his sins. Who is God? But let us forgive as God forgave. You know, a moral therapeutic that would do you more good than a Turkish bath and a Swedish massage this morning, just forgive everybody, if you just forgive everybody. If you could just start right now. Bow your head while we’re singing the closing hymn and say, O God, I hear by now and herewith forgive everybody in the world and set my heart to love them. You know, it would be like a new birth to you if you’ve got a little malice, a little grudge, a little hard feeling, a little edginess, it keeps you little. It keeps you morally sick. The moral therapeutic of forgiveness; I recommend it to you. Forgive everybody as God has for Christ’s sake forgiven you.

Then there’s pity. It is vicarious sorrow. In one sense, Jesus died of pity. He died of pity. It was pity that brought Him. It was love that brought Him. It was not only love, but it was love plus compassion. It was loving compassion; compassion and love that brought Him, and He died of pity. I don’t want ever to go through the world hard and not pity people. I pity people. I am sorry for how things are going in the world and sorry for those that suffer. When I hear of a little girl who was hit with a car, I’m sorry. You would go crazy if you went to every home and tried to follow it up all over the United States or wrote to everybody. You can’t do it. The world’s too big, and there are too many people in it. But nobody can keep you from grieving.

I’m sorry for lots of young people who jump over the traces and run away and die on the highway. Or go to the dog some other way. I can’t keep them from it. But they can’t keep me from grieving. Pity and sorrow of heart for others, God has it. God has it. I don’t know how God has it. God is perfect, and yet has pity. Philosophy would say that if God is perfect. He couldn’t have pity. I think Spinoza makes that claim. But I know two things: I know God is perfect and I know God has pity. I know two things, not just one. So, we will accept both and if one seems to be contrary to the other, we’ll wait until we know as we are known. And then we will understand how the great God can pity us and at the same time be the perfect God that He is.

Then there’s tranquility. That’s the last word. How we need tranquility in this terrible day. The world is like a spinning top. One out of every four hospital beds are occupied by somebody who is in the hospital for mental trouble. We have invented a juggernaut, a Frankenstein, modern civilization, commercial, materialistic, scientific civilization. And it’s busy pulling us, body and mind.

I read the other day there are several kinds of heart trouble and I don’t have any, but I wasn’t being morbid, but I just haven’t read about it. One of them was a strange kind of heart trouble, that you die suddenly, instantaneously, without anything being wrong with your heart. A pile up of electricity, they say. And there’s a sudden jump and you’re dead. And you are perfectly healthy, nothing wrong with your heart. But they said it was like sticking a needle into your heart, the job of electricity and you’re finished.

Well, the world is worried, sick, troubled, even American people. They don’t look happy. Go out on the street and see. People don’t look happy. You see people driving by in big cars and apparently, they’re well off and have comforts, physical comforts with it with a strained look on their face. But there remaineth a rest for the people of God.

See my attorney, you know, that’s the expression used by men who can afford lawyers. If anybody comes to them, they don’t even answer. They say, see my lawyer. There seateth at the right hand of God, One who has stooped to call Himself our Lawyer and our Advocate. And if you have learned to turn your problems over to Him, all those problems between you and God and those problems between you and men. Jesus Christ is your advocate above, your Savior by the throne of love and He takes care of all that. I suppose that if there were truth, I don’t know if things will never work out to the way I plan it, but I’d like to go all over the United States of America and tear down all the grave stones that have lies on them and put the truth there. I would, I’d like to do that just to startle the world and maybe bring them to their knees.

Here’s one with a little text on, and if I knew the truth, I would have it chisel on; here lies Henry Jones, died from being henpecked. And then over on across would be another and it would be Mrs. Mary Smith. Here lies Mrs. Smith, died of being brutalized by her gorilla husband. And here lies so and so, died at 32 from her burnt-out fuse. She drove too fast, traveled too fast, stayed up too late, got up at the wrong hours, ate the wrong things, tried to keep up with the Joneses and died of a burnt-out fuse.

I tell you, if all the gravestones of the world told the truth there would be a different face on history, but we don’t. We lie when we ask the man with the chisel and the hammer to go to work on the tombstones of our dead. They tell another story, not always, not always. Among the saints it’s not so. But out in the world it is.

Well, my friends, I’m telling you, so few things really matter. But I think we ought to get tranquil really, and without any tranquilizers, too, without any tranquilizers. Tomorrow is just a certain and safe as heaven is safe. We sang the church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord. She is His new creation by water and the blood.

And if He is our foundation, then He’s all we’ve got to think about if we’ve settled it that He’s made good and He’s what He claims to be. And He is victorious. You and I can’t help but be. We’re bound to be. So, let’s relax and be tranquil and rest. Let’s not get disturbed too much about what’s going to happen. Because we know finally from prophecy what’s going to happen. We know far, far beyond the scientific predictions. We know. He told us. Let’s rest in God and wait patiently for Him.

Now, I’ll read you this passage of Scripture from Isaiah 32, and that will be the close. Until the spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest. Then judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the fruitful field. And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness, and assurance forever. And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings. And in quiet resting places. Peace, I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, and that peace nobody can take away.

Tags Deny, Grace, Repudiate

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date February 4, 2024

“The Grace Of God Appears To All Men“

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The Grace of God Appears to All Men

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

June 22, 1958

In the Apostle Paul’s declaration in Titus 2:11, of God’s love for the world, there is an organic part of that, grace as an in-working power to save us from the bondage of our sins. I hope that you’ve gotten that. I’d like to have you students and those of you are wanting Bible teaching, actually put that down. Don’t be afraid of that. And don’t say, Tozer said that, but I don’t think he quite meant that. I meant that exactly and I’ll stand for that before all theologians in the world, that no man is teaching truly who teaches the grace of God as a method of escape from our past, who does not add that the grace of God is also a power to escape from sin, our present bondage. The Bible teaches both.

And in the text, I read, the grace of God that brings salvation; there is the technical, the judicial method of escaping from the sins of our past. But it teaches us, that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world.

Now, it teaches inwardly, that is, there is a moral impulse. I do not think there’s any other religion; I don’t know of any other religion that teaches this moral impulse. There are some good religions. That is, there are some religions, which if they could be kept, would make very good people. I think if everybody in the world was a Buddhist after the doctrines that Buddha taught, it would be a vastly better world than it is now. I think that while Confucius was not a religious teacher, but a moralist and a philosopher; he has been made into a religious teacher in China. And if everybody in the world would bring his moral standards to the level of Confucius, the world would be a pleasant place in which to live. You could throw all your keys away. You would never need to lock up anything. And so it is with a number of other religions.

But the difficulty lies in the “if.” The human race cannot do this. It’s like saying to, say a man in the last stages of consumption. Now, if you would go out and hit a home run, you would be alright. And he whispers, with his last, thin voice that I couldn’t lift a bat. He’s dying. The human race cannot rise to the teachings of the great teachers. They cannot rise to it. Because human nature is bad and there’s no inner power to enable it.

But the grace of God which brings salvation also brings the moral impulse within the heart. It is God that worketh in you to will and to do of His own good pleasure. So that the Christian faith provides that which none of the great religions of the world even thought about, and that is, an inward power to enable.

Now, John mentions this. Let me read it. John in his epistle says in the second chapter and the 24th verse and following. Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the beginning. If that which ye have heard from the beginning shall remain in you, ye also shall continue in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that He has promised us, even eternal life. These things have I written, but the anointing which ye have received of Him remains in you. And ye need not that any man teach you; but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in Him. And now, little children, abide in Him.

Now, that’s what John said, that there was an anointing and an aflatus. I do not know where this has been better said than by Isaac Watts in that line where he says the Lord pours eyesight on the blind. Incidentally, that was not Watts’ line. That was Wesley’s line. Wesley put that in. The Lord pours eyesight on the blind.

Now what does that mean, pouring eyesight on the blind? Here stands a poor man groping. And suddenly the Lord pours on oil on him that makes him see. The Lord pours eyesight on the blind and he sees by an outward enabling now in him; an oil is poured on him, a seeing oil. And I believe this is what’s taught here; that the grace of God is a kind of an anointing, a moral anointing that comes into a man who has received the grace of God in truth. And it teaches him inwardly.

The inward teaching of the moral impulse of Christianity is one of the greatest things about Christianity. But we have degraded it into an escape from hell in our day. Evangelists have degraded it into an escape from hell. We paint a terrible picture of hell and say, do you want to escape that? And of course everybody does. And I do. And I believe in hell. And Christianity, the gospel of Christ, is an escape from hell. That’s only the negative part. The other part is the positive, affirmative, dynamic part, is that it is an oil poured into the heart; the grace of God teaches us. Now, what does it teach us? If you’re following me closely, you’re gonna be shocked. It says, teaching us that denying. Imagine that, Paul? Teaching us that–denying.

Now, why is that word here at the head of the list of things that the grace of God teaches us. The grace of God is conceived as a beautiful, warm, angelic thing, floating down from the throne of God with a smile sweetly coming to the heart. But the Holy Ghost says the grace of God teaches us that denying. Why is that there? For that word denying means to contradict, to disavow, to renounce. Every student of the Greek knows that. And I search into these things and don’t stand in ignorance. I’m ignorant, but I know where to look up some things and so I look them up. And this word denying means, deny means, to contradict, disavow, and renounce. And why are these three negative words, disavow, contradict, renounce, deny; why are such words as that at the top of the list here? How is it explained?

Now, if I had said this in the day of Finney, nobody would have batted an eye. But saying it now, I expect repercussions. Let me say to you, my friends, that the word grace stands as an everlasting condemnation of the human race. The word grace, the grace of God hath appeared.

And the first thing the grace of God does when it appears to a man is to condemn him. Why should it be necessary that there should be something which should be good to the undeserving, except the undeserving were there? Why should it be necessary that God should send something that could give everything to the pauper, unless the pauper were present? Why should grace appear, which gives goodness to the bad man, unless the bad man were here? The very fact you use the word grace implies and takes for granted that there is evil present, that there is badness there, that there is people deserving of death. And the very word grace comes.

There comes a pulmotor down the street. The whistle is blowing, the siren blowing. What’s that pulmotor doing? There is somebody sick down there. Somebody’s about to die. And they have got an oxygen tent there. Why is that oxygen tent and pulmotor there? Somebody’s about to die of a heart attack or drowning. And though that pulmotor and oxygen tent are positive things, they’re good things. They’re excellent things worked out by fine minds and administered by dedicated doctors and nurses. Yet, the very fact they are there indicates somebody is about to die.

Another word that’s beautiful is pardon. And I suppose the average Governor of the average state is a decent fellow, be he a Democrat or Republican. He’s a decent fellow. And I suppose there wouldn’t be a word he would like better than the word pardon. I suppose if I were Governor or you were Governor of one of the states and somebody came to me and said, we want to appeal on the part of so and so for a pardon for this man condemned to die. I suppose that the sweetest word imaginable would be the word pardon. But the very word pardon itself would stand as a condemnation. Why? Because it would be useless and meaningless unless somebody were condemned. You can’t pardon a man who has no sentence against it.

And so the grace of God cannot forgive a man who needs no forgiveness. The very word grace itself stands as an instant and eternal and everlasting condemnation. But it also carries with it deliverance and cleansing and forgiveness and resurrection into a new life. But unless I am prepared to admit that I am a condemned sinner unworthy of God’s smile and that hell is the place where I belong, grace can never reach me.

But that word grace itself, somebody says grace, what does grace mean? It means everything for nothing. It means being good to the worthless. It means forgiving the condemned. It means pardoning those who want to die. Well, who are these? Ah, my brother, it’s you and me, you and me. The very fact the word grace had to be here, and that grace had to appear, indicates to all immoral intelligences that the human race is bad, condemned; and apart from the grace of God will perish.

Human beings in their present situation, only evil continually and the world consisting of human beings as they are, can be saved from this situation, only by disavowal and renouncing it. The drowning man who won’t renounce the water, will die in that water. And the man who swallowed a lethal dose of poison and who refuses to have his stomach pumped and will not accept the ministrations of the physician, will die by his refusal.

And so, the Scriptures say, the grace of God brought salvation, teaching us that we must renounce our own sins and renounce organized sin, which is the world, and to disavow and contradict and stand as a judgment against it. As soon as I see the grace of God appearing to save me, I admit I’m lost. I admit I deserve to die. I admit hell is my portion. And then I rush to the grace of God, condemned, but delivered because I’m condemned. Ready to perish but saved because I admit I’m ready to perish. Do you get that friends? Do you see that? And this is where we’re failing. And I want you, my brethren, I am persuaded better things of you and things that accompany good Bible teaching.

Now, the cross of Christ, how beautiful it is. What it stands for is a judgment upon this moral order. The very fact that cross had to appear, is all angels need to know, to know how bad we are. It’s a judgment, I say, upon the world’s moral order. And it expresses God’s rejection of man’s sin and God’s rejection of man apart from grace and the cross. And the cross of Jesus is the place where every redeemed man must die.

Jesus said, if any man will come after Me, let him deny himself. And so, take up His cross. I looked at that very carefully to be sure I was right yesterday, because I thought I had remembered that’s what He had said, and I checked it and found out actually that’s what He said and there is no twisting out of it by any translation. That’s what He said, his cross, not my cross. You can’t carry Jesus’ cross. He carried it. Joseph of Arimathea helped him a little. But He carried His cross. He carried it. You can’t carry His cross, but His cross becomes your cross. And then you carry your cross.

And so, the cross of Christ stands as a judgment upon the world’s moral order. And the only way I can be benefited by that cross and have all of the advantages it provides is by renouncing that which it has renounced. And the only way I can be saved by the grace of God is by repudiating that which it repudiates and disavowing that which it disavows.

Salvation then, according to this, begins with an outright renouncement, a renouncement of my sin, of myself with my ungodliness, of my worldly lusts. This is repentance. Failure to see this is responsible for thousands of deluded Christians, thousands of deluded Christians; responsible for the low moral standards among Christians; responsible for the effort everywhere to make the cross of Christ acceptable to society. For the cross of Christ can never be acceptable to society and still remain the cross of Christ. It becomes something else. The cross of Christ stands for the condemnation of society. And just as the Ark floated above the waters and stood as a condemnation of the human race, and only those who entered it could be saved. So, the cross of Christ, towering over the wrecks of time, stands for the condemnation of the human race. And only those who enter it, so to speak, who enter the heart of Jesus, by means of it, can be saved.

So, how can the cross be acceptable to society when it stands as a judgment of that society, when there’s a contradiction between the two? This is the reason, I say, the failure to see this is the reason for the strange popularity of Jesus today. Jesus is very popular. But the Jesus of the New Testament, who bore a cross that condemned the world while it condemned Him, never, never was popular and never will be, except in that hour when He comes down with that sword upon His thigh riding that white horse. And all moral intelligence that’s in heaven and on earth and under the earth are forced; some happily and joyously and voluntarily; others solemnly, are compelled to kneel and say He is Lord of all to the glory of God the Father.

How can Christ be popular among persons who don’t intend to obey Him? And yet He is. How can He be popular among those who don’t intend to acknowledge His Lordship nor carry a cross nor quit their ungodliness nor cease from their indulging their worldly lusts? Yet, tens of thousands and multiplied tens of thousands are in and out of our evangelical churches. And Jesus is very popular. But because we misunderstand that the grace of God condemns us and saves us. The cross of Christ slays us and raises us.

And the very fact that Jesus had to come is the last final, terrible proof of the world’s guilt. There’s a close connection between Christ and the Ark of Noah. And the fact that the Ark of Noah had to be there was proof enough of the world’s depravity. The fact that the cross of Jesus had to be raised on the hillside is proof enough of the world’s depravity.

My friends, if we could only believe how bad we are, and then in a burst of faith, believe how good God is, what a happy bunch we would be. But we walk halfway in between trying to keep on God’s good side and at the same time, preserve our morality and our goodness and half obey Him and be half Christians. So, what does the grace of God tell us, the grace of God?

We had a distinguished preacher here last week. Here comes another one, distinguished looking brother, thin, lean, old, and I ask, who are you? And he says, I am Simon Peter, a servant. Oh, you’re Saint Peter. Oh no, not Saint Peter. I denied my Lord. I am Simon Peter an apostle and servant of Jesus Christ, through like precious faith with us, to the righteousness of God and our Savior, Jesus Christ. Well then, I get a little frightened, because I don’t know. I’m afraid of an apostle, I’m afraid I’m not doing this thing right. And I say, well, would you say a word, and he says, grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ our Lord. According as His divine power has given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that has called us up to glory and virtue.

And I say to him, Brother Peter, we’ve been talking about the grace of God, and you lived near Jesus Christ’s heart, and you wrote two epistles. And you lived with the other apostles and with our Lord. Tell us, what does the grace of God do for people? And what should people do seeing that they have obtained like precious faith and the grace of God?

Peter says, well, do this, brethren, and you’ll be all right. Give all diligence and add to your faith virtue. But Brother Peter, if we seek to be virtuous, they say we’re legalistic. A dry smile comes on his face. And he says, they talked that way about me too. But add to your faith, virtue and to virtue knowledge. Yes. And to knowledge, temperance. Excuse me, what does temperance mean Peter? It means being able to control your own body. Don’t eat too much. Don’t drink. Don’t abuse your own body by the way you live. And to temperance, add patience, and to patience, add godliness, and to godliness, brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness, love.

Well, now, Peter, doesn’t the grace of God prepare me with nothing further? Doesn’t it prepare me to meet the Lord? Well, he says, if it had then, I wouldn’t tell you this. Here’s what I want to tell you. If these things be in you and abound, they make that ye shall be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. But he that lacks these things is blind and can’t see a far off. He’s forgotten that he was purged from his own old sins. Wherefore says Peter, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure. But Peter, I accepted Jesus when I was eleven. And as Peter knew today’s as he knew his day, he’d say, maybe the Jesus you accepted was the popular Jesus, without a cross and without a code and without any commandments and without any demand. Maybe it was merely an imaginary Jesus. Make your calling and election sure.

And if you do these things, ye shall never fall. For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. That’s Peters exhortation. That’s what he says, and he doesn’t contradict Paul. He and Paul were brethren. They had one little argument, and Paul won. But later on, Peter humbly wrote about our beloved brother Paul and some of these deep stuff that they were agreed.

So, Paul says, the grace of God teaches us, and Peter says here’s what it teaches us. Let your life grow constantly in morality and righteousness, in charity and virtue and goodness, and then brotherly kindness. That’s what the grace of God teaches. I don’t want to disturb anybody that’s actually believing. But I want to make it awfully sure that you don’t think you’re believing when you’re not. For the grace of God that brings salvation also teaches us inwardly a high moral standard, and then enables us to live it.

Tags Deny, Grace, Repudiate

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date November 5, 2023

“Three Dimensions of Christian Living“

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Three Dimensions of Christian Living

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

July 13, 1958

Now, we’ve been talking about grace. From the book of Titus, the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present world.

Grace divine, how sweet the sound; sweet the grace that I have found, wrote one old brother. Another one said, sweet the sound of grace divine, sweet the grace that makes me Thine. Grace is a charming sound harmonious to the ear, said another one.

Now, that’s the grace of God. And I have been talking about it these Sunday mornings. And have said that if the grace of God has reached you, it has taught you also by inward impulse. And the first thing that it teaches is denial. That is, it teaches us to disavow, renounce, and repudiate. And there are two things mentioned here that are to be renounced: ungodliness and worldly lusts. Ungodliness means of course, impiety, irreverence, and whatever is not of God; whatever God is not in. Whatever God’s not in is ungodly by definition, “un” being a negative of God, godly.

Now, the dictates of grace teach us that whatever is ungodly is forthwith to be renounced. Impiety, irreverence, forthwith are to be renounced. And it is to be renounced even if accepted, say, at school. We spend an awful lot of our time in the hands of pagans, an awful lot of time. We start in the preschool classes with finger painting. And we end up with a PhD taken in some university where the name of God is about as welcome as the name of Hitler would have been in the Jewish synagogue. And the schools place their approval tacitly or overtly from lots of things that are still not of God. God isn’t in them. They’re ungodly.

Either we are not to be Christians or else we are to renounce these ungodly things. Even if, for upwards of twenty years, we have been taught that they’re all right in the schools. We are to renounce them even if they are set to music on TV or radio. And many of the things are set to music on TV and radio that are irreverent, ungodly, God-less; that God isn’t in them. The fact that they are set to music or illustrated doesn’t make them good. The Christian has got to have backbone enough.

You know, there’s one kind of person that will never get to heaven; and that is the one without a backbone. The fellow that has no backbone we’ll never make it through. Because it takes a certain amount of backbone to deny when everybody else is affirming and to affirm when everybody else is denying. Anybody that thinks a Christian is a weakling, he’s never been a Christian. He’s never been much around Christians. Any dead fish or dying fish can turn over on his back and float belly up with the stream, but a salmon goes up the Columbia River over falls as high as this building.

And the Christian, the grace of God, and the Word of God unite to teach us that we are to deny ungodliness and renounce it for good even if it is practiced by celebrities. The saints and prophets of the day are the celebrities. And some celebrities practice things that are ungodly. And the fact that they are practiced by widely known people doesn’t in any wise mitigate the ungodliness. They’re still ungodly, denying ungodliness. And all ungodliness is the be denied by the Christian even if it is found in classic literature.

The fact that Bokorshow or somebody else wrote it, doesn’t make it good, doesn’t make it godly. It’s still dirty if it’s dirty and it’s still ungodly if it’s ungodly. And it isn’t better because it’s found embalmed in classic art. Go to the Art Institute and you will find some things there God isn’t in, and every Christian is to have backbone enough to be sneered at for repudiating such things.

And even if they’re approved by our friends, good kind friends who love us. And even if they’re practiced by church people, they’re still wrong; and even if they’re defended by priests or pastors. And outside of murder and adultery, I don’t suppose there is any sin anywhere that some priest or pastor won’t come out in favor of. Shakespeare said the devil could always quote a text for a purpose. He must have gone to church sometimes anyhow or been among religious people.

Now, if this sounds severe, what I am saying to you my friends, remember what Jesus said: if Thy hand offend thee, cut it off. If thine eye offend thee or cause thee to stumble, pluck it out. For it’s better to go to heaven with only one eye and one hand than to go to hell having two of each.

And if he just turned back a page here, to 2 Timothy, Paul says, I charge thee therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at is appearing and His Kingdom. Preach the Word. Be instant in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. But after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers having itching ears. And they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables. Watch thou in all things. Endure afflictions. Do the work of evangelist and make full proof of thy ministry.

And then the second is worldly lust. Of course, the old word lust in English. And I looked it up in Greek and it means about the same thing, that is, the original word, which was translated lust, means desires. It means pleasure longing, pleasure longing, longings for pleasure. And these are indentified elsewhere in the New Testament by modifiers. I have gone over the New Testament to find them. And there’s a modifier called foolish lust. Another one is called hurtful lust, fleshly lust, ungodly lust, former lust in your ignorance, youthful lust and lusts that war in your members.

Now these are here and they’re natural to fallen man; perfectly natural to fallen man that he should have foolish, hurtful lust, fleshly ungodly lust. And of course, because they’re natural, they’re defended; defended and excused by the psychologist and the sociologists and the modern writers and the marriage counselors and consultants. But the Christian doesn’t ask advice about them, He renounces them. Because he’s taught both inwardly and on the pages of the Book. He’s taught on the pages of the Book to renounce worldly lust. And he’s taught by the Spirit in his heart to renounce worldly lust. And so, when he picks up a book excusing worldly lust, he turns, shuts it up and turns it away from him, because he’s taught inwardly and by the book of God.

Now, God doesn’t leave us there. He says, we’re to deny, and I’ve born down heavily upon that. But He doesn’t leave us there. God never calls us to dwell in a vacuum, and He never calls us to sterile negativity; negativeness, nothingness, not doing things, not being ungodly, not being lustful, not being unbelieving. He calls us away from those things to something else. He doesn’t leave us in a vacuum. He calls us out that He might bring us in.

And so, the indwelling Spirit and the Word agree that we should live. There’s your positive word. Deny, there’s your negative word. Live, there’s your positive word. And just as this electric light has a negative and a positive pole, and if it doesn’t have both we have no light Just as this recorder must have juice, it has both negative and positive. If you don’t have the two you don’t have a recorder. So, the Word of God teaches us that there should be held in suspension the two. We must say no and yes. No to the ungodly, yes to the godly.

Perhaps somebody could get me a glass of water. I got a little laryngitis last Tuesday night. I haven’t been able to get free from. I am not sick. And I’m not discouraged. I’m just hindered. Now how shall we live? I remember hearing Churchill one time during the war make a speech and he coughed all the way through it. I remember that and that gives me a little consolation to know that the great Winnie. Thank you, my friend. I don’t know if that cures what I have but it may help. I never liked to drink water while I preach because it makes me self-conscious. I always remember a story about the windmill that ran on water.

Now, how should we live? How should we live? Well, thank God, live, live, live. Get that word, live, live. There’s a good positive word, live. We should live. We couldn’t live before because we were dead. Now we can live. Well, to live soberly, righteously and godly, and in this present world.

And here we have, and I’ll be brief with it, the Christians three-dimensional life. These are sobriety, righteousness and godliness. There are your three dimensions for the Christian, sobriety, which means temperance and self-control. This is the self-dimension and has to do with our relation to ourselves. A man who can’t control himself, you’re not going to make much of a Christian. Sobriety, self-control, temperance, self-mastery. This is the self-dimension. This is Christianity as relates to me.

And there’s righteousness, which means justice, honesty, loving kindness. That’s the “others” dimension, or it’s Christianity as it relates to others through us.

And then there’s godliness. And this is the god dimension, our relation to God: faith, reverence and love. And on those three dimensions, man lives. Christians live if they deny ungodliness and worldly lusts. But if they do not deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, then they’re all confused and mixed up. If they do not deny ungodliness they can join a church, but they can’t have godliness. And if they do not deny a worldly lust, they may join the church but not have sobriety or temperance or self-control. And if they do not have godliness, and sobriety, how are they going to have righteousness?

So, we find ourselves dwelling there, this triangle, or these three dimensions. Sobriety, that’s self-control. We’re not much of a people for self-control now. They believed in it once, sober, serious people. And now an unsober, uncontrolled, lawless generation is writing books about those serious-minded, self-controlled, disciplined men who lived their Christianity like a soldier.

They’re writing now, I remember Papa, one foot in heaven, chicken every Sunday. How I got on with Grandpa. The young smart alecks of the day who are living in Sodom in lusts and sinful self-indulgence, now write serial comic books about the old Puritans and the men of God who said, let’s do right if the heavens fall. And they show some of their extreme and radical beliefs. They had radical beliefs, I suppose. Lot was a radical in Sodom. And Noah was a radical before the flood. Daniel was a radical in Babylon. Luther was a radical in Germany. John Wesley was a radical in a rotten society in England. Maybe they were radical, but they were sober men who were full of the Spirit and who controlled themselves.

Incidentally, that Book of Proverbs, I don’t want to steal any of the thunder of the brother who will be giving a series on the book of Proverbs to the young people. But that book of Proverbs deals with that kind of life. It’s a grave. Life to the book of Proverbs is a serious thing. There’s no yakking and no empty laughing. In fact, it calls laughter, the laughter of fools it says is like the crackling of thorns under a pot. Did you ever try to take dry thorns and light them and put them under a pot to try to cook an egg? Notice how that crackle and pop in all directions and then die down. The old man of God said that’s the way of the laughter of fools.

Well, sobriety that’s self-controlled, you know, the Holy Ghost is in you, and you’re living right. That’s your self-dimension. Then there’s righteousness, your attitude toward others. The Spirit teaches us both in the Word and in the heart that we’re to live righteously toward others. You don’t cheat others. You don’t rob others, don’t lie about others. You don’t gossip about others and do them harm.

And then there’s godliness; faith, I say, and reverence and love. That comes first. Our attitude toward God is first, but it’s put third here because it starts with self and goes up. I am last. My neighbor is next, and God is first. God is first, my neighbor is next, and I am last. That’s the way it’s supposed to be in the Christian life.

Somebody said, what a cold and colorless life we would live to be sober and righteous and godly. That’s just where you’re mistaken my friend. That man who fell out with his wife here yesterday or day before yesterday. He went to get her. She wouldn’t come back. He drew a gun. She started to run. He started to fire, and he hit her a few times, I guess. He didn’t kill her and then turned around and blew whatever that was he had in his head out. It wasn’t brains because his brains were cooked, steaming with fury.

They want me to believe that that is superior to the self-controlled, righteous, God-fearing man who lives his holy life, so he dares to die. They want me to believe that a bunch of shapely mares out in Hollywood nay over the fence; that shapely stallions out in Hollywood; they want me to believe that they are superior to those serious-minded fathers of whom we now make fun and about whom comic books are written; who walked with God and were not, for God took them.

If you want to get your faith up and get your heart helped, go to Plymouth where our fathers landed and read the tombstones. Go on up on the hill and read the tombstones. That’s all I want you to do. That’s enough for a day. That’s Bible enough for a day. You’ll get more text there than you would get in University of Chicago. Right there on the hill, men of God lived there. They had their good old bishops with the Bible along with them and said the King James was modernistic. But they carried their Geneva Bible along with them and they read it, righteous men, sober men, godly men. Don’t forget, my brethren, that the states were founded mostly by sober men, godly men.

The nation was whittled out, this is close to the Fourth of July. I can wax patriotic and say this nation was whittled out by men who held God in reverence and held their neighbor in loving affection and held themselves in control. The other kind went along for the ride. But the nation was founded by the other kind, this kind: sober, the righteous, the godly. And our hospitals were founded mostly by that kind of people. The very word, hospital, comes up out of a religious context.

When they marched from Europe at the preaching of Peter the Hermit and marched for Jerusalem. They went in there and they built hospitals and called some hospitallers. And almost every alleviation of human suffering and woe that’s known in modern society has sprung up out of the Christian ethic, the sober, the righteous, the godly people. And when the human heart goes free, and the human brain runs away, and we have atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, death rays, bacteriological warfare, destruction of cities.

No, my friend, the Holy Ghost isn’t calling you to negativity. The Holy Ghost isn’t calling you to sit around solemnly like an owl in the daytime, staring unseeingly ahead of your waiting for the end. The Lord is calling you to live. Do you hear that word—live. But live soberly and live righteously.

And the word righteous; always remember, is not a negative word. It’s an explosive, dynamic, positive word. The man who determines to live righteously in this unrighteous world is going to have a full-time job on his hands. You say you have nothing to do? You live righteously in an unrighteous world, and you will have something to do.

So, I call you have to renounce. Renounce what? Renounce your prison and take all of God’s great out of doors. But until you have renounced your prison, you’ll never go free. Renounce your chains and take all the infinite, limitless, liberty of God. And renounce your darkness and take all the shining light of God that shineth more and more unto a perfect day. Sweet the sound of grace divine, sweet the grace that makes me Thine. That’s what the grace of God teaches.

He just wants us to be good people, loving people, generous, kindly people, God-fearing people, self-controlled people with temperance and sobriety as a part of our nature. But at the same time, I have all the freedom of God’s vast out of doors and all the liberty of the sons of God; all the shining light, the Light of the world pours on us. Amen.

Tags Grace, Lust, Ungodly

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 8, 2023

“How to Grow in Grace”

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How to Grow in Grace

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 29, 1957

We may be very grateful to the Holy Spirit and to the man Peter who when he was very, very old and about ready to lay down his burden, said, wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance. Though ye know them and be established in the present truth. Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir you up by putting you in remembrance, knowing that shortly I must put off this, my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ has shown me. Moreover, I will endeavor that you may be able, after my departure, to have these things always in remembrance.

Now, that was Peter in his second epistle. And he wrote a little further and then said, in 3:10, the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in the which the heavens shall pass away with the great noise and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. The earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hastening unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless, we according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless. And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction. Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own steadfastness. But grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever. Amen.

Now, those last two verses, ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, why be careful, lest you be led away with the error of the wicked and fall from your own steadfastness, but grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, this is the language of the dear old apostle. Ye beloved, he says. I still believe, I’ve said it a number of times in various contexts, but I still believe that old Christians ought to be sweet, mellow Christians, and that we ought to get more mellow and gracious as we get older. We find it here very plain in this last epistle of Peter’s, a perfect blend of tender love and severe faithfulness. Now one is necessary to the other, because without one, you will have only harm without the other. If a man is only filled with tenderest love, then he is likely to become sentimental, or he’s likely to become so tender that he’s harmful to those he ministers to. But, if on the other hand, he is simply faithful to truth, he’s likely to injure with the very truth he is using to help people.

But Peter seemed to have both. He said, you, beloved, seeing ye know these things before. And he took a good measure, an account to see that we would have this before us long, long after he was gone. He said, seeing ye know these things. And what are these things? Well, the things named above, the certainty of judgment for all mankind. That God holds up actions and doesn’t judge, not because He is careless, but because He’s waiting for men to repent. And then, that the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night. And the fiery passing away of the whole creation is before us and is coming, and the establishment of a new creation for eternity. These are the things, at least some of the things that he referred to; and said, seeing you know these things.

And so, he held them before us as a reason for our Christian living. Then he said, if you know these things, beware. Now here’s a red light. Here is a caution light. He said, you Christians, I’m going away from you and you’re going to be left here in what he called a wicked and adulterous generation. And so, you’re going to have to beware. That is, exercise moral caution.

Today, out in, I don’t know how many towns throughout the United States and on highways between towns, there will be men, or young men maybe, driving without caution. I suppose we tend to get more cautious as we get older, but I’ve seen old men drive with anything but caution. But there will be a number of them, I couldn’t tell you how many, I wish I could say none, but I know there will be many who will forget to exercise caution and will press on the gas and pull their great cars up to tremendous speeds and fail to, what the newspapers call, negotiate a curve. They mean they couldn’t make the curve and a hit or go into a gully or hit a bank or a bridge and they will be gathered up dead. They will not pay any attention to the markings. The markings are not put there by mean policemen or nasty state troopers in order that they might devil us. They’re put there because a little way ahead, there’s danger.

So, the man, Peter, said beware; not to take his spite out on the people. Neither do I repeat it because I have any grudges against anybody. It’s just a sign here, slippery when wet, sharp curve ahead, “S” turn ahead, and a crossroad and railroad crossing–beware. It’s just a sign on the way. And the moral fool disregards the sign, of course. He shrugs his shoulders, rushes on and perishes, but the wise man slows down and proceeds with caution and lives. And the man of God says, now you know what’s ahead. Therefore, you Christians, beware lest you be led away by the world as others have been.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about that fellow, that goat down at the stockyards that I’ve mentioned several times here, they call him Judas Iscariot. I can’t get him out of my mind. They say he’s down there. I’ve never seen him, but I’ve had it confirmed that they have him. He’s a well-trained old goat with a deadly cynicism and complete cruelty, or else just ignorance. I don’t know which. I hope it’s the latter. And when they want a flock of sheep to go into a pen so they can get killed. They won’t go in. They’re afraid to go in being timid things. So, they start this old goat down and he leads them down the runway to the slaughter pen. Then, they open a gate and he goes out. They kill the sheep and he comes back and leads another flock down. That’s his job. That’s his occupation, leading innocent sheep astray. They call him Judas Iscariot.

And that Judas Iscariot is in the church here and there, too. And some people live only to betray others and to lead them away and to drag them down. And after they have betrayed them, they have very little interest in them after that. So, he says, lest ye should be led away. Always remember that unless you watch, you can be led. But always remember that everybody is led by someone. You say not me. I’m as hard as a rock and I am not led by anybody. Do you know that you are led by your newspaper, your radio, the magazines? You’re led by Billboard, your schooling, your education, the people that talk to you. You are led by the history that you have read. You are led by the friends and associates and social companions. You are led, but you just don’t know it.

I have been hearing of something that I think; Mr. Chase and I sometimes say good naturedly, that if it gets any worse, we’ll hunt a cave and become monks. I don’t think we ever will, but under circumstances, but I’m inclined a little more that way lately because I’ve heard of a strange thing. It is a subconscious, subaudible advertising they’re putting on now on the radio. Your subconscious hears it but you don’t hear it. You can hear, God knows, you can hear an anthem sung now in favor of everything.

But they are now not only going to give you the ones you can hear, but they now are giving you ones that come through on a wavelength that your ear doesn’t receive, but your subconscious gets. And they keep plugging away at you like that. What is that but brainwashing? I wonder if we ought not to write our Senator and ask him if we can’t stop a thing like that. Who knows, one of these days when he’s going to rush out and buy a pink elephant? And his wife will say what’s the matter with you, Charles? Well, Charles said, I don’t really know. It just came on me, a desire to buy a pink elephant. And somewhere in Washington or New York or Chicago Loop, somebody has been advertising pink elephants on the subaudible wavelength.

And so, our subconscious gets all worked up. You’re being led Brother, don’t forget it; and you’re being brainwashed. But it just depends upon who does it. If the Lord does it; if the Holy Ghost, does it, if it’s washed by the water of the Word, then blessed are you. But you can be led astray. And the Scripture says watch it, that ye be led not astray.

Now, grow in grace rather than be led astray. Grow in grace. And I want to point out to you that whether it’s a child or a garden, it has got to be cared for. There’s got to be watchfulness and use of means. If you do not use means, we have a wilderness because nature will grow whether we like it or not. And the only way you can have a garden is to use means and care and thoughtful planning. Because if you don’t use thoughtful planning and take care, you will have something growing out there all right, because nature will grow. But you’ll have a wilderness. And the difference between a wilderness and a garden is that the wilderness grows without planning and the gardens is carefully planned. Grow in grace. Grow in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.

I talked last week about backsliding, and I think it had some effect, because I’ve had a number of people talk about it, and not talk critically about it. That is, I didn’t hear the criticisms if there were any. I heard the other side. But have you ever stopped to think how many times we’ve gone to altars and knelt at chairs and benches, and prayed and stood when the evangelists asked us to and have gone forward and renewed our vows and consecrations? Have you ever thought how often we’ve done that? Well, a lot have done it and I wonder how many have gone on then and grown in grace.

The Word of God says it is better not to vow than to vow and not pay. But the Bible heroes vowed and kept their vows. And the Christian heroes since Bible times vowed and kept their vows. And there are those living now who have made vows and kept them. But we stand and we reaccert our vows and reconsecrate over and over and over and over again down the years. It’s like getting married again, taking your vows over and over and over and over again. Every time a new voice is heard, we come and take our marriage vows over again. I think it’s silly. But we might as well do that as to be doing all of this vowing and standing and promising and never doing anything about it. It’s better to vow and pay, but it’s better not to vow than to vow and not pay.

I have been reading about this Henry Suso, Heinrich Suso. This Henry Suso, if you will allow us to anglicize him. He was an old Saint and I just been reading again about his conversion. He began to serve the Lord when he was, let’s see, five off 18 would make 13, wouldn’t it. When he was about 13, but he got no place. And he said he was quite contented just to keep out of the sins that would spoil his reputation. But as he went on trying to live a good life, why, a conviction for sin came on him. And he got under the burden, not only for the sins that would have ruined his reputation, but for the sins that would have ruined his relations with God. So suddenly, instantaneously, he was converted; converted just as suddenly and instantaneously as the flash of an eyelash.

Well, immediately after he was converted, he began to get moved inwardly to become a saint, to become a saintly young fellow. He was 18 then, and to seek the face of God and to put the world behind him and the flesh under his feet. And he said, immediately, the voice of the tempter said to him, now Henry, it’s alright for you to be a Christian the way you’ve been, but you know, this, this saintly business, this desire to be an unusual Christian, that’s awfully easy to talk about, but it’s awfully hard to do.

And he said, he answered back and said, well, but God can help me. And he said, the voice of the Tempter said, Henry, God can help you, but will He? And he said, he went to the Word of God in prayer and settled that one. Then he said, I found that God not only could, but was willing to help anybody who wraughts righteousness in His name. So, when the voice of the Tempter couldn’t get any further with him that way, why, the tempter got awfully smooth and soft and patted his back and said, All right, Henry, it’s very good that God will help you. There’s no question about that. But now why make a production out of it? Why push it so far? And why be unlike other people. Take it easy. Eat and drink and relax and be like the other Christians around you. They expect to go to heaven. Why should you want to be any different from what they are?

Well, that was convincing enough, so he went to the Lord about that. And he said the voice of Eternal Wisdom said to me. I don’t know what that was. It could have been the Holy Ghost or the Scriptures or the voice of God in him. But he said, the voice of Eternal Wisdom said to him, Henry, anybody who tries to catch a slippery eel by the tail, or who will try to begin the saintly life with a cool, lukewarm heart, both are foolish men. Henry heard that, and God said, Henry, don’t let him talk you out of it. Remember one thing? Anybody who thinks he can serve God and live for the world is a fool. Don’t try it. So, Henry said, all right, God, I will go on and I’ll put the world and the flesh under my feet and sin behind me.

And he went awhile, and he was young, and he began to get discouraged. He had no help. So, he said, not having any help, I taught some of my Christian friends for a bit of consolation. And he said they shrugged and raised their eyebrows and said, no, I can’t do it. This kind of thing can never come to any good end; this yearning after holiness, this desire to be all out on God’s side. We knew nothing good would come out of it.

So he apologized and said, O God, he said, it’s my fault. He said, I wouldn’t have had to hear them if I hadn’t gone and listened to them. So, he apologized. But he went on and he became one of the greatest saints of the 14th century. And today, we sing his hymns. And today, we warm our hearts at the fire of His mighty devotion. But he had some temptations to put behind him, some vows to keep. He listened to the voice of the Tempter and answered it in the name of the Lord. And when he couldn’t get any help from his Christian friends, he said, I decided to go it alone. It wasn’t very long until he had others following him.

It’ll always be so. When you start out, determine that you’re going to have the best God has for you, you won’t have many who will understand you, but it won’t be very long until people come to you. And the numbers are growing. And I stand in great encouragement to tell you that the number of those who are determined to put away, not only sin and the world and the flesh, but degenerate and decay in Christianity behind them and serve God after the Bible pattern–they’re growing.

Mr. McAfee comes and tells me about a Dutch Reformed preacher from where? Holland, Michigan. And I just talked to a Presbyterian pastor the other day. Why, there are hungry men seeking the face of God, not many, but they’re growing in numbers. And they come up out of not only one group, but they come up out of where you wouldn’t expect them at all, seeking the face of God. They are there. You won’t find many, but you’ll find some.

And now grow in grace. How can I grow in grace? There won’t be anything new here in this brief recital from here on. But you should hear it again, or you should hear it until you do something about it. Why, have you been reading the Word of God with meditation? Have you read a good portion of the Book daily, the sincere milk of the word. You haven’t? How do you expect to grow in grace? How do you expect to keep healthy and resist the inroads of the virus of sin? How do you expect to be saved from the epidemic of iniquity that’s all throughout the land, a pandemic, indeed, for it’s everywhere.

Do you make time for private prayer? You come to church on Sunday. But if this is all you get, you certainly are in grave danger spiritually. Make time for private prayer and then learn to pray as you go. Learn to put things out of your mind. Sometimes I wake up at night and lo and behold, I’m thinking about myself, or something related to me or my family and I push it from me and say, O Holy Father, Holy Trinity, blessed Holy Savior, and try to turn my mind away from even my family and myself, because naturally we gravitate to ourselves and our people. And on certain times, that’s perfectly proper. God has given you your family to take care of them.

But I tell you, we ought to learn to pray when we go and as we go. And then I think we ought also to improve our mental attitude in church. I’m not satisfied at all with our church services. I’m not pleased, partly my fault, party my ignorance, partly my lack of insight and spirituality, but I think we all ought to join to see whether we can’t improve our mental attitude in church. Instead of joking out in front and joking up the stairway and all the rest, we ought to come with reverence, not into a building. There’s nothing holy about this building of bricks, but into the presence of the great God, O God is here. Let us adore and own how holy is this place.

So, let’s improve our mental attitude. Some are grieving God very greatly by their attitude in church, whispering, passing notes, and, or bored with the whole business. If the preaching is so bad, that it bores you, go somewhere else. Don’t come here and endure me. I mean that. I’m not being nasty. I just mean that. If I’m inflicting something on you that puts you to sleep, in God’s name, pray me out of here and get somebody that will keep you awake. But, if your sleepiness lies in your own heart, in your own failure to appreciate spiritual things, then let’s put the blame where it belongs. If it’s on me, I’ll take it. But if it’s on you, will you take it? And let us ask God whether we can’t improve our mental attitude. We’re grieving God. I’m sure we’re grieving God by our failures. We’re grieving Him by our failures in this thing.

And then, we ought to read. We ought to read good books. If you’re over 10 years old, you ought not to read Christian fiction at all. Throw it out. You ought to read good books. There are good biographies. I was called to preach by reading a biography of a southern preacher. God’s spoke to my heart when I read that biography. And there are missionaries all over the world that were called of God while they read, say, the life of Livingstone, the book that the Sunday school gave to some of the graduates this morning. So, let’s get a hold of good books. You don’t have to read trash.

Somebody says, oh, Mr. Tozer, I admit I don’t read but I just don’t have time. How much time do you spend waiting? Now, I ask you, how much time do you spend waiting? You know, I read lots of books. But you know, I rarely sit down to a book reading session, very rarely. I read them in between time. I take a bus up here and I read on the bus. I ride downtown; I read on the train. I wait for a train, and I read then. I wait to go to bed at night when I’m riding on a train, and I read then. You can get it read if you want to do it bad enough. So, while you’re waiting and while you’re arriving, and put some other things away, and read some good books, Christian biography, Christian devotional books, good sound, hard Christian theology. Read up on it, get it into your heart and so improve yourself.

And then take your stand as a witness and let people know where you stand. They’re feeding us now a soft, baby, pre-cooked mash that any baby could eat. It’s the mash of toleration and brotherhood. Don’t hurt anybody’s feelings. If you’re with anybody and you find he’s a Roman Catholic, don’t hurt his feelings at all by talking about the Savior because he’s got his religion. If you find he’s an atheist, don’t, don’t hurt him. Be tolerant. Be kind. Be brotherly. And the more they feed us that tasteless mash, the further we get separated from each other and the worse the nations hate each other. In the hour when we are being brainwashed from Washington on the subject of toleration and brotherhood and religion, we’re getting further and further apart, and our bombs are getting bigger and our guided missiles longer and our ability to kill more terrible. So, the whole thing is hogwash, and ought to be recognized as such. Be a witness For Jesus Christ. Tell somebody not later than tomorrow morning that you’re a Christian see what it does for you.

I remember when I was a very young Christian, another fellow and I, just two of us, neither one of us could sing, so we didn’t have a singing service, but we used to ride to Kent, Ohio. Kent, Ohio was a little town. We went to the mayor and asked him whether we could have street meetings. He took us good naturedly. I think rather with a grain of salt or maybe a whole pinch and said, sure, sure boys, you can have street meetings. And we used to go up there like an ox to the slaughter, you know, hating to do it. Oh, how I hated it because I never was much for approaching people anyway. I’d never make a salesman. I would walk past the door five times rather than push the button, the doorbell; but we’d get up on the street and I’d start to yell. And somebody would say, well now, just exactly what happened to him? And they would turn around and begin to gather and pretty soon in that little town of Kent, I would have great crowd listen to me.

And my brother-in-law was along. And he wasn’t anything of a preacher. He was a slow-talking southerner who kept his voice low. But His face shone in those days with the light of God. And after I had preached until I had worn myself out, I put him on to testify. And then after we would close, we would get on what they call nowadays, an inter-urban, a streetcar that ran between towns. Oh, what a relaxation and joy and delight on the way home. I had done it. I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t the thing I liked to do. I’m not born for that kind of thing. I have met men that never saw a stranger.

I know a preacher friend of mine who went up to Washington and the United Nations. And where he was ready to sit and they were waiting on Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. My preacher friend walks in, and I don’t know how he wormed it, but somehow, he got in touch with Ms. Roosevelt. And he stood there and talked about God for 15 minutes to Mrs. Roosevelt while United Nations waited. Yeah!

That same fellow went to Eastman Kodak Company, and he walked into with a big smile and said, I want to see the President. Well, the Secretary said the President is in a meeting of the Board of Directors. He can’t see you now. He said, I can’t wait. I want to see the President now. Well, who are you? Well, I’m Reverend so and so. She said, well, I’ll go to him. So, she went off rather tiptoeing in and not knowing whether it means her job, right, but what. She said, you know, Mr. So and so, there’s a preacher outside who wants to see you, a preacher. He says, just relax a few minutes. Have a coffee break, he said, I’ll go talk to preacher.

So, he went out and there stood my friend. And he talked to him about God. And this Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Eastman Kodak Company, a multi-million-dollar concern, broke down and cried and wept like a baby and said, Reverend, I’ve been around this town, I’m well known. But up to now, you’re the first man that ever talked to me about my soul or about Jesus Christ.

And the big shots of the Board of Directors twiddled their thumbs while this preacher, now, he can do that. There, he’s got that. But I couldn’t do that. If I went in and said, I want to see the President, they’d motion to a cop. And they would say, would you lead this, out? Would you lead it out, please. They wouldn’t even say he.

So, you see, brethren, we’re not all alike. And we can’t all do the same thing. But we ought to be at the disposal of the Holy Ghost. And if God leads you to do some hard, impossible thing, go do it. And if you go like an ox to the slaughter, you will come away feeling like a lamb that hasn’t been slaughtered.

Well, and separate yourself from pollution, all kinds of pollution, bad Company, bad habits, bad books. Begin to spread to the light. That’s the positive side of last Sunday’s talk. I talked last Sunday on backsliding and how we are bent to backslide. And I tell you, my friend, there’s a gravitational pull. There’s a moral, gravitational tug that is just as strong as the natural law of gravity. And it’ll pull you down and pull you down and flatten you out and mix you with the earth. And you’ve got to rise above it by taking the means of grace that God affords you; the prayer and the Word of God and the prayer meeting and the church service and testimony and witnessing and praying as you go and mingling with good people. If you can’t find any, then read a book about a good fellow. That’s next best. But somehow see that your fellowship is with the saints.

Many fall from their own steadfastness, because they don’t go clear over on God’s side. They get converted and then they listen to the voice of the Tempter. And the voice of the Tempter says, now take it easy. Take it easy. You see all these Christians? They’re all going to heaven. Why should you be unusual? I stand to tell you, if you won’t be an unusual Christian in this backslidden age, you won’t be much of a Christian at all. For the man who is much of a Christian is bound to be unusual.

If you were all as the whole city of Chicago were composed of little roots, four feet tall, I’d be an unusual man. I’m five foot 10. And in a Christian society where we’re pygmies, the man has got to be determined to be unusual to stand out.

Well, the wrecks are everywhere confirming the Word of God. The sad, miserable wrecks are everywhere. Because iniquity shall abound, the love of the many shall wax cold. But they that continue on to the end, the same shall be saved.

We’ve had that explained away, but it’s in the Book, and Jesus Christ said it and I can’t explain it away. Whatever dispensation that applies to or whomsoever it belongs, the principle lies there. They that persevere the same shall be saved. Somebody would say that’s Arminianism. Brother McAfee was reading out of the Calvinistic catechism to me this morning. You know what it said? It said, the grace of God that saved a man also worked in him to make him persevere and go on. That’s Calvinism mind you. To say that Calvinists say that you get saved and once in grace, always in grace. And from that time on you can put out your wings and you’d be borne home to heaven. They don’t.

That’s a misunderstanding and a misapplication. John Calvin never said it. He believed in a rebirth. He believed in a renewed life. He believed in a Spirit-filled life. He believed in a sanctified life. Why should we hide behind any misinterpretations of ancient theology when the Holy Ghost says, they that continue faithful unto the end, the same shall be saved. Saved up out of the wreck it means of course. Saved up out of the woe of the world. And for the moment it’s not talking about justification, but salvation out from the wreckage and rubble of the world.

Well, shall we go on? There are signs that God is blessing here and there. For a few days, we’ve got the next few days, I am to spend time preaching with James Stewart to the European Evangelistic Society; R.R Brown with Stacy Woods of InterVarsity, with numbers of others; Paris Reidhead and R.S. Roseberry. I don’t know what will come out of it.

But O Brethren, won’t you pray that God somehow or other, there are people everywhere hungry, but we’re not organized. We’re not together, we’re wasting our sweetness on the desert air if you will excuse the expression. I wonder if God won’t raise up some fellow like a Reidhead or somebody else who is young enough and vigorous enough to pull this all together. And perhaps the Holy Ghost will bring a new kind of revival to the world that won’t just scrape the surface but will go down to the roots in human living so that we may be saved from our sins and from ourselves and from the world and from iniquity and from our past and from our present; saved unto a life of saintliness and holiness before God. Won’t you pray? Won’t you spend a lot of time praying for this?

Tonight, I preach my third sermon on worship. I can hardly wait. I could wish I could start now. I had such a marvelous time preparing it. If the music tonight is anything like it was last Sunday night, I look forward to that with great relish and delight. God bless you. Try to come back.

Tags Grace, Growth, Prayer

Messages

Tozer Talks

“Some Christian Qualities to Seek“

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“Some Christian Qualities to Seek”

Pastor and author Aiden Wilson Tozer

October 20, 1957

A brief message from the Book of Colossians. Colossians 3, in the fifteenth verse, often read and memorized by the people of God but still as fresh as a new morning. The Holy Spirit says to us, let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body. And be ye thankful. And let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him.

Now, he says, “let” here, and as you know, the word let means, see to it. It doesn’t mean permit only. It’s stronger than that. It’s an affirmative, positive word—permit. Let as we say, let him do it. It’s to grant permission, but “let” here. And also let means hinder. But in this instance, it means see to it that. In other words, as George Duncan said last Thursday night at the Keswick, there is no place in grace where we are free from the necessity of discipline and choice. I agree with that fully. There is no place where you’re going to float to heaven on a pink cloud. You must take hold of yourself, because in us dwell two powers, the natural life, with bad inclinations. I know that some say that the bad, natural life is taken out, but I’ve never met anybody yet that I’d trust if the Lord left him. I’ve never met any Christian yet that I’d trust him very long if the Lord left him.

They say that one great old brother who believed in the elimination, that is eradication of the natural bad in man, the natural flesh. They said to him, brother, you say that the natural life received from Adam has been eliminated? He said, yes sir. That’s what I believe. And he said, let me ask you a question. Suppose that a young man who had had the natural Adam life completely eliminated, married a young woman who had had the natural life completely eliminated. And they had a baby, would the baby be redeemed automatically and not need the new birth? They had him. So, he gave an illustration. He said, well, it’s like this. He said, you have a sour apple tree and you graft a good apple branch in, he said, that good branch will bear good fruit. But if you plant the seeds, you would get a bad tree. That was supposed to answer that question, but all it did was confirm the other man’s opinion, because obviously, that seed was bad, and it’s bad still. So, we’ve got that to deal with. It’s possible to live above it and live in the Spirit and not fulfill it as I tried to preach last week at Keswick.

But there is within us the power of Christ, the presence of the new Man and the holy inclinations and the good inclinations we find in the seventh of Romans yearning to do good. And in the eighth chapter of Romans we’re taught how the yearning to do good can overcome the yearning, the gravitational tendencies of the natural man. But our lives will go in the direction that we determine they should go. He said, let’s see to it, see to it. The indwelling power of Christ then will furnish the power. This that I have said previously is not in any way to excuse poor living. I don’t believe in it. I believe that God’s children are to live day by day in the Spirit and not sin and fulfill the lusts of the flesh. He said, let’s permit, see to it that the peace of God rules in your heart. And whatever rules in your heart, that’s the way you’ll go, just as whoever is at the wheel of the car, that’s where their car will go. And whoever runs the country, that’s the way the country will go. And so, whoever rules your heart, if it’s the peace of God, why, you will have that in your heart and that will be the way your life will go. To which also he says ye are called.

Now, Adam, old Adam and his brood come from that bad seed the brother talked about in that apple. There’s inward discord there. That’s our trouble, inward discord. We’ve always had inward discord you know. It’s only recently that we invented psychiatrists who lay you down on the couch and have you tell your story. But everybody has had inward discord. I can imagine that Adam and Eve walked around grinding their teeth many of time. And Adam went away shaking his head saying, that woman. I am sure of it. I’m sure of it. That’s just because they were fallen human beings, discord was their inward discord. And always it’s the inward discord that causes the outward discord.

If suddenly, everybody in the world had peace of heart we could eliminate the Sputnik and all the armies and navies and policemen. If we had inner accord, I said discord, but accord, inner accord, if we had inner peace, everybody had inner peace, we can eliminate all armies. And we could call home John Foster Dulles and all the rest and say, now, go fishing. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about, because the inner discord is taken away and everybody’s at peace. And when people are at peace, they won’t hurt each other. It’s when they’re not at peace that the trouble comes, and most people aren’t.

So, he said, have peace. Let’s see to it that the peace of God rules in your heart to which you’re also called. And it’s the inward discord that causes the outward bickering and brawls and wars. And it’s the inward redemption, redemption and reestablishment of peace that results in inward harmony. And he said, ye are called, you’re called in one body, harmonious accord between ourselves as a source of measureless enjoyment. No question. It’s a source of measureless enjoyment. And discord is the source of the greatest suffering in the world.

I have said, I have never had anybody answer it. Maybe it wasn’t worth answering or maybe nobody could, that I have said that I believe the source of the most pain and suffering among mankind is bad dispositions, people with bad tempers. But you say, isn’t cancer worse? No, cancer kills its victim and gets it over with, but a fellow with a bad disposition lives with it, maybe seventy years. And his wife lives with it, poor woman, maybe fifty years. And she suffers, not as sharp and as acute maybe as tuberculosis or cancer or leukemia, but it doesn’t kill its victim. It just tortures them till they die. But inward peace, the harmony and love inside the heart is a source of great enjoyment to us all.

So, let the peace of God rule in your heart to which you’re called in one body. And let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Now, here’s what the Gideons are dedicated to, to giving out are the word of Christ. The word of Christ. The word of Christ, what does it mean? Does it mean that you will buy a red-letter testament? If you have a red-letter testament, don’t be offended by what I say, because it’s perfectly alright for you to have one I suppose. But I think the red-letter testament unintentionally gives a bad impression, because it gives the impression that the letters written in red, were the words of Christ and the other ones are the word of man which is not true.

The word of Christ is not only the words Christ spoke, but they’re all the words spoken about Christ by inspired man. So, letting the word of Christ dwell in you richly may mean letting the first Psalm dwell in you or the 23rd Psalm or the 22nd Psalm, or the 46th Psalm or the 103 Psalm, or any of the Psalms or the Prophets, or the Gospels, or the Acts or the Epistles or Revelation. So don’t imagine that if you see some words printed and read that that means that they’re Christ and they’re more important, they’re not more important. In addition to the fact they murder your eyes, I don’t know whoever invented that, but it’s invented and so we have.

But the word of Christ is whatever the holy prophet said about Christ, what the holy apostle said about Christ and what Christ said about things when He was on earth. That’s the word of Christ. And let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.

Now, where does it dwell in you? Well, it dwells in your mind by memorizing, and we ought to memorize the Scriptures. We ought to memorize it by loving it rather than mechanical memorization, but we ought to memorize it. It’s in your mind by memorizing. It’s in your heart, by loving it. It’s in your will by choosing. And it’s in your life by enthroning. Those four things–that would make a sermon in itself and anybody can have it if he wants it for a sermon outline of four points here. The word of Christ dwells in your mind by memorizing it. There’s something about the word of God, when it gets into the human mind, it corrects faults and purifies the mind and does something good for it. And then it’s in your heart by loving it. We should love the word as David said he did and it’s in your will by choosing to obey it and it’s in your whole life by enthroning it. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.

Now, the Holy Ghost put that little phrase in, “all wisdom,” a little prepositional phrase thrown in here as a modifier. And I want you to notice that he said, let the word of Christ dwell in you and in all wisdom, because it’s perfectly possible to have a lot of the word of God in your mind and have no wisdom at all. And so, it will be worse off than if he didn’t. I mean for instance, Jehovah’s Witnesses quote the Bible continuously, but they have no wisdom. They quote it all out of its context and give their own meaning to it. And so there are other groups that quote the Bible, but it’s not in wisdom. There is a divine wisdom. The same Holy Spirit that inspired the Bible must teach the Bible. He must illuminate the Bible so that when you hear it and read it and memorize it, you’ll know what it means in spiritual meaning.

Then he says, teaching and admonishing one another. In this day and age, we hire our teachers. We hire teachers at school, and we sit and listen to them and go home. But the Scripture says teaching and admonishing one another. Every one of you should be a teacher of somebody else. Admonished means to reprove and to warn gently and kindly, but seriously and determinedly.

I’ve been doing a bit of research on the old Methodists for a series I’m writing on those amazing Methodists. And you know what I find? I find they divided their churches up into groups of twelve, called classes, and up into smaller groups called bands. And they had group leaders, class leaders, and then they had persons over those bands. And the business of those class leaders was not to lead the meeting, not to be as we say now, the emcee. The Methodists never heard of that horrible thing. But what they did was this, they picked out some wise old sharp-eyed, prayerful brother and they said, now we’ll make you a class leader and we’ll put eleven people under you, not actually under you, but we’ll put them into your prayerful care.

And they gave him the list and gave him their names and said, now you watch over them as over your own soul and pray for them. And if you see them going wrong, go to them. So that this class leader with these eleven persons to whom he was responsible, women for women I suppose and men for men. But when this class leader saw anybody beginning to slip, he didn’t go to the pastor and he didn’t go to the open prayer meeting. And he didn’t talk behind his back. He went right straight to his Christian brother. And he said, my brother, I am bothered about you. I’m worried about you because of the way you’re living. And most often he got him straightened out and nobody ever knew anything about it. It was the Holy Spirit using a man to admonish another man–teaching and admonishing one another. But we’re not honest enough nor courageous enough now to do that. Now if you admonished a man he gets blazing mad, but that’s because we’re so carnal and far from God.

In Colossae, they were assumed to be close enough to God to accept admonishments. And in the Methodists, they had to be close enough to God or they got shown the back door. They actually did show them the back door. And if Wesley found things weren’t going right, he said, straighten out you’ll see my face no more and he walked out on them and they straightened out.

Now, if we did this, this would head off many a bad fall on the part of some of our Christian people, particularly young Christians. It says we’re to teach and admonish each other, and one way of teaching and admonishing is to sing. Sing songs and hymns and spiritual songs. Now, this is Paul’s threefold classification: psalms of David set to music, hymns written by the Christians and you’ll find a number of them if I had time. I’d point them out to you in the New Testament. Some of Paul’s epistles contain little gems which Paul didn’t write, but which we borrowed and set in there, the same as if you hear a preacher preaching a sermon, and suddenly, he goes off into a four-line stanza of a hymn saying what he wants to say better than he can. So, Paul, in some of his epistles, quoted certain passages, which were actually hymns which the Christians were singing. And he said that they ought to sing these, and not only the songs but hymns of what the old Methodists and Presbyterians called a human composition. And then spiritual songs, I don’t know what that would be, perhaps it would be another way of saying the other two, songs and hymns.

And then, singing with grace in your heart to the Lord. You know, whenever I go, almost any place I go, what I miss is our singing here. I miss it. We don’t have the greatest singers in the world here. We have good singers. And we have some who have a reputation as good singers. But I mean that we’re not a St. Olaf’s outfit here. But there’s something here, the singing; singing with grace in your heart. And I hear grace in a song when I hear the song. There are some religious songs that you couldn’t get any grace and grace would enter that place. But there are other songs that you’ll sing with grace in your heart, you’ll make a rather ordinary song pretty good. Have you ever had the experience of having a fellow who wasn’t too well instructed, but who did love God and who sang with the Spirit. He would get up and choose a rather ragged number that wasn’t too good and put his head off on one side and close his eyes and sing it, and pretty soon you were getting blessed even if the song wasn’t the best. Now if he’d had a good one, he’d have multiplied his usefulness. But, I’ve seen that happen more than once. And if somebody sang with grace in their hearts, and if the song wasn’t so good, they made it good. And I’ve heard some of the most noble songs ever composed by the pen, inspired man, ruined by being sung without grace.

And then it says, sing to the Lord. Not sing to the congregation, but sing to the Lord. And if you sing a good song to the Lord, somebody’s going to get help as sure as you live. And it’s my positive conviction that next to the preaching of the word and expounding of the Scriptures, the next greatest power to do good in the public assembly is grace-filled singing of great songs to the Lord. Sing with grace in your heart. There oughtened to be anybody in the choir that couldn’t come stand right up before the board and take an examination on whether they had grace in their heart or not. The paid and the professional singer doesn’t do much good.

One of the sexiest singers singing today, I’m not even going to advertise him by speaking his name. One of the most, one of the most carnal, sexiest singers singing today has some sacred album. They said they did it to try to help to counteract bad publicity. Can you imagine a guy, a man, a young fellow so terrible? He’s got a reputation says, well, I want to get away from this reputation for being that kind of a fellow, so I’m going to sing some hymns and so he sings himself some hymns and poor, dumb Christians buy them and put them on and play them and wipe the tears out of their eyes. Well, singing with grace in your heart. And if we don’t sing with grace in our heart, we might just as well not sing.

Then in closing it says, whatsoever you do, whatever you do, and you know we’ve all got a lot to do. Do you ever get up in the morning and say to yourself, I haven’t much to do today, but before 10 o’clock, you were involved in so many things you wish you had twelve hands instead of two. It happens to me all the time. I get up early and come up to church here. I’m up an hour and a half in the church here before you’re present, looking around at things for the Sunday school and straightening out things and praying a little and going over my sermons, and I’m here. And I think I’ll have nothing to do when I get up there but sit and meditate and pray. When I get up here, I find that there’s so much to do that it takes up to church time and behind the scenes, but I’m doing it. Whatever you do, he said, the world’s full of things to do. Personally, I think if we were wiser than we are, we’d find some things that didn’t have to be done. We cut down on our activity a bit. We do them. But if we, do it to the Lord it says, whatever you do, do to the glory of God, in the name of the Lord Jesus giving thanks to God the Father. So, this glorifies all activities, that is if they’re divine, if they’re in God.

Domestic toil, one of our poor pastors. Here he’s been up every night now for ten days. And his poor bleary-eyed wife. The little fellow is healthy, but he just mixed up. He thinks night is day and day is night. So poor Brother Moore has to lug him around at night you know, so if you hear a tramp, tramp, tramp, don’t think the enemies coming, it’s just Brother Moore. He’s carrying the new baby around. You can do it to the glory of God, son if you know how.

And you can do everything to the glory of God, domestic toil, labor, caring for babies, your business, your long-distance calls and closing of that deal if it’s honest. If it isn’t honest, you can’t. But if it’s honest, you can do it for the glory of God and your school. You can do that for the glory of God and your travel, whether it’s by bus which is the worst way to travel, or by plane which is the fastest. Why, you can still glorify God, giving thanks to God the Father. And I say, we must preserve a thankful heart.

I wonder what there is about frost and yellow leaves that makes people thankful? I don’t think we ought to wait until the birds go south to get thankful. Thankfulness should be an ingredient in our Christian hearts, and we shouldn’t be thankful all the time. For thankfulness is more precious than diamonds. And I for my part, I’m determined to be thankful. Every day I considered a bonus. I ought to be dead long ago if God had dealt with me. And if he’d have been as hard on me as I’ve been on His people, I would have been. But He still lets me live. And every day I think of it and say thank Thee Lord and another day a bonus. Every day is a bonus, every day. I think we ought to thank Him and keep thankful. And if we keep a thankful heart and a singing heart and a Bible-filled heart, a Scripture-filled heart and a good honest, courageous heart that isn’t afraid to admonish and reprove when we have to, why, we’ll certainly have peace of heart. And if we have peace of heart, why, we’ll have, and it’s all here in this text. We’ll have harmony and accord and that’s the sweetest thing in the world. It’s like the oil on the head of Aaron that went down to his beard and went down to the skirts of his garment for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life forevermore.

Tags Discord, God, Grace, Peace

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 6, 2022

“The Blessed Hope of Christ’s Coming“

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“The Blessed Hope of Christ’s Coming”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

July 6, 1958

We are continuing in the book of Titus, the second chapter of the book of Titus. The man of God says, for the grace of God, that bringeth salvation to all men hath appeared. Teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ. Who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

Now, I have on a previous occasion dealt with some care with that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, and living soberly and righteously and godly in this present world. Now, looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the Great God and of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Those words will engage our attention for a brief time.

Now, if you will note here, and it’s always well to follow punctuation carefully in our King James Version, and not break into verses without regard to punctuation. If you will notice what it says here. That the grace of God teaches us to live–looking. It teaches us to live. Of course, there are some adverbs coming in between, soberly, righteously, godly, and the phrase, in this present world. But, it doesn’t in anywise destroy the force of the passage, teaching us that we should live–looking.

Now, I want to just talk about that a little bit, that the Christian lives–looking. That is, the Christian life is a joyous anticipation. Everybody knows what anticipation does for human life. If you did not have some hope of something you planned to do, somebody you hope to see, some advance you hope to make, your life could soon level down to a drab, colorless existence that wouldn’t be worth the living. If you were to take joyous anticipation out of the hearts of men, the suicides in the world would be so many, that literally there would not be enough technical help to dispose of the dead. We must have something to look forward to. We should live, looking, says the Holy Spirit here to Christians. We Christians should live–looking.

Now what is it that a Christian looks forward to? A Christian looks forward to what the Bible calls, the blessed hope, which is the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ. Now this is the epiphany that the churches talk about the shining forth, used for the coming up of the sun, and used also for the coming of Jesus Christ to the world. Used of His first manifestation to the world and also used of His second. The churches, the ritualistic churches that follow the church calendar, have certain times when they celebrate the Epiphany, the shining forth, the coming, the appearance of Jesus Christ our Lord.

And the Bible also talks about another epiphany, a shining forth. The two of them are found together in the Books of Timothy. Paul wrote Titus, from which the text is taken; he also wrote First and Second Timothy. And here’s what he says, God, who has called us, saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began. But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, there, after an eternal purpose.

I want you to understand I’ve said this and continue to say it because it is a very basic spiritual truth, that the Bible-taught Christian is not an orphan. He is not somebody who by some accident has happened upon a book and is now a Christian. He is a part of an eternal purpose which God purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. And this eternal purpose says, the Man of God is now made manifest by the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.

Now, those are all past tense expressions. That’s something that has in our modern English, has been done. Now, if you have the same kind of Bible I have of columns, just cast your eye up, just a quarter of a page and you will read these words, where the man of God says, same man writing in a different letter, to the same man. I give thee charge in the sight of God, who quickeneth all things, and before Jesus Christ, who before Pontius Pilate, witnessed a good confession. I give thee charge that thou keep His commandment without spot, unrebukable until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which in His times He shall show. Who, is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen or can see, to whom be honor and power everlasting. Amen. Now, below, he has brought life and immortality to the light through the appearing of Jesus Christ our Lord. That’s one. He will show in His own times, at the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ, who only hath immortality dwelling in life.

Now, there we have the two epiphanies, the two shinings forth set before us in sharp, beautiful contrast, the one to the other. We should live–looking. And what are the directions, for there is not one, but there are two. What are the directions that a Christian should look in his living?

Well, at our communion services, we often quote, in fact, almost always quote, somewhere, we do show forth His death till He come. A Christian is one who deeply appreciates the past for what has been done, but who does not anchor to the past knowing that the past is a prelude to the future. And therefore, his gaze is sometimes back for reassurance, and sometimes forward in happy anticipation. When he looks back, he sees the Epiphany, the shining forth of Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin, to suffer under Pontius Pilate, to be crucified, dead and buried, to rise again from the dead the third day, to go to the right hand of God the Father Almighty to be seated there at that right hand ever making intercession for His own

That’s the past, but then we tear our eyes from the past and gaze into the future. So that time when He shall appear, and there shall be another world epiphany, when He shall be shown forth to the world as the Potentate and King, the only Potentate, the only King. The way they’re getting rid of Kings these days, it looks to me as if we were kind of cleaning house for the coming of the Lord. There was a day when we had so many kings, every third fellow you would meet in Europe, either was a king or was related to one. But now, either they aren’t kings or they’re ashamed to admit they’re related to them. We don’t have many kings left, very many potentates left, nor plenipotentiaries.

I remember when we had a confluence of big shots, political big shots come to this country some years ago. I listened on the radio to the speeches and the introductions and they talked about the plenipotentiaries and potentates. Well, the plenipotentiaries and potentates are sort of petering out. And we don’t have so many of them anymore, because the Lord is bringing us to a time when it shall be seen who is the only potentate who only hath immortality; who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords who dwells in the light which no man can approach unto, to Whom be glory and honor everlasting.

Now, even if we should die, yet, we will see this Epiphany, this awaited revelation. Because in 1 Thessalonians 4, notice that again. We’re just reading from the Bible itself. Paul says, for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and all churches do believe that Jesus died and rose again, or they’re not churches. Even so, them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. For this, we say unto you by the Word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not go before them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout and with the voice of the archangel. And the trump of God and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then, we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so shall we ever be with the Lord.

Isn’t it rather ironical that we reserve the reading of passages like this for funerals? Isn’t it rather a cynical twist of the human mind, or of the devil, himself that we should have taken all such beautiful passages as say, John 14? Let not your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God, believe also in me, that we should take these and reserve them almost exclusively for funerals.

My dear little old mother was a great lover of flowers. She raised them and had flowers every little spot where a flower could grow she had flowers. But she insisted that they grow, that they have their roots in the ground. When they were cut and put on a table, she shied away from them. The reason being, she had gone to so many funerals, and had seen so many cut flowers, and it smelled the heady fragrance of so many bouquets for the dead, that she instinctively associated the smell of cut flowers with the coffin. So, Mother didn’t care for cut flowers. She liked the kind that grew in the ground. They reminded her of sunshine and rain and wind and clouds and birdsong and beauty. Whereas cut flowers reminded her of the dead.

And we find the same thing true of such a delightful passage as this, let not your heart be troubled. There’s Jesus cheering up his people. And isn’t it unfortunate that we have relegated this to the dead with the cut flowers, and the silent tread, and the sonorous, solemn tone of the minister. Isn’t it too bad that we can’t see that this is the Lord calling His people to look forward with anticipation to the Father’s house and the many mansions? So it is with the Thessalonian passage here. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again. Soon as you start to read that, you look around for the coffin. And you wonder whether, who died and how you got at the funeral without knowing it?

Well, the simple truth is, this is not for funerals only. This is the word of the Lord for all of his people, all of the time. I tell you again. I’ve said this many times. In fact, I don’t say anything anymore that I haven’t said many times before. But I tell you again, that there are lots of worse things than dying. Dying is one of the easiest things possible, and one of the most delightful for a Christian, so that we ought not to associate all the hopeful promises of the Lord with dying, and dying with something we don’t want to do. The Lord says, that we are to live, looking. That is, there’s anticipation there. What do we anticipate, or rather, who is it that we anticipate? Well, he says, the great God and Savior, Jesus Christ our Lord. You know, the great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. That Christ is God is taught here. Do you hear me, that Christ is God is taught here, this is the book of God. And that Christ is God is taught in that book all through that book.

Now, there are some who consider that Christ is not God. That He is only a very, extremely good man. Oh, nearly as good as Albert Schweitzer, but that He is a very good man. Not as wise as Albert, because He didn’t know of course how to perform operations and cure up the yaws by an injection of penicillin, but they’re willing to put Him along at least with Albert Schweitzer, but He is not God.

My brethren, why can’t we be honest with ourselves. I have a great deal more respect for an out and out unbeliever who stands up and smiles and says, I respect your faith, but I don’t own it. I don’t have it. That can say with Emerson, why should the robe on him allure which I could not on me endure? He said, I like a church; I like a cowl; I love a prophet of the soul; Yet not for all his faith can see, would I that cowled churchman be. Why should the vest on him alure, Which I could not on me endure? I confess I’m modernizing the English, but that’s it generally.

And the man said, now, I respect your right to believe. I don’t care what you believe, but I just don’t believe it. I respect that man. I could shake hands with him and live alongside of him and borrow his hose and lend him my grass cutter. I have no trouble with him and be perfectly tolerant, and he with me and I with him. But what I can’t understand, is the person who says I am a Christian, and then denies or doubts or holds in foggy uncertainty, the deity of the Son of God. My brethren, why don’t we do one thing or the other? Why don’t we get over onto one side or the other? If the people of the Lord, or the people who claim to be people of the Lord, were just to get over on one side or the other, what a fine housecleaning we’d have. It wouldn’t be any trouble, no difficulty, we wouldn’t fight. We’d still be Americans together. But at least we’d know where we stood. So many of us, we don’t know where we stand.

Now, when they said Jesus was God, the old scribes of Jewish days thought he was blaspheming. The Unitarians of the day reject His deity, many liberals reject His deity, and many cults reject His deity. But the man called Paul, who wrote as he was moved by the Holy Ghost said, we look for the great God and Savior, Jesus Christ our Lord. Now, either he was wrong, or else somebody is wrong today. And I have decided that I’m going to go along with Jesus, who claimed to be God, and with John and Paul and Peter and Jude and Luke and Mark and Matthew and James, who said He was God, rather than going along with those who doubt that He is God. For to doubt or deny the deity of the Son of God is to reject the Holy Scriptures.

And you will have a perfect right to reject the Holy Scriptures, remember that. Nobody is bound in any wise to accept the Holy Scriptures. You can reject the Scriptures and you will get no argument from me whatsoever. I would never spend one minute of my time arguing with anybody, not even pleading with anybody to believe the Book of God, because not all men have faith. And if you have not been touched by the mighty Holy Ghost, you won’t have faith. You know, the Presbyterians in their prime, taught election and predestination. And they believe that when God touched a man, he believed, he believed. When he was touched, he had to have some work done on him, some previous work done on him before he could believe.

That’s pretty well gone down the drain now, but I still happen to believe it. I believe that no men can come unto Jesus Christ except the Father draw him. And if the Father draws the man, if that mystic something settles on the man and draws him toward the Son of God, he’ll come. And when he comes, he’ll believe and when he believes he will be saved. That’s Bible my brethren. The whole book of Gospel of John teaches that. And our spiritual fathers, the Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians thought that, well, the Methodists taught it, but not with such finality, perhaps as our Presbyterian forebearers.

But nevertheless, we’re live now between two mighty events. His appearing to redeem us and His appearing to glorify us. This then is interim. It is interim, but it is not vacuum. I cannot find in my Bible where any man is ever called to live in a vacuum, that he is called to live in a spiritual emptiness, looking no direction. The Bible says we live in an interim between two epiphanies, two mighty, world-shaking events: the appearing that brought life and immortality to the light through the gospel, and the appearing that shall show to all the world who is the only Potentate, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, worthy to rule the world.

Now, between those two appearings we stand. And you say, well, when is this second appearing going to take place? Now, you won’t fool me like that. I’m too wise an old trooper ever to give myself up to a prophecy of when another appearing will take place. Frankly, my brethren, I don’t know. I can always answer all questions, either by giving you information which is reasonably accurate or by saying I don’t know. And in this case, I say, I don’t know. Don’t be too hard on people who have set dates and been fooled, because they meant well. But the Lord says, no man knoweth, not even the Son, save the Father which is in heaven. He knows. But we do know that we look for His appearing.

And incidentally, if you imagine that this is some kind of cultism or some sort of strange borderline or fringe doctrine, let me tell you that the Dutch Reformed church believes in it. Let me tell you that the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Nazarenes, the evangelicals, and you can just name them up and down the line and there isn’t one church that exists today, that believes the Bible but what also believes that there’s to be another shining forth, another shining forth. When he was shown forth, being born in a manger, will shine forth wearing the robes of royalty. Not one. They have differences of opinion about how it will take place. And I for my part, don’t care one little bit how it takes place. I haven’t the remotest care how it takes place.

A man called me just before I came down here, and he said, Mr. Tozer, you don’t know me, but I’m in trouble. I said, I didn’t sleep all night last night, I went to bed at seven, got up at seven and didn’t close my eyes all through the night and I’m in deep difficulty. Will you pray for me? And I said, yes, I will pray for you and also, I want to give you this verse, that the Lord will not suffer you to be tempted above what you’re able to bear. And he said, but you didn’t quote the rest of the verse. And I said, well, I couldn’t quote all the Bible at one sitting. I said, I gave you that part of it. Well, he said, the rest of it is, but will with the temptation make a way of escape. Now, what is my way of escape? And I said, my friend, this is just the neat, little way the Lord works with people. He promises them a way of escape. He leads them out and saves them, but he doesn’t show them how ahead of time. If the Lord were to take you aside and give you a schedule, or up in Toronto, they’d say shedule of future events, your head would get so big there isn’t a hat in Cook County would go down on it, not one. You would lose your humility and become so proud, you couldn’t keep from telling you wife and everybody else but what you knew about the future.

So, the Lord says, I will make a way of escape, but you leave the way of escape to Me. And so the Lord says, looking forward to His coming. And I said, when will it be Lord and what will be the signs? The Lord said, now, don’t ask me questions. You leave that to me. And you trust Me and I’ll take care of it. Just believe that there’s to be a shining forth. So I believe there’s a shining forth. And so this is interim.

But what are we to do in this, live in a vacuum? No. We are to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Soberly, that is my relation to myself. Righteously, that is my relation to my fellow man. Godly, that is my relation to God. And so, there are the three dimensions of the Christian’s life, soberly and righteously and godly; God and others and myself. And you can’t get out of that. And it’s a strange thing that as brilliant as the human mind is and as utterly wonderful as it is, still, we cannot escape these three dimensions. We cannot get beyond them, any more than you can jump into the fourth dimension in space. You’ve got to stay within them. Everything that you can think about, that touches humanity in your life, everything has to do either with yourself, with somebody else, or with God, and there’s no fourth place. Only three. That’s where you live. And so we live soberly and righteously and godly.

Then why? Why did the Lord say there’s to be another epiphany, a shining forth. Why did He say that. He did it because he that hath this hope in Him, purifies himself even as He is pure. The Lord did it. Oh, could we could we pull an illustration out of the air? Suppose that a man has been away. And, oh say, he’s a soldier and he’s been on some duty in some far-away country, in the Far East or in Europe. And he hasn’t been home for a couple of years. And he calls transatlantic telephone and says, I will be in at such and such a time by Air France or some other of the great lines. And I will land at such and such a field and I’ll take a taxi. I should be there by 3:10.

Well, you know what they will do, Mother and the girls? They will clean up that house as it’s never been cleaned up before. They will busy themselves fixing things up. And then the girls will dress themselves up in their finest and wait for their father. Now, that’s what anticipation does. It gets you ready or tends to want to make you want to be ready and to get your work done, and be ready when he comes. So, he that has this hope in him, he purifies himself even as our Lord is pure.

So, the hope of the shining forth, which is yet future, is not a foolish notion held by certain cults. In fact, a very few cults hold it. It is a doctrine held by our fathers back to Paul, Augustine, and all the church fathers down the years. They varied I say in regard to detail and schedule, but they never varied one little bit with regard to the overt fact. He is coming and there is to be a shining forth. And so in the meantime, we do show the Lord’s death until He comes. And there is the beautiful meaning of the Lord’s Supper.

I had not planned to bring this up at all, and this is not dragged in by its ears in order to fit. But just here that I have received of the Lord what I delivered, that the Lord took bread the night He was betrayed and when He’d given thanks, He’d break it. And He said, take and eat. This do in remembrance of me there. That’s the remembrance of the epiphany that was. And as oft as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, you do show the Lord’s death until He come. And there is the epiphany that will be. So, that is one of the meanings among many, of the supper of the Lord, that we remember that he died for us. We remember that He’s coming for us. That He died for us is a fact. That He’s coming for us is a fact. How His death for us could prepare us to meet Him, we do not know. When He’s coming, we do not know. That He’s coming, we are certain.

So now, we do show the Lord’s death until He come. Only this you say, what qualifies a person for the Lord’s Supper? The answer is soberly, righteously, godly. Let a man examine himself. Is he living soberly, righteously and godly in this present world, looking. That’s all. Let a man examine himself.

How have you been living? Soberly? Or have you let yourself go? Have you forgot you’re a Christian when you were out on your vacation? Did you do a lot of things you wouldn’t do if you had been home? Strange isn’t it how it works? A tame, domesticated Maltese-type of husband who says yes dear, yes dear all year-long, goes away on convention. And the tamer and the more domesticated he was while staying at home with Mama, the more of a long-eared donkey he made out himself when he got in a strange city on convention. It’s almost always that way.

Now, that ought never to be so of Christians. A Christian is one who carries his shrine with him. His sanctuary is in his heart. And whether he is traveling somewhere to see relatives out in the mountains for a rest wherever it is, he should never be out of his sanctuary. He should be in the holy place because the Holy God is with him and living in his heart. Lo, I’m with you always, even unto the end of the world. How’s it been with you this last week? Have you lived soberly? How’s it been with you and your neighbor? Have you lived righteously or have you had a tiff with somebody two doors away? If you have, don’t take communion this morning. How has it been with you and God? Have you kept up your prayer life and your devotional life and your Bible loving life? I don’t say you haven’t and I don’t ask those questions in a tone of voice tending to accuse. I’m just inquiring.

Now our friends, the brethren will meet us and we will have the Lord’s Supper. We take it once a month in this church, every first Sunday. It’s not for members of this church, but members of the church of Christ. And if you qualify–sober, godly, righteous living and confident faith in our Savior–you join with us because you’re a member of our church anyway, whether we ever saw you before or not. Let’s gather.

Tags God, Grace, Second Coming of Christ, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

“The Benefits of God’s Grace“

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“The Benefits of God’s Grace”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

June 29, 1958

Now the difference between a classic and anything less than a classic is, that which is less than the classic gets tiring after you hear it a good many times, a few times. But the classic never wears out. It’s good anywhere, anytime, and continues through the years. And though heard, over and over, never loses the freshness of its youth. I mentioned this because I want to read again, for I guess about the fifth time, that beautiful passage from which I have been preaching lately.

Titus 2, beginning at the 11th verse. For the grace of God, that bringeth salvation to all men hath appeared, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lust, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world. Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. These things speak and exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no man despise thee. Our Savior, Jesus Christ, you see, we have dealt with the earlier part of this passage. So, we begin with the last line of verse thirteen. It’s the last line in my Bible. Our Savior, Jesus Christ.

I read the other day, and the children of this world are often wiser in their generation than the children of life. And I read the other day by a Polish writer who was writing about communism. That is, he was writing about how he’d escaped from it and was writing against it, but not from a Christian standpoint. He was a child of this world with such light as a child of this world may be expected to have; an unusual degree of it, for he was an unusually brilliant man.

And he said this, that the only teaching worthwhile is that which is valid in the face of imminent death. He said that because he had been, and mentioned others who had been at times, faced with instant death. And he was forced to say, what do I believe now? Here, death’s facing me. It may be a matter of three heartbeats away. What is this that I believe? And he said, no teaching is worth your time unless it stands solid and true and valid, faced with immediate death.

I mentioned this because I begin with the words, our Savior, Jesus Christ. And I would like to guess, if I might be allowed, how many have faced imminent death with these great, beautiful, meaningful, strong words in their mouths, our Savior Jesus Christ? If you knew that death was three heartbeats away or five or seven, I’m sure you wouldn’t try to remember what the Greek baptizo was and what form of baptism was the proper one? I’m sure that it would make very little difference to you whether the Presbyterian or the Episcopal form of government or the congregational were the right form of government. I’m sure that there would be an infinite number of things that clutter up your spiritual thinking now, that would fall away from you instantly if you knew that death was a heartbeat away. But there is one thing I’m sure that you’d cling to and repeat over and over and over until you could repeat it no more, our Savior, Jesus Christ. I know you’d want to say those words, because they’re valid under any circumstance, you see. Those words are good any time, young or old, our Savior, Jesus Christ; beautiful, wonderful words. Then Paul goes on to say, who gave Himself for us, who gave Himself for us.

Now, we may learn the value of a thing by the price men are willing to pay for it. That is, we may learn its value to the individual who’s procuring it. I remember when Charles E. Dawes, the great American general was Vice President. I’m not sure he was vice president at that time, but he had been Vice President, or was of the United States. And that was the least thing he did. He was a great general in the First World War. And I remember what he said when they had him before some kind of a committee accusing him, or at least inquiring, why he had paid such vast, huge prices for horses in France. And he settled the whole business and set his inquisitors back on their heels by this abrupt expression. He said, I’d have paid horse prices for sheep if they could have pulled my guns where I wanted them. It wasn’t a question of how big the horse was, it was a question of a desperate and critical need, and though he did pay huge and exorbitant prices for French horses, he used those French horses to win a war. And he said I’d have paid that much for sheep if they had done the job for me.

Now, what I’m trying to illustrate is this, that a need, a value, determines the price you’ll pay for a thing. Even though a man is wrong in his appraisal, personally, I think that we human beings have set a wrong value on jewelry. I think for instance, we’ve set the wrong value on diamonds. A piece of glass can’t be told across the room from a diamond. And yet the difference, it runs up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in some instances. It’s because we have set an arbitrary value upon jewelry. I don’t mind people wearing it. I don’t own any except this thing to hold my tie down so it won’t flap around when I get to preaching. But outside of that, I haven’t any and don’t want it, but I think that we have set wrong values on things. But the illustrations still holds.

We can tell how precious a thing is to a man or woman by how much they’re willing to pay for it. We can learn that. And so, when it says here, He gave Himself for us, we learn how dear we are and were to Christ. Remember, when we say “are” about Christ, or “were” about Christ, whether we’re using the past, present, or future tense, we’re using all the tenses there are. Because Jesus Christ, being Himself very God of very God, embodies in Himself all the tenses there are. Or better still, He has no tense. There is no yesterday and today and tomorrow with Christ. There is a yesterday and tomorrow and today with us. The Bible says Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. But it’s not talking about His yesterday and today and forever, it’s talking about ours.

We have a yesterday, and really not a very much of a yesterday. The oldest one of us has much of a yesterday compared, say, with a mud turtle or a crow, or a sequoia tree in California. We haven’t much of yesterday, but we’ve got a little yesterday. We have it today, which is getting away from us fast, and we have an eternal tomorrow. So that our yesterday and today and tomorrow are valid. But when we apply that to God and Christ, we invalidate the meaning of it. For we cannot say that Jesus our Lord has no tenses, because all that He is, He ever was and all that He ever was, He ever will be.

So, when we say how precious we were to Jesus, we mean how precious we are to Jesus. And when we say how precious we are to Jesus, we mean how precious we will always be to Jesus; for I, the Lord change not. I, the Lord, change not. Now, we can learn how precious we are to Christ by how much He was willing to give for us. What was the price that He paid. Don’t forget that all through the Bible, Old Testament and New and particularly in the New, the idea of redemption is found. The idea of the paying, the giving of value for value, the giving of price for something precious. And Jesus Christ gave, says the Holy Ghost here, gave Himself for us. What was He willing to give for us? Let’s look back at the book, say, of Colossians. No, Philippians. Look back at Philippians.

He says, Jesus Christ, second chapter, fifth verse. Jesus Christ, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, O Lord, in the form of God. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God. Thou, O Lord, art the Eternal Word, the Eternal Son, begotten of the Father before all worlds, by the mystery of eternal generation. Wilt Thou then O Lord, give up this mystery and wonder even for a while, that men might be redeemed? He answers, yes. He considered it not something to be held on to, but made Himself of no reputation by becoming for a time, less than God. He made Himself of a reputation less than God and thus being of no reputation. O Lord, how far will you go? I will take upon me the form of a servant. He had been before in the position of the Master. Now, He stoops to the position of the servant. But how much more will you pay for men O Lord?

The answer is, He will be made in the likeness of men. And how much more Lord, for the price is going up. He will be found in fashion as a man and even then, He will humble Himself. Not only be a man, but be a humbled man. Not a humble man only but a humbled man. And how much more wilt Thou pay O Lord? I will become obedient unto death. But all of the sons of men are obedient unto death. Yes, but for their sakes, I choose the worst death that ever was invented, death of the cross. So that is how much He paid for us. And the Scripture says then, Jesus, our Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, and who advertised to all the intelligent universe, how precious we are to Him by how much he was willing to give for us.

Now, if you’re ever tempted to think little of yourself, I want you to know that it’s never a godly thing to do. I want you to know, that if you’re puffed up and think you amount to anything, then that’s wrong. I want you to know, if you overlook your sin, and imagine you’re good, that’s wrong. I want you to know, that if you were inclined to compare yourself with another and put yourself above that other, that’s wrong. And all these wrongs should be repented of and amended so they don’t occur anymore in your life.

But this idea of voiding our preciousness, and writing down our value, and putting a price tag on us that’s cheap; cross out the value that used to be and put a lower one on, that never occurs in the Bible anywhere. Never. When God wants to talk about man’s weakness, He says, that man’s breath is in his nostrils. When he wants to talk about how little time he’s here below, He says, that time, like an ever-rolling stream bares all its sons away. And that a thousand years in God’s sight are about as yesterday when it is past. When God wants to talk about how weak we are, He calls us grass and says we’re like the grass that grows up. But never anywhere in the Bible does God say anything derogatory about the nature of man. For the Scripture says, so God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them.

And the passage we read from James this morning said, why curse ye man, who was made in the similitude of God. That is why it is so sinful to call a man of fool or to say raca, because it is heaping contempt upon man. And remember, that there isn’t an order of angels before the throne of God, that is as high as man will be when God is thrown with him. Remember that there isn’t a cherubim nor seraphim, there isn’t a creature before the shining throne of God that gazes upon the sea of glass, but what must be beneath man when God is through with man. For God has made man in His image, and when man sinned, turned around and made Himself in man’s image, that He might thus dually and forever unite Godhead and manhood, so that man is the creature nearest to God, nearest equal to God, of all the beings that fill the vast universe.

So, if you imagine that you’re humble, by thinking little of yourself, you’re all wrong. Why callest thou unclean that which God called clean? Why callest thou worthless that which God called worthy of giving himself to die for it? No, no. We must remember how dear we are to Christ by what He gave for us; and He gave Himself for us.

Why did He give Himself? It says in the next phrase, to redeem us from all iniquity. Iniquity was our problem, you see. We were caught in the meshes of iniquity. And He gave Himself to redeem us from all iniquity. Notice the prepositions, and they’re actually there, not in, but from. He shall save His people from their sins. Let me repeat, and I’ve said it, I guess 1000 times that any interpretation of New Testament Christianity that allows sin a place in the human life, is a false interpretation. Let me remind you once more, that any interpretation of mercy or grace or justification by faith, that allows any kind of sin, external or internal, to live unrebuked, unforsaken and unrepentant of, is a travesty on the gospel of Christ, and not the true gospel at all. He gave Himself, and the price was Himself, that He might redeem us and purify unto Himself–purify.

Now, the one deep disease of the world you know, is impurity. And by impurity we mean, anything that is unlike God. Sexual misconduct, yes, but that’s only one facet of this impurity. Contentiousness is another. There are some people that you can’t say it’s a nice morning, isn’t it, but what they will say, no, I don’t think it is and start an argument. If you compliment, they will start an argument and no matter what you say, they’re contentious. I’ve met that kind of contentious people. They live in the world by the mercy of the people who aren’t contentious. And they imagine themselves wonderful, when they’re merely the recipients of an almost infinite amount of patience on the part of people, who would like to tramp on them, but won’t. And so, these contentious people are impure people.

Then there are hatreds, hatreds of every sort, that’s impurity. Gluttony is impurity. And slothfulness is impurity. The lazy person is impure. Or the person who works only that he can play, is impure. Self-indulgence is another form of impurity. Pride is another form. Egoism is another form. Self-pity and resentfulness and churlishness, I’ve named only a few. But all that is not of God. This is all impurity, and the work of Christ is to purify a people.

Now, remember it my brethren, you can quote Scripture by the yard, but if you haven’t been purified by the fire of the Holy Ghost and the blood of the Lamb, you are of all men most miserable. Because you will find in that day, that you will be rejected from the presence of the Lord, because it will not be your belief, so much as the state of your heart, that will tell where you go in that day, though your beliefs will certainly take you to purity. The work of Christ is to purify a people; by blood and by fire, and to rid them of these things. The churlish Christian excuses it, and calls it by some other name. The resentful Christian, says he’s nervous, but he walks around with a chip on his shoulder. And I have been informed, that if you find a chip on his shoulder, it’s very likely to have come off of the block further up.

But resentfulness and self-pity and egotism and pride; all these we are to be purified from. And if we had as many Bible teachers, trying to teach how pure Christians can become as we do, trying to teach that they can’t become pure, we would have a better church than we have.

Now he says here, he purifies unto Himself, a peculiar people, a peculiar people. Let’s look at that a little bit, that word, peculiar. Well, that word has been used. It’s gotten into the hands of the enemy, and it’s been used to cloak some very weird goings on in the Christian church. But the word has no connotation of strange or irrational or queer or ridiculous or foolish. No, Jesus Christ was the perfect example. And He walked among men with utmost rationality. Everything He did was as logical and as clear and salty and sane as the sunshine on the grass of a June morning, Jesus our Lord was the perfect example of a mind that was poised and balanced and symmetrical and in perfect adjustment to itself.

And yet, of course, He was our example. He was our sample man. And He never did or said anything, or left anything unsaid, that would cause the raising of an eyebrow, or the wondering if we might not be quite there. Now, they said He had the devil because He healed the sick on the Sabbath day, the false teachers and those who believed in commandments, instead of people; who loved law instead of men, and those who loved text in place of children, and those who would rather take the evil woman and hurl her into hell than see her forgiven. They of course, said He had the devil. But read if you will all four Gospels and see, in not one instance did Jesus do or say anything that was not sane and salty and completely normal and right.

So, those who do irrational things in the name of the Lord have their own selves to blame. And those who are queer and ridiculous and foolish, and then flippantly say, I’m a fool for Christ’s sake, they’re not. You know, you can’t do anything you want to do and say, I do it for Christ’s sake and make it all right. Keep that in mind, brother. You can only do for Christ’s sake that which Christ told you to do. You cannot do what you’ve decided to do and then make it good by saying it’s for Christ’s sake. That is offering a swine on the altar of the Lord, and it will be rejected abruptly by great God Almighty. So, let’s remember that Christians are not to be weirdies, strange people, odd balls, not at all in any sense of the word.

But, what does the word peculiar mean here? Well, it means the same thing in Greek as it does in Hebrew, so the scholars tell us. And it’s found in Exodus 19:5, thou shalt be a peculiar treasure unto me, above all people, He told Israel. A peculiar treasure unto Me, above all people.

Oh, if you’ll allow me, indulge me again. My own family laughs at me. But if you’ll allow me. This afternoon, God willing, about 1:30 I’ll see a little boy, five years old, blondie, a brown-eyed blonde. His name is Paul, and he’s, my grandson. And I’ll see him, well, if we both live that long. Now, there’s a boy, really, there’s a boy. And you know, there isn’t anything peculiar about him. He is sensible, sane, good natured, poised, balanced, symmetrical in his character, so far as a five-year-old can be, and is already learning to read and is allowed mathematics and can connect with a ball every time it’s tossed to him. And he’s just a boy. And there’s nothing peculiar about him at all. If he was playing on the lawn with a half a dozen other boys, you wouldn’t pick him out. Except of course, he’s better looking, but you wouldn’t pick him out. He’d just be one more boy there playing on the lawn. And yet to his father and mother, and to us at our house, he’s a peculiar boy. Why? Because he’s peculiarly ours.

I saw him when he was just a few hours old in the hospital, a terrible, homely-looking mess of something or other there. But now he’s blossomed into a grand boy. Well now he’s peculiar. How is he peculiar, little off? No. Because he acts queer? No. He’s peculiar because he belongs to us. He is ours, as God said of Israel, a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people. And every mother knows what I am talking about. Every mother knows her little crow is the blackest. And every cat knows her kittens are the softest. And every father knows his son is the sharpest, his grandson the brightest. Everybody knows that. A peculiar treasure unto me. Love has made you mine in a way that logic can’t explain, that you have to feel it to know it.

And so that same word peculiar came on over into the Greek and then into our English, that same word. That same meaning, I mean, a peculiar treasure. Etymologically, it means, shut up to me as my special jewel. Imagine that, shut up to me as my special jewel. I have you under my hand as my specialty jewel. Buddy Robinson used to say, that dear old saint. One of the few modern saints that I’ve ever known. Buddy Robinson said that the Lord holds him in the hollow of His hand. And every once in a while, raises His hand a little and says, are you alright, Buddy? Now, that was Robinson’s simple, childlike way of telling what a Butler or a Calvin or a Wesley would have cloaked in great, heavy, resonant, resounding English phrases. But Buddy just simplified it. Moody had a way of doing that too, take some great profound doctrine and simplify it.

Well now, that’s what it all means, that the Lord has us as His peculiar treasure, and He is purifying unto Himself, a people to be His as special jewels. And yet, Israel in the Old Testament, they were different, but they were not different in a queer or ridiculous way. When Daniel, say, went to Babylon, he was different. Daniel wouldn’t eat the meat of the Babylonians. And Daniel prayed several times a day facing toward Jerusalem. If that made him mentally disturbed, that nowadays you know, they’d have sent out a booklet on that. And they would have said that that’s, a mental health outfit would have wanted to take Daniel up on that because he prayed three times a day facing toward Jerusalem. But was there anything crazy about that? No. Daniel simply recognized a higher loyalty than Babylonian kings, and he stayed by that loyalty even to be cast into the den of lions.

And so, in the New Testament, Christians are God’s special jewels marked out for Him to be peculiar, but not queer; to be peculiar, but not ridiculous; to be peculiar, but not foolish. And yet, they are different. They are different. Somebody told me he’d heard a sermon on the air recently where some preacher, I suppose he was a young preacher, I hope he was. God forgive him if he was over 21. But he preached anyhow and said, people think to become a Christian you’ve got to be a square. But I tell you, you don’t have to be different to be a Christian, oh, brother, if he had said five times five equals 99 and three fourths, he couldn’t have been any wronger than he was.

To be a peculiar treasure unto God does make you different. And you do live differently. You have a higher loyalty, and you’ll recognize the right of God to tell you how to live. And men’s philosophies come and go. Religions come and go. Quasi-revivals come and go. Healing campaigns come and go. And new ideas come and go, and scientific notions come and go. And all the time, this Christian has got in focus the heart of God and He’s living just like the way he had been, going on doing the will of God and recognizing only one final loyalty. Thrones and crowns may perish, kingdoms rise and wane, but the church of Jesus, constant shall remain. And that constancy is because of her. She’s got God in her focus.

And so other things come and go. They’re like the winds that blow and the storms that come and pass. But we go on. That makes us different, but it doesn’t make us queer nor foolish. It makes us right. Put one sane man in a ward where everybody else is in a bad, advanced state of paranoia, and the one man who looks right, and is right, will look wrong. H.G Wells wrote a book called “The Country of the Blind,” just a simple little story; and it was just to bring before his readers an idea. A man fell into a little valley somewhere, where people had no eyes. He of course had eyes. And there among these blind people who had learned to live without eyes. They were scientists and philosophers and poets and all the rest without eyes; and he had eyes. And it wasn’t very long until they were preparing to operate on him, to get rid of those strange protuberances that were just beneath his eyebrow, because they said it made him act queer and say queer things. But his queerness was his own sight. He saw, and therefore he was different from those who did not see.

And so a Christian is one who sees, and because he sees, some people who don’t see, say he is all wrong. But when God says He makes a peculiar people, He doesn’t mean that He makes a lot of ridiculous and queer people. He merely makes them His peculiarly, His shut up unto Him. And of course, the world won’t like them because they’re His.

Lastly, zealous of good works. These peculiar people, they sing loudly, but they give generously. They pray along, but they work hard, zealous of good works. The Bible knows nothing of armchair Christians. The Bible knows nothing of ivory tower Christianity.

I maybe could mention this. Just within the last two weeks, I’ve had at least a partial offer, and if I cultivate a little bit, it would become a valid offer, of a foundation’s $13 million in it; to be turned out to pasture, like a fine old horse that has seen his day, and just write and have my time; just do nothing but except the big salary and just be retired to write and have fun. I give you three guesses whether I’m going to accept it or not. An ivory tower Christian? For me to move out among the blue birds and sit with an electric typewriter in an air-conditioned study done in knotty pine? You couldn’t sell me that, my brother. You couldn’t give it to me. You couldn’t get me to take it. I’m not for sale. And furthermore, if I lived, I don’t suppose I’d live very long at that rate. But if I lived even a year, I’d become an ivory tower suburbanite, a Christian that just couldn’t live unless I was looking on green things. And I’d just have to have a birdsong in order to be happy. No, my brother. The Bible teaches that we are to be zealous of good works.

I talked last evening to a woman. I don’t know too much about her, and I’m not setting her up as an example. But she was here at our meeting. And her husband told me of how in the pursuance of her work she goes through all these areas north of here into places where it looks dangerous for anybody to be. He said, she’s got faith, Reverend. She’s got faith. She goes in anywhere and she’s afraid of nothing. He said she was a little afraid, but she went. And yet she belongs to a congregational church somewhere in the suburbs. But, she comes in where the need is, and goes from home to home. And I say, God purifies unto himself a people peculiarly precious to Him. And while they’re down here, they’re going to be zealous of good works.

Now the church can silence her critics by good works, and she can silence in no other way. Take doctrine, and they’ll turn your doctrine against you. Quote scripture, and they’ll say that isn’t the right translation. You can silence your critics only by godliness and good works. And nobody can argue down godliness and good works. The devil himself wouldn’t try it. He wouldn’t try it. He knows better. Godliness and good works shut the mouths of everybody. They may take you out and hang you, but they’ll respect you while you die; godliness and good works. And yet not to be seen of men, but to imitate our Lord who went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed of the devil.

So, we have it again, this beautiful passage that can’t be worn out. Our Savior Jesus Christ who gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from all iniquity; and purify unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. Then Paul adds these words. I don’t know why they’re here, but they’re here. These things speak and exhort and rebuke with all authority. And don’t let anybody despise you. Amen.

Tags God, Grace, Peculiar People, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date April 4, 2021

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“The Grace of God”

Sunday evening, October 26, 1958

Message #6 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

Tonight, I want to talk on grace as one of the attributes of God. It’s too big for any man to handle, but we’re leaning on the Blessed Spirit, so I want to read some verses merely, merely texts. They’re all found all through the Bible, but I’ll just select this many. Genesis 6, but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Exodus 33, The Lord said to Moses, thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name. Proverbs 3, surely God scorneth the scorner, but He giveth grace unto the lowly. John 1, And of His fullness of all we received and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Romans 3, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Romans 5, for if through the offence of one, many be dead, much more the grace of God and the gift of grace which is by one Man, Jesus Christ. By one man Jesus Christ, the gift of grace hath abounded under many. Ephesians 1, to the praise of the glory of His grace wherein He hath made us accepted in the beloved. In Whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sin, according to the riches of His grace. 1 Peter 5, but the God of all grace. To Him, be glory and dominion forever and ever. Now, I just read a few verses there that I copied out on a card here, so I wouldn’t have to flip from one page to another in order that you might see that this is taught both in the Old and the New Testament.

Now, grace is an attribute of God. Let me repeat patiently, little here and little there, line upon line and precept upon precept, that an attribute is something God is, not something God has. Grace is therefore something God is. And it is near to, but it is not the same as mercy. It is almost the same as mercy, but it is not quite the same. And just as mercy flows out of the goodness of God, so grace flows out of the goodness of God. Mercy is God’s goodness confronting human guilt. Now, we dealt with that last week that mercy is the goodness of God confronting human guilt, whereas grace is the goodness of God and confronting human demerit.

I talked about justice and I said, that when justice confronts a moral situation, it pronounces death. There’s stern disapprobation where there is blame and divine disapproval to the point of execration where God must stand against the man because the man stands with his sin, then justice must judge. But still the goodness of God yearns to bestow blessedness and that is a grace, the goodness of God yearning to bestow blessedness even to those who do not deserve it, but who have a specific demerit. There’s a difference between no merit and demerit. No merit simply is a negative thing. It’s vacuity, but demerit is a positive thing. It means that there is not only no merit there, but that there is the opposite of merit.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about grace and mentioned some facts about it. That it is God’s good pleasure and it flows of course out of the goodness of God. And it is what God is like. If you were to meet God, you’d find that this is what God is like. I have said over and over again over the years, that one of the big problems of the church, one of our great losses is the loss of the proper concept of what God is like, and that if we could restore that again, and we could have an army of preachers going up and down the land preaching about God, what God is like, and the pastors and teachers would begin again to tell the people what God is like, it would put strength and foundation under our faith again.

Now, grace is that in God which brings into favor. I’m actually staying very close to the Hebrew and Greek definition when I’m saying this, that it is that in God which brings into favor one justly in disfavor. And grace and favor incidentally, are used interchangeably in the English Bible, not always, but very often. I said last week that there was four times as much said about mercy in the Old Testament as in the New. And I think I may have jarred some of you by saying it because usually we’re taught the opposite. But actually, there’s four times as much said about mercy in the Old Testament as there is in the New. But strangely and wonderfully, there’s more than three times as much said about grace in the New Testament as in the Old.

Now, I read to you that law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Christ is the channel through which grace flows. And it’s possible to misunderstand this and a great many people have. Never underestimate the ability of good people to misunderstand. And we have misunderstood and we have made it to mean that Moses knew only law and Christ knows only grace. This is the typical teaching of the hour, but it is not the teaching of our fathers. You will not find it in John Bunyan, or Henry Scougal, or any of the Puritans. You will not find it even in Calvin. You will not find it among the great revivals and church fathers and reformers.

The doctrine that Moses knew only law and Christ knew only grace so to read it is to misunderstand it altogether. To think that because the law was given by Moses, God gave the law through Moses that therefore, Moses knew no grace is to misread or fail to read that passage; that before the flood, Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Now remember that’s Genesis 6. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord before there was any law given. And after the law was given, and Moses had been on the Mount forty days and forty nights, and God had reached down out of the fire and storm, and with His finger had chiseled the ten words on the tables of stone. It says, thou hast found grace in my sight and I know thee by name. God did not deal with Moses on the basis of law. He dealt with Moses on the basis of grace. And Moses knew it and said, If I’ve found grace in thy sight, well then do so and so Father or Lord. He called Him Jehovah.

Now, how could it be otherwise, my brethren. How could it be that God should act only in law in the Old Testament and only in grace in the New if God doesn’t change. If immutability is an attribute of God, then God must always act like Himself. I’ve said this many times, and I wish we could get a hold of it. That God always acts like Himself.

I was talking to Brother McAffee in the study just before the service began, that prodigal son story where it said that after he had spent all and he went out there among the swine, he came to himself. And I said, what a beautiful idiom, as if God understood that the man hadn’t been himself, but now, through the wisdom taught him by sin, the wisdom taught him by loss and homesickness, he comes to himself. You don’t find people always the same, but you find God always the same. God must always act like himself, and He never varies from Himself. Grace doesn’t ebb and flow like the tide, it doesn’t come like the weather, a great surge of hot grace, and then we get no grace at all. God must always act like Himself. And He must act like Himself before the flood and after the flood and when the law was given an after the law was given. God must always act like Himself. And since Grace is an attribute of God, it is that which God is and which cannot be removed from God and yet have God remain God.

So, there was always grace in the heart of God, and there isn’t any more grace now than there ever was. And there will never be any more grace than there is now. If we could only see that grace is infinite and therefore it neither ebbs nor flows. It doesn’t grow nor diminish. It doesn’t die nor be born. It is what God is and God is of course, unchangeable and eternal.

Now, here are two important truths that I want you to get. And I want you to take it and the next time you hear a professor or a preacher say otherwise, go to him and remind him of this. One of them is that no one was ever saved, no one is now saved, and no one will ever be saved except by grace. Now get that in your mind my brethren. I was quite surprised to learn here only within the last couple of weeks, that this was believed by Robertson McQuilkin, and taught by Robertson McQuilkin, the very justly famous expositor and teacher who founded Ben Lippen and Columbia Bible College.

Well, this is the fact that nobody was ever saved except by grace; before Moses, nobody was ever, except by grace. During Moses’ time nobody was ever saved except by grace. After Moses and before the cross, and after the cross, and since the cross, and during all this dispensation, during any dispensation, anywhere, anytime, since Abel offered his first lamb before God on a smoking altar, nobody was ever saved in any other way than by grace. Ah, my brother, if we could only get a hold of that.

And then the second thing is, that grace always comes by Jesus Christ, that grace always came by Jesus Christ. Law, the law was given by Moses, but grace came by Jesus Christ. But it didn’t mean and is not to be understood that before Jesus was born of Mary, there was no grace, because God dealt in grace with mankind looking forward to the Incarnation and death of Jesus. Before Christ came and now since He’s come and gone to the Father’s right hand, God looks back upon the cross as we look back upon the cross. Everybody from Abel on was saved by looking forward to the cross. Grace came by Jesus Christ. And everybody that’s been saved since the cross, is saved by looking back at the cross. Grace always comes by Jesus Christ. It didn’t come at His birth, but it came in God’s ancient scheme.

I was trying to think up a word that I could use and I remembered Finney’s words. He talked about the Christian scheme. Now the word scheme has gotten into bad company. When we think of it rather, it has connotations that are not pleasant. But, even a hundred years ago, it was a good pure word. It meant a carefully wrought plan. And so, the old writers could talk about God’s redemptive scheme, God’s redemptive plan carefully wrought and thought out and wrought out. And so, grace came according to God’s ancient plan in Christ Jesus. And no grace was ever administered to anybody except by and through and in Jesus Christ. When yet Adam and Eve had no children, God’s spared Adam and Eve by grace. And when they had their two boys, one offered a lamb and thus said I look forward to the Lamb of God; he accepted the grace of Christ Jesus 4,000 years before He was born. And God gave His witness that he was justified.

So, grace did not come when Christ was born in a manger. It did not come when Christ was baptized or anointed of the Spirit. It did not come when He died on a cross. It did not come when He rose from the dead. It did not come when He went to the Father’s right hand. Grace came from the ancient beginnings through Jesus Christ the Eternal Son and was manifest on the cross of Calvary in fiery blood and tears and sweat and death. But it had always been operated from the beginning. If God had not operated in grace, He would have swept the human race away. He would have crushed Adam and Eve under His heel in awful judgment, for they had it coming. But because God was a God of grace, and because He had already an eternity plan, the plan of grace and the Lamb of God had been slain before the foundation of the world. There was no embarrassment in the Divine scheme. And God didn’t have to back out and say, I’m sorry, but I have mixed things up here. He simply went right on.

I heard a great Southern preacher one time, remind and talking about the work of God as being a wheel spinning on a hub. And he said, when Adam spun off of the wheel and went rolling down, he said, God put Christ on and He’s been on there spinning ever since. That’s a rather odd illustration, but the first Adam slipped away and the second Adam already was there. And anything God has ever done for anybody, of all of His grace have all we received. And grace for grace so that God’s grace is for everybody, and everybody receives in some degree God’s grace. Everybody receives in some degree God’s grace, the lowest woman in the world, the most sinful, bloody man in the world, a Judas, a Hitler. If it hadn’t been that God was gracious, they would have been cut off and slain along with you and me and all the rest.

For I wonder after all, if there’s too much difference in us sinners. When a woman sweeps up a house, and somes dirty, blacksome gray, some different colored, but it’s all dirt and it all goes before the broom. And when God looks at humanity, He sees some that are very white, but they’re dirt, and He sees some that are very black and they’re dirt. And He sees some that are morally speckled and it’s all dirt and it all goes before the moral broom.

So, the grace of God is operated toward everybody; now, not the saving grace of God. Remember, there’s a difference. When the grace of God becomes operative through faith in Jesus Christ, then there is the new birth. But the grace of God nevertheless holds back any judgment that would come until God in His kindness has given every man a chance to repent.

Now, grace is God’s goodness I said. It is the kindness of God’s heart, the goodwill, the cordial benevolence. It is what God is like. And I would like to tell you and keep telling you, where it’s very hard for us poor, bound creatures to remember it, that God is like that all the time, gracious. God is kind all the time. God is filled with goodwill and cordiality and benevolence all the time, all the time. All through, God is like that. You’ll never run into a stratum in God that’s hard. You’ll always find God gracious all through, and always and all times and toward all peoples forever. You will never run into any meanness in God. Never any resentment or rancor or ill will for there’s nothing there. God has no ill will toward any being.

God is a God of utter kindness and cordiality and goodwill and benevolence. And yet all of these, remember, work in perfect harmony with God’s justice and God’s judgment. For I believe in hell and I believe in judgment, but I also believe that those whom God must reject because of their impenitence, yet there will be grace. God will still feel gracious toward all of His universe, for He’s God and He can’t do anything else.

Now, grace is infinite I have said and I don’t want you to strain to understand infinitude. I had the temerity to preach on infinitude a few times and wonderful as it seems, I got along all right, at least I got along all right preaching on infinitude–the limitlessness of God. God’s grace is infinite. But I say let’s not strain to try to understand it. Let’s try to measure it against ourselves, not against God. God never measures anything in Himself against anything else in Himself. That is, God never measures His grace, against His justice or His mercy against His love, because God is all one. But God measures His grace against our sin. Grace has abounded under many, said Romans 5. Grace has abounded under many, said Ephesians 1, the riches of His grace. And says Romans 5 again, where sin abounded, grace does much more abound.

Now, when God says much more abound, I told you quite a while ago that God has no degrees. Man has degrees. We give men their IQs. It is one of the worst things you can do. I think I told you that I had, when I was in the army, I had an IQ test and I rated very high and I’ve had a lifetime to try to keep from remembering that. And to keep very humble before God you know, because whenever get thinking about it, hmm, I rated up among the top 4% in all of the army. And of course, you know what that does to you? Do you know what it does to you? And you have to keep humbling and God has to keep chastening you to keep down.

We vary in our IQ. Some people’s IQ drags along behind and some are way up there. One of my grandchildren, he’s got an IQ so high that he’s a pest, and my wife and I worry a little bit as good grandparents should over that boy. He’s all right. He wants to be normal, but his parents can’t forget his high IQ.

Well, he may turn out to be a very, very good truck driver later on. But he’s got a high IQ. Higher or lower, some have very great kindness. Some are not so kind. But there’s nothing in God that can compare itself with anything else in God. What God is, God is. But when we measure it against ourselves, when it says grace does much more abound means not that grace does much more abound than anything else in God, but it means that grace much more abounds than anything in us. So that no matter what, how much sin a man has done, literally and truly, grace abounds unto that man.

Old John Bunyan wrote his life story and do you remember what he called it? I think it is one of the finest titles ever given to a book. It was a little too long. Now they don’t give them such long titles, but he called it, “Grace Abounding Toward the Chiefest Sinner.” That was his title, “Grace Abounding Toward the Chiefest Sinner.” Well nowadays we would have just shortened it to “Grace Abounding.”

Do you know, nobody ever reminds or remembers that it said, grace abounding toward the chief of sinners, Now, John Bunyan honestly believed that he was the man who had the least right to the grace of God. Nobody that anybody ever had any right but he felt his sinfulness–grace abounded. So, for us who stand under the disapprobation of God; who by sin lie under sentence, under the sentence of God’s eternal, everlasting displeasure, and banishment.

Grace then, is an incomprehensively immense and overwhelming plenitude of kindness and goodness, and if we could only remember it my brother. If we could only get a hold of it, we wouldn’t have to be played with and fooled with so much and entertained so much. If we can only walk around remembering that the grace of God toward us who have nothing, but demerit. It’s an incomprehensively immense attribute, so vast, so huge, so overwhelming that nobody can ever grasp it or hope to understand it. And it is the lovingkindness of God toward the people.

Would God have put up with us this long if He had not had this in Him. If God had had only a limited amount of grace. Well, if He had had only a limited amount of grace, He wouldn’t have been God. If He’d had only a limited amount of anything, He wouldn’t have been God because God to be God, must have an infinite, not amount because amount means a measure; and you can’t measure God in any direction. God dwells in no dimension and can’t be measured in any way. Measures belong to human beings. Measures belong to the stars. Distances I’ve pointed out is the way heavenly bodies account for the distance they are, the space they occupy, their relation to other heavenly bodies. The moon 250,000 miles away, the sun, 93 million miles away, and all that kind of thing.

Well, that’s these heavenly bodies accounting to our intelligence for where they are, but God never accounts to anybody for anything He is. God’s immensity, God’s infinitude must mean that the grace of God must always be immeasurably full. When we sing the grace of God, Amazing Grace, Amazing Grace wrote this man. Why, of course, it’s amazing. How can we stand and gaze at the fullness of the grace of God. Do you see, there are two ways to think about the grace of God; there’s to look at yourself and see how sinful you were and say God’s grace must be oceanic. It must be vast. It must be huge as the space to forgive such a sinner as I am. That’s one way, and that’s a good way. And then probably that’s the most popular way. But there’s another way to think of the grace of God too, and that’s to think of the grace of God being the way God is, so that always it remains the way God is. That’s God being like God.

And when God shows grace to a sinner, He isn’t being dramatic. He’s acting like God and He’ll never act any other way but like God. On the other hand, when that man that justice has condemned, when that man turns his back on the grace of God in Christ and refuses to allow himself to be rescued, then the time comes when God must judge the man. And when God judges the man, He acts like Himself in judging the man. When God shows love to the human race, He acts like Himself. When God shows judgment to the angels that kept not their first estate, He acts like Himself. Always God acts in conformity with the fullness of His own holy, perfect, symmetrical nature. And remember that God always feels this overwhelming plenitude of goodness, and He feels it in harmony with all His other attributes. I’d like to repeat there’s no frustration in God. I’d like to repeat that the evangelists and the pastor’s effort to explain; you know, we use metaphors.

I picked up a little book today called, The Book of God by Spinoza. Now, I don’t follow Spinoza fully, but I get help from lots of men I wouldn’t go across the street with. But nevertheless, they do say some things sometimes and we get help from a lot of people and he talks about the infinitude of God, this man, the infinitude of God. Well, God is infinite and God always remains God and never changes, and this the man believed.

Now, everything that God is, He is, I say, in complete harmony and that there is never any frustration in Him. But all this He bestows in His Eternal Son. You see, a lot of people have talked about the goodness of God and then they’ve gotten sentimental about it. And they have said, God is too good to punish anybody. He is too good to banish anybody. And so, they have ruled out hell. One man preached a sermon called, “The Damnable Doctrine of Damnation.” And so, he damned the doctrine of damnation. Well, you see, his concept of God wasn’t adequate. A man who has an adequate conception of God, will not only believe in the love of God, but he’ll believe in the holiness of God. He’ll not only believe in the mercy of God, but he’ll believe in the justice of God.

And when you see the Everlasting God in His holy, perfect union; when you see the one God acting in judgment, you know that the man who chooses evil must never dwell in the presence of this Holy God. But a lot of people have gone so far and they write books, and tired and lovesick women read them, and then they write poetry, and pretty soon everybody gets to believing that God is so kind and loving and gentle.

Well, God is so kind that infinity won’t measure it. And God is so loving that He is immeasurably loving, but God is also holy and just. You have got to keep that in mind. That the grace of God comes only through Jesus Christ and is channeled only through Jesus Christ; for the Second Person of the Trinity brought, opened the channel and grace flows through. It flowed through from the day that Adam sinned all through Old Testament times and it never flows any other way. So, let’s not write dreamy poetry about the goodness of our Heavenly Father who is love, love is God and God is love and love is all and all is God and everything will be okay. That’s the summation of a lot of teaching these days, but it’s false teaching my friends.

If I want to know this immeasurable grace; if I want to know this overwhelming, this astounding kindness of God, I have to step under the shadow of the cross. I must come where God releases grace. I must either have looked forward to it or I must look back at it. I must look one way or the other to that cross where Jesus died, the grace flowed out of His wounded side. And the grace that flowed there had saved Abel, and the grace that flowed there saves you.

So, we must remember that always, no man cometh unto the Father but by Me, said our Lord Jesus Christ. And Peter said that there is no name given under Heaven among men whereby we must be saved, except the name of Jesus Christ. The reason for that is, of course, that Jesus Christ is God. The law could come by Moses, and only law could come by Moses, but grace came by Jesus Christ, and it came from the beginning. It could come only by Jesus Christ because there was nobody else that was God who could die. Nobody else could take on him flesh and still be the infinite God. And when Jesus walked around on earth and patted the heads of babies, forgave harlots, and blessed mankind, He was simply God acting like God in a given situation, that’s all, just acting like God. And everything that God does, He acts like Himself. If you can only remember it and keep it in your heart; put it down somewhere and remember it.

But, this one act of Jesus, this one act, this divine act, this human act, it couldn’t have been a divine act alone, for it had to be for man. It couldn’t have been a human act alone, for only God could save. So, it was a human act and a divine act. It was a historic act, a once done act, done there in the darkness on the tree. That once done act hidden there; that secret act in darkness, once done and never repeated. Owned and accepted by God the Father Almighty, who raised Him from the dead the third day and took Him to His own right hand. So, let’s not degrade ourselves by vulgarizing the atonement.

Over the last generation or two generations, popular men, and they’re good men and they’ve won some to Christ and I thank God for everybody that’s been won. But you know, even while you’re winning men to Christ, even winning them in great numbers, you can be so misreading and laying wrong emphasis that you start a trend that is bad. And over the last two generations, evangelists have commercialized the atonement. And they’ve given us the doctrine of paying of a price. I believe He paid the price alright. And I can sing Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe, but I hope I know what I mean. When we simplify it and illustrate it and we vulgarize the atonement, my brethren, I do not know how He did it. I can only stand as Ezekiel stood in the valley of dry bones and raise my head to God and say, O Lord God, Thou knowest.

Back there when the Prophet said that He would come and give Himself a ransom for many, they didn’t know quite what they were writing about, Peter said. And even angels that watched the pen, the quill pen write over the old-fashioned paper, the story of the coming Messiah, looking over the shoulders of the prophets, as they wrote, the angels desired to look into it. Not even the sharp-eyed angels around the throne of God know how He did it. In secret, there in the dark, He did a once done act never done before and never done again. An historic act, finished, done and completed. And because He did that, the grace of God flows to all men.

Oh my friend, let’s remember that angels and prophets and even Paul said without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness manifest, that God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the world and received up into heaven. And this mightiest mind, many say, many serious minded, worthy scholars are ready to say that Paul’s mind was the greatest that ever was known in the human race, except of course, for the perfect mind of Christ.

But this mighty mind never tried to understand it. He said, great is the mystery of godliness, and that’s all. We’re saved by His blood, but how are we saved by His blood? We are alive by His death, but why are we alive by His death? Atonement was made in His death, but how was atonement made in His death? Let’s not vulgarize it by trying to understand it. But let’s stand and gaze at the cross and say, O Lord God, Thou knowest, worthy is the Lamb that was slain. And the angels enviest, if angels can be envious, look upon us ransomed sinners and desire to look into it. But God says to the angels, the spirits burning there before the throne can bear, can bear the burning bliss, but they have never, never known a sinful world like this.

So, God says, go help my people. Go help my people. He sends them out to be ministering spirits to them who shall be heirs of salvation, but He never explains to them. And I doubt whether there’s an angel or archangel anywhere in heaven that understands what happened there on that cross. We know He died. We know because He died, we don’t have to. We know that He rose from the dead, and because He rose from the dead, we’ll rise from the dead who believe on Him. We know He went to the right hand of God and sat down in perfect approval amidst the acclamations of the heavenly multitude. And we know that because He did, we’ll go there with Him. But why God shut up in secret of His own great heart forever. And we can only say, worthy is the Lamb.

Well, let’s not try to understand, let’s just believe. Do you know Brother McAfee that it was 100 years before the church ever began to talk about and try to explain atonement, 100 years? The fathers never tried. Paul never tried to explain it. Peter never tried. The fathers, early fathers never tried. It was only when Greek influence came in and men began to try to think their way through and then they gave us explanations. And I appreciate those explanations. But I, for my part, stand and gaze on Him and say, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know how He did it nor what it all means, any more than a two-year-old baby stands gazing into her mother’s face and says, Mother, how did I get here? And the mother smiles and says you’ll know later and doesn’t try to explain to a two-year-old intellect. But I think that God, when we say, O God, how is it?, I do not believe that God will say you’ll know later. I think He will say, believe on my Son. For what is of the earth, He lets us know, but what is of Heaven, He holds in his own great heart. And what He won’t tell the angels, maybe He won’t tell us.

Oh, the wonder of it; the awesomeness of it. Can we preach too much about it? Can we sing too much about it? Can we pray too much? Can we insist on it too much? Well, maybe we should cease to strain to understand. And we should just hear the story in five minutes. The story of grace told by the Lord of all grace and the Fountain of all mercy, believed in by the simple-hearted. A certain man had two sons and one of them said to his father, Father, divide the portion that is mine with me. And the father divided the portion and when he had received it, he went into a foreign country. There he did live riotously. And when he had spent all, a great famine game in that land. And this ungrateful boy who had demanded his share before his father’s death, thus had violated one of the tenderest conventions of human society, now goes and ask for a job feeding hogs and he was a Jew. Things got worse and worse and then he had nothing. And finally, he had to push a hog away and eat some of the husks. And those who fed the hogs wouldn’t give him any. They said, let it alone, this is for the pigs. He managed to stay alive. Then one day he got to thinking, that’s when he came to himself you remember. He’d been somebody else, but now he comes to himself. That’s repentance. And he thinks about home, about father. And he knew that that father hadn’t changed. And that’s what Jesus was trying to tell us. The father hadn’t changed.

Oh, a long time ago, I won’t say how many, but it’s a great many years ago; and I was in my earliest twenties. I had heard the prodigal son was a backslider. But I didn’t read it in the fifteenth of Luke. He couldn’t be a backslider and fit all the circumstances. I’d heard he was a sinner. But I couldn’t hear God say of a sinner, this my son was dead and is alive again. It didn’t fit the circumstances. So, I went to God, and I said, God, will you show me. Then, I went to a place all by myself. I used to spend days and praying all alone. And I went there, and suddenly there flashed over me the understanding. And I have never had reason to doubt that this was God teaching me His Bible. I never heard anybody else say this, and I haven’t made a lot of it, but God said to my heart, the prodigal son is neither a backslider nor a sinner. The prodigal son is the human race. The human race that went out to the pigsty to the far country in Adam, and came back in Christ, my Son. For if you’ll notice, there were two other parables there, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The sheep that wandered away was the part of the human race that will be saved. And when he comes back, he’s the part of the human race that will be one that’s redeemed, and that will accept redemption.

So, these, all these, all these of every race and color around the world that have come back, they’ve all come back in Christ. And they’ve all come back in the person of that prodigal, all that’s the redeemed human race coming back. And do you know what they found the Father to be like? They found He hadn’t been changed at all. Insults, wronged, his neighbors pitted him and they said, oh, isn’t that terrible the way that boy treated his poor old Dad. And his father was humiliated and shamed and sorry and grieved and heartbroken. But when the boy came back, he hadn’t changed at all. And Jesus was saying to us, you went away in Adam, but you’re coming back in Christ. And when you come back, you’ll find the Father hasn’t changed. He’s the same Father that He was when you all went out every man to his own way. And when you come back in Jesus Christ, you’ll find Him exactly the same as you left Him, unchanged. That’s the story of the prodigal son. He ran and threw his arms around him and welcomed him, put a robe on him and a ring, and said, this my son was dead, and he’s alive again.

This is the grace of God my friends. Isn’t it worth believing in, preaching, teaching, singing about, while the world stands? If you’re out of the grace of God tonight, you know where grace is. Turn your eyes upon Jesus, and there’s the grace of God flowing free for you, all the grace you need. The great kindness of God in Christ Jesus. If you set your teeth against Him, the grace of God might as well not exist for you and Christ might as well not have died. But, if you yield to Him and come home, then all the overwhelming, incomprehensible plenitude of goodness and kindness in the great illimitable reaches of God’s nature are on your side. And even justice, as I said before, is on the side of the returning sinner. He’s faithful and just to forgive us our sin. And all the infinite attributes of God rejoice together when a man believes in the grace of God and returns home. Let us pray.

Father, we pray for all of us. We pray that thou will sweep away our self-righteousness, even any little traces of the ragged traces of self-righteousness that may be left, sweep them away, and save us from ourselves. Let grace abound from Calvary and teach us that it is not by grace and something else, but grace alone, thy goodness, thy kindness in Christ Jesus. This we ask in the name of the Lord who loves us. Amen.

Tags attributes, Grace, Tozer