Tag: Holy Spirit

“Christ Offers Us Spiritual Power-Why We Don’t Have It“

Christ Offers Us Spiritual Power-Why We Don’t Have It

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 29, 1959

Now, it is a privilege any time to take the Word of God and expound it to any group of people anywhere. But it is particularly, it is a particular privilege to be able to preach to preachers, because when you preach to a preacher, if it does him any good, then you are preaching to everybody he preaches to after that.

If you preach to a congregation, you preach to a congregation. But if you preach to preachers, you preach to everybody they preach to after that.  So, it is a particular privilege for me to address the members of Conference, and it’s odd that the congregation is composed almost exclusively of the delegates.

Now, there are two little passages of Scripture that I want to read. One is found in the first chapter of Acts. When they were come together, they asked Him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?

And He said unto them, it is not for you to know the times or the seasons. You see, He caught them up on a word. Wilt Thou at this time, and He said, it’s not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath put in His own power, but ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

Then, in 2 Corinthians 7:10, 11, for godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death. For behold, this selfsame thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly sort. What carefulness it wrought in you, what clearing of yourselves, yea, what indignation, yea, what fear, what vehement desire, what zeal, what revenge, and in all things ye have proved yourselves to be clear in this matter.

Now, I want to talk first about the offer of our Lord, that we should have power. And then, try to show why we don’t have, and that will be the second text.

Now you will notice that in the verses from Acts, that the word power occurs twice. Greek sharks complain all the time that the Greek has so many meanings in it, that they can’t find any English word that has enough meanings. But it so happens that here we have an English word that has too many meanings, and that’s the word power. It has enough meaning in that one word to take in both Greek words. For in verse 7 it says, which the Father hath put in His own power, verse 8, but ye shall receive power. The same word in English.

But this English word has two meanings, and so it covers the two Greek words. One meaning ability, and the other meaning authority. In Luke 4, verses 35 and 36, we read of our Lord performing an act, Luke 4, and it says that the power and authority of Jesus, it refers to His power and authority, and there you have both of the meanings.

Now, authority is the right to do, and power is the ability to do, but it so happens that power in English means both of these things. We have to distinguish. Jesus here did not promise authority. That is dealt with elsewhere, but here the word authority, or the thought of authority, is not present. He’s talking about ability to do.

And He said when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, you shall have moral ability to do. This supernatural potency, he said, was to come upon them. It was to be an invasion from outside of them, from beyond them. It was to invade their nature. It was to come into their personality from outside of them.

And here is the great gulf that separates between the faith of Christ and all forms of occultism. There’s Baha’ism and New Thought and Unity and Yogiism and Applied Psychology and Autosuggestions and New Thought and what have you.

Well, they all try to do the same thing, and you know the odd part about it is that they’re not all bad. They have a little good in them.

If a fellow is downcast and hand-pecked and brow-beaten and discouraged and blue, and you can talk him into believing that he amounts to something, it’ll help him a little. You know, he’ll go home and back and face it, or he’ll go to his work and face it. It does him a little bit of good.

Thinking positively helps a little bit. But all of these occult or psychological religions say the same thing, wake up the giant within you. Some of us have no giant, we have a mouse in us. But wake up the giant within you. Others say tune in your hidden potentials.

A man sent me a book called, “You Are Greater Than You Think,” and he autographed it for me, inscribed it, said he knew I’d enjoy it. And then another fellow says, make friends with your solar plexus and learn to think creatively.

Now, all of these are the occult, forms of occultism and psychology. And I say that they’re not wholly bad, not wholly bad, because they help a man to get his chin up and take it. And it’s better than nothing at all for a short time.

But it isn’t what Jesus was talking about. These things have nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever. Our Lord had nothing like that in mind. He knew there was no giant within us. He knew that our hidden potentialities were potentialities for sin. And He knew that our solar plexus was simply the central switchboard for fallen nerves. He knew that. And He knew that we could think until the world came and not create anything. He knew it.

So, He said, what you’re going to have to have is an invasion from outside of you, an afflatus from above, a potency that has come from another world. And you’ll receive that when the Holy Ghost comes upon you. You’ll receive that moral ability that you don’t have now. You’ll receive it.

Now, this has to come. And that’s why ethical Christianity is not sufficient. You know, evangelicalism in one fringe at any rate, very important fringe, is moving the way liberalism moved 50 years ago, going the same direction.

And they’re beginning now to talk about the importance of Christian ethics. Well, Christian ethics, my friends, simply means obeying the commandment of Christ. That was the name for it. But that sounds too dumb. So now we’ve invented terms to sound more learned, so we can hold up our heads among the PhDs.

And all of this ethical Christianity is inadequate. It isn’t enough because it doesn’t bring something to you. It simply whips up a weak dog. It whips up a weak animal, that’s all. When you lay the lash on an old spaven swayback mule, all you can bring out of him is what he’s got in him. If you want an Arabian stallion, you have to have an Arabian stallion.

And so all that books on Christian ethics can do is to whip up the poor old spaven Adam nature that you’ve got, and it isn’t enough. It isn’t sufficient. It won’t do.

So, the Lord Jesus Christ said, you shall receive a potency from above. You shall receive an afflatus of power coming upon you with ability to do, moral ability. If Christianity doesn’t provide this, then it is only one more of the religions of the world.

Now, this power of course is the Spirit of God, and I will say “It” sometimes, meaning the power, abstracting in thought, the power from the Spirit, who is the Power, but only in thought. There can be no division, no cleavage between the Holy Spirit and His power, but I shall talk about power and sometimes say “It.”

So don’t think that I’m going wrong here. It is only the weakness and ineffectiveness of human language that forces me to do it. The power of the Spirit, the Spirit of Holiness, the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of the Father, He is the Spirit of the Father, and therefore this power that God, that our Lord offers us, is the power of God.

Now, I want to talk a little about how that power operates. It operates by an unmediated force applied directly to the human spirit by the Holy Spirit.

The wrestler works in the same way. He operates by applying physical power to physical power. The great bruiser applies, he reaches his ends and succeeds, that is, in pinning the other man by applying great lumpy muscle to another fellow who has great lumpy muscle, but maybe not quite as much.

So, the wrestler achieves his end by the pressure of body on body, and the thinker achieves his end by the pressure of ideas upon the mind. And it’s amazing what an idea will do when it gets into the mind.

That little peasant that was over here from Russia the other day, he’s a brainwashed fellow. He’s sold on his proposition. Ideas hit his mind, and they bend him and shaped him and molded him. And even though an Iowa farmer can raise 16 times as much corn to the bushel, he thought he knew how to tell the farmer how to raise corn. That’s because ideas have hit his mind, and the raw force of ideas on a little shrewd mind has turned him into a devoted communist.

Of course, ideas don’t have to be communistic. They’re ideas all up and down the scale from bad to good, and they achieve their ends by naked contact with the human mind.

Then when we come to morals, morals achieve their end by the pressure of obligation upon the conscience. A man does right because his conscience has obligation. He feels a sense of moral obligation upon his conscience.

Now, those are illustrations merely, but when we come to the Holy Spirit, we come to something else altogether. He may make use of ideas, and He may make use of a sense of obligation and a conscience. He may make use of it.

Though I preached a sermon on conscience one time up in your district, the one you came out of, brother, before you came out of it, I mean before you got in it, years ago, and they ran me ragged for talking about conscience.

I believe in conscience. The words in the Bible, and I’ll never run from the words in the Bible, it’s there, the Holy Ghost may use conscience, the Holy Ghost uses ideas. But when Jesus said, Ye shall receive power, he was not particularly thinking about ideas nor about conscience. He was thinking about the application, the pressure of the Spirit of God upon the Spirit of man, the ability of God being brought into contact with the Spirit of man, enabling the man to do what he couldn’t otherwise do or ever hope to be able to do.

Now, it can be experienced, this power, but it can never be described, and never worry about that, any of you preachers. If anybody runs you in the corner and says, define, never worry about that at all, because no scientist can define, no philosopher can define, you can’t define at all. You can only describe.

Definitions are for dictionaries, and they belong there. I cannot define how the power of God works in a man, I don’t know, I can’t define, but you’ve seen it work. You’ve seen the Spirit of God come into a drunkard and kill the desire for liquor, you’ve seen that. You’ve seen the Holy Ghost come into a dope fiend and take away that terrible love of dope. You’ve seen the Holy Ghost come into a man with a fiery, vicious temper and calm him down and smooth him off and make him as quiet as a lamb. You’ve seen that. It can’t be explained.

The Holy Ghost does this, He uses the awe and fear of the supernatural. He secures the end, independent of the intellect.

Now, the greatest force, of course that the Holy Ghost has, the greatest force is His ability to make spiritual entities real to the mind. When the Holy Ghost has come, He shall take the things of mine and He shall show them unto you. There is a veil between the mind of a man and spiritual things until the Spirit of God comes and makes it possible for him to see them.

The Holy Ghost doesn’t create the objects any more than the sun, when it comes up in the morning, creates the landscape. You can stand on a hillside and look down on a valley where there are beautiful farms and lovely farm buildings and little lakes and flowing rivers and see nothing at all, for it’s dark there.

Then the sun comes up in its blazing glory and you see the silver rivers and the little lakes and the farmhouses and the fields all laid out in squares and the highway weaving between. The sun didn’t create those things, they were there, but you didn’t see them. But when the sun came, you saw what was there.

The Spirit of God comes to show you what’s already there. He doesn’t create them. He doesn’t project imaginary things out of your mind. They’re there, but you can’t see them. Then when He comes, He shows them to you. I say this full effectiveness is when the Spirit of God reveals Jesus Christ unto us and enables us to do what you have to do, He enables you to do.

Now, the next question is, with this promise here, with its having been fulfilled at Pentecost and with the perpetuation of Pentecost, and I will say, I do not believe in the repetition of Pentecost, I believe in the perpetuation of Pentecost.

Pentecost is not to be repeated, it is to be perpetuated. But if you have been brainwashed by some of the dispensationalists, why, you will be asking me the question or quietly and smugly, smiling at my ignorance and saying, don’t you know that Pentecost came and went? And I reply, no, I know nothing of the sort. Pentecost came and stayed, it did not come and go.

The Spirit of the Lord, God, came down into human flesh, and wherever there’s a heart that’s open to His incoming, he still does the same thing. But somebody says, that happened back there once for all, that can’t, we never can have that that they had back there.

I say that I might as well try to live on a meal that Peter ate in Jerusalem, as to live on the blessing that Peter got in the upper room. And if I can’t have the same afflatus of power, the same incoming of potency from beyond me, then what good did it do Peter? Peter was filled with the Holy Ghost, but Peter’s dead. Much, much wind has blown over the moor since that hour. In another part of the world, in another age, way back yonder, Peter was filled with the Holy Ghost in the upper chamber.

And they say, now, shh, be quiet, let it go at that. That’s what it meant; you shall receive power. That happened back there, but they’re all dead.

Neither the church died with them, or else the Lord Jesus Christ meant that that should be perpetuated to the end of the age. I believe the latter. I believe that the Lord meant that the power of the Holy Ghost he offered His church here should be perpetuated to all His people and beloved friends. If you read your Schofield Bible margin, you’ll find He believes it too.

Now, why don’t we have this? We Alliance preachers, we claim to believe in the deeper life, the Spirit-filled life. But I preach for an awful lot of people. When I go to New York next week, I’m going to preach for a week in the Alliance church, and then I’m going to preach to a convention of Pentecostal preachers, believe it or not. Then I’m going to preach to a convention two days later of Baptist preachers. And I’m going to preach just about the same thing.

And I’d like to say to you Alliance preachers, I find that we don’t have a thing the rest of them don’t have. We don’t have a thing except the memory of A. B. Simpson. Where are you going to go to find Alliance preachers that have anything extra? Why don’t we have? We’ve got Christ in the Bible series, we have days of heaven upon earth, we have all of those books. We’re supposed to believe in these things. But we’ve learned the ways of the denominations. Some denominations are ahead of us, edge us out.

I run into people, I run into preachers who are hungry for God, that it’s pitiful. A pastor of a Bible church, a Calvinistic Bible church that’s not supposed to believe in these things, told me this. He said, Brother Tozer, I’m so hungry for God, I can feel it in my body, in my flesh. I long for God with a longing that I can feel in my body. I know what he meant, for David said, my flesh and my heart cry out for the living God. I haven’t had an Alliance preacher say that to me in 25 years.

I’m preaching to Alliance preachers, but brethren, if I were preaching to Baptists, I’d never say this. I’m as loyal as a dog when I’m preaching to others, but I’m talking to you, I want to be frank, tell you what I think of you. Why don’t we have this? Why do we preach about it and not experience it?

Why are we satisfied to take a little church, preach to a few people and stay three years, then write the superintendent and get shifted and then two years more, go someplace else and quit and go into evangelism, and evangelism for a year and then go back into the pastorate? Why are we satisfied to do that kind of thing? Why must we always be little and without much ministry?

I’ll tell you, my brethren, why. And incidentally, it’s not because this truth doesn’t stand here, ye shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you. Isn’t it that we’ve misinterpreted that? No. It’s because we don’t have what Paul called, a vehement desire. A vehement desire creates a vacuum in the human spirit.

And just as nature loathes a vacuum, so God loathes a vacuum. And He never allows a vacuum to stay in the human spirit. If we empty ourselves out and long for God until a vacuum is created, only one thing can happen, the Holy Ghost will rush in to fill the vacuum.

This longing for God is a vital ingredient in the religious life. It’s found interwoven, of course, with the experience of the saints everywhere. It has other names in the Bible, hunger, for instance. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness. Covet is another word Paul used. Long for, yearn, ardor, and fervency, all of these words. But vehement desire, desire that stops being conventional.

The trouble with us, brethren, the trouble with you, is you’re too conventional. You’ve got a cheap brand of sophisticated Christianity, and you’d rather be conventional than to please God. And you’d consider it a terrible thing if anybody said you were fanatical. If you’re going to please God, you’re going to have to run the gamut, and you’re going to have to be accused of everything.

I’ve been accused of everything imaginable, including being a liberal, if you can imagine that. But I’ve been accused of being a liberal. I’ve just had a little of everything. But you’ve got to be what Paul said here. Yeah, what indignation!

A man has to be a little bit tough and a little bit mean to serve God. You know what I mean by that? I mean, if you’re a soft pussy afraid of your reputation and afraid of what the superintendent will think of you, afraid of what the chairman of the board will think of you, afraid of what the women’s prayer band will think of you, you’ll always be a little mouse.

But if there’s a longing for God and a repentance and a sorrow of heart over your own weakness, that is of a godly sort that works in you, carefulness and a clearing of yourself, and indignation not against others but with yourself, and fear and vehement desire, you’ll get a reputation of being different, of course, and they’ll say, he’s weird, he’s different. And somebody says, let’s get so-and-so as our pastor, and somebody says, just a minute, just a minute, I know that fellow, because he’s vehemently longing after God.

But if you’ll go ahead anyhow, if you’ll do it anyway, if you’ll seek the face of God anyhow, if you’ll shut yourself up and seek the face of God until the afflatus from God comes on you, give yourself five years, they’ll be coming to you. The first year they’ll run away from you, and the next four they’ll be coming to you. Remember that. What longing after God, Paul said.

Now, the effect of absence of desire is all around about us. We examine our own hearts, it’ll confirm the truth of what I’ve said, the state of our spiritual desire.

Now, here you are at conference, and you’re going to elect a new district superintendent, and I think that I could safely and charitably say that who your new superintendent is, is the most important matter in the minds of most of us. Brethren, it doesn’t matter much at all. Ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, and you shall be visited by a supernatural afflatus from another world. That’s what matters.

And if we could meet God’s terms, and we could create by indignation and a clearing of ourselves and a yearning after God, if we could create within our hearts a vacuum and this mighty Spirit of God would flow in, almost anybody will help us to lead us. But we take the least important things and make them to be important, and the one important thing we overlook.

When Peter later on got up and grabbed his hat and started to preach the gospel to every creature, the Lord called him back and said, Peter, you’ve misunderstood me. I said you should go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, but you’re not ready to go yet. Don’t go yet, because ye shall receive power, then you go. But never go until you do.

I’ve always claimed that before any man is ordained, he ought to give proof that he either has been filled with the Holy Ghost or he’s longing with vehement desire. But we never ask him that question, at least we rarely do.

So, we grade up and down from practically no desire at all to a very little desire, to a desire that’s stronger than any emotion in the human breast. A longing after God, a longing for God’s Spirit, a longing for holiness of heart, a longing for ability to do.

And if you’ll remember this, that our spiritual state always corresponds with the intensity of our desire. Everybody listening to me has as much of God as he actually desires. You are as holy as you want to be. You are as full of the Holy Ghost as you really want to be.

Remember, that we can think we want to be filled with the Spirit of God, but not want too bad enough to pay the price to be filled. We cancel out our longing and we don’t want to be at all.

If you can make terms with God; a man will kneel at the altar and begin to make terms with God. He’ll never be filled. Man will kneel at the altar and begin to argue with God. He’ll never be filled. It’s when desire goes beyond all dickering and all making of terms and becomes a vehement thing, a tempestuous thing, a torrential thing, then God will bless and fill that man with the Holy Ghost.

I preached to a conference of Baptist preachers some time ago, a few years back, and I preached about Isaiah seeing the Lord high and lifted up. Two years later, two Baptist preachers came to my home out in Longwood Drive and said, we’d like to talk with you, Brother Tozer. I said, Come on in. I knew one of them, and the other was introduced to me. One of them said, do you remember when you preached to a conference of Baptist preachers up in the name of the town up north of Chicago? I don’t remember which one it was. I said, I remember.

Well, he said, you remember when you preached on Isaiah seeing the Lord high and lifted up and he saw that he was no good, he was all dirty inside, he needed to have a hot coal, a flaming coal to touch him. I said, I remember this sermon.

Well, he said, You know what happened to me? I conceived that day such a longing to be filled with the Holy Ghost that it ruled my life, it controlled me, it became the biggest thing in my life.

And he said, For months and months I sought God. I went on with my pastorate, but I sought God. And he said, one day, after more than a year, one day I stood in the middle of my living room floor and I suddenly looked up and I said, God, I won’t wait any longer.

And he said, Instantly and suddenly, wonderfully, there came down an afflatus of the Holy Ghost upon my life. Oh, Brother Tozer, he said, what God did for me. I said, don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to the Pentecostals. I’m a Baptist preacher. I’m going right back and preach right the way I’ve been preaching. But he said, Oh, I got what you preached about.

I could illustrate by telling you case after case, person after person, who, whatever their shade of theology might have been, I never worry much about that, as long as it’s orthodox. But the point is, when they get a longing after God sufficiently, then the Spirit of God will rush in and fill the vacuum.

And always remember, I repeat, you have as much as you want. Maybe you don’t have as much as you’ve prayed for, but you have as much as you really desire. It is wonderful what strong desire will do for a man.

Paul Rader used to tell about a man cast up on an island with just one can of beans. He said he just had a can of beans that floated up there, and he was alone. He said he hadn’t a thing. He didn’t even have a fountain pen. He said, there are the beans. He said, as the days went on, that man got hungrier and hungrier and hungrier. But there were the beans in the can, and he didn’t even have a sharp rock.

But he said, do you know something? That man will get that can open somehow, and he will. You put a man up on an island with a can of beans and let him get hungry enough, he’ll get that can open somehow.

And the man who wants God bad enough, he’ll get God. A man who wants that afflatus of power badly enough, he’ll get that afflatus of power. It may take him five years to figure it out theologically, but the power of God will come upon that life. And this is what we need in our day. This is what we need.

Back a few years ago in Nyack, some of the boys, one of them from this church, Harry Post, some of the other fellows from different places, they got the idea they wanted to have a prayer meeting.

So, they went down in the furnace room of the great big old Simpson Hall, I think they call it now, and they had what they called a glory hole. They were young enough, you know, to be kind of silly, but old enough to be longing after God.

So, they called it the glory hole. And down there they went. And they got to praying, seeking the face of God. And God got to meeting them and bothered the faculty terribly. So, they called them together and straightened them out theologically.

But they were just a little too late to head off the power of God. God had met this half dozen fellows, I could name them on my fingers, and everyone went out to be outstanding missionaries. Everyone. Not ordinary missionaries, outstanding missionaries. You know Harry Post. He gets up, you know, and flaps his ears and talks and moves people when he talks. God came on him. God came on these boys.

Always there’s somebody running and saying, let the Master alone, let the Master alone. When they run, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And some dig and said, let him alone, let him alone. Jesus said, you let him alone. I want to help him. What do you want? He said, I want to see. He said, okay. He touched him and he saw.

But we’re so afraid of getting fanatical. That’s what always tickles me when I get in Alliance churches. They say, now, we don’t want to become fanatical. We’re so far from being fanatical, we couldn’t get there by jet airplane in two weeks. No.

Fanatical? Fanatical, brother? Is a man likely to die of a fever when he’s only, he’s only, he’s only gotten a temperature of 80 in the shade? No, no. You won’t die of fever. We Alliance preachers don’t have to worry. We can go miles toward God, brother, before we strike any place where we’re likely to get fanatical.

And if you’re moving toward God, you’ll never get fanatical. It’s only when you stop moving toward God and start moving out after somebody. As long as you’re longing for God, you’ll never become fanatical. Ah, for the fanaticism of power, the fanaticism of Memminger, and the fanaticism of Dr. Wilson, and the fanaticism of these holy men that founded the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Well, what shall we do about this absence of desire? Well, we ought to consider it a deep soul sickness. We ought to consider something’s wrong with us.

Now, we can lead in prayer, we can read the Scripture, we can whip up a sermon, we can be chairman of the board, we can build a new church, we can do all sorts of religious things.

But you know, you can do that without God’s help. Did you know that brethren? You can preach a sermon without the Holy Ghost. You can. You can conduct a church for a year without the Holy Ghost. You don’t need the power of God to carry on a church the way we’ve got them organized now. All you need is a pleasant smile and a little patience.

Does that shock you? Well, thank God something happened anyhow. Is it shocking? It’s true, nevertheless. There are churches in this town where the Holy Ghost hasn’t been for generations, but they carry on just the same. All you have to do is get your constitution, get organized, get an understanding of who’s running things, and sing some, and give some, and preach some, and pray some, and visit some, and be nice, and you’ve got a church. But you haven’t got what God talked about.

Ye shall receive a potency from without you, that shall enter into you and give you moral ability to do. And if we don’t want this and we’re not longing for it, we ought to consider ourselves spiritually sick.

A man gets up in the morning and has no appetite, goes to noon and still has no appetite, at supper time his wife can’t persuade him to eat, and the next morning he has no appetite. He’s sick.

And the lack of longing, the lack of appetite, is a spiritual sickness. And we ought to consider how it’s keeping us helpless in this hour of the death struggle, this terrible hour of the death struggle, when evangelical Christianity is going off in four or five different directions.

Oh, how God needs sane, sound men with sound doctrinal position, but aflame with the Power. How desperately we need it, but we’ll not have it as long as we’re satisfied with what we’ve got. Give the average young preacher a little parsonage, second-hand car, and two weeks’ vacation a year, and pay his way to conference, and that’s about all he wants. He’ll probably have a couple of babies, or three, four. But that’s about all. He’s very happy.

Oh, for the men and women, the young fellows that won’t be satisfied with this. They’ll go off and seek God until something happens to their lives. I’d be happy if a young fellow who thinks he’s called to the ministry would seek God until he found whether he was or not.

You know this fellow, Duma. Is that his name? D-U-M-A, I think. Over there in Africa, South Africa. How he, ignorant fellow, Zulu, if I remember. No education, nothing, but he felt called to preach. He came to Dr. Cook, now at Fort Wayne Bible Institute College. He said, Mr. Cook, I believe God’s calling me to preach. And Cook tells it on himself. He said, I didn’t think any of these were ever called to preach. He was ignorant. He was uncouth. He had nothing.

He said, I told him, oh, you better give it up. I don’t think you’re called to preach. He said he disappeared and was gone two weeks. He went up in the hills and went in a cave. He spent two weeks waiting on God to be guided, to be filled with the Holy Ghost, to be prepared, to find out whether he was called or not. At the end of two weeks, he came back with his black face shining.

And he went to the Baptists and said, I’d like a church. And they said, all right. Gave him a church of six members. In a year or two, he had that many hundreds. It was only a little while until he became the outstanding preacher of South Africa.

They say that ignorant man, black as ebony, many times called into the homes of the white governors to pray for their sick. And he prays for their sick and they get well. Nobody, nobody doubted his call when he came back from his two weeks with God. He shall receive power when the Holy Ghost comes upon you.

Now, brethren, you can do anything you want with this. You can interpret it. And you can say that it’s not scriptural, a sound, scriptural position. Do as you please about it, but always remember, whatever you do about it is what you’ll have in your ministry. You’ll get as much as you’re hungry for. You will have as much as you long for.

And if the self-indignation and the clearing of yourself and the godly sorrow and the yearning after God that becomes vehement, if it takes over, you don’t know what God may do for you. Coming upon you in great power, the power of enabling, the power of moral enabling, the power of spiritual penetration, the power to see through the fog bank, power of x-ray vision. God wants to give you that, my ministerial brethren.

The price has all been paid on the cross of Calvary. No price yet to be paid, only conditions to be met. I pray that before this conference is over, some of you may have met those conditions. For when you meet them, instantly the work of God is done. You shall be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Now, I know this is not a good motive to suggest, but I’m going to tell you something. The Christian and Missionary Alliance believes what I’ve preached tonight. But we’re doing so little about it that there are other groups who had not been taught it, but who have in recent years become hungry, and they’re going into the kingdom of God ahead of us.

Now, it’s not a good motive, of course, but I’m just warning you that if we won’t, somebody will. If we’re not, somebody is. May God grant that yet the Christian and Missionary Alliance, with its 850, nearly, missionaries around the world, may go back to Bethel, back to where we found God and start over. Let us pray.

O Lord Jesus, Thou knowest the propensity of the human heart to backslide. Thou knowest how quickly the temperature of the human spirit cools off. Thou knowest how easy it is to become satisfied with ourselves, to be at ease in Zion, to invent instruments of music and stretch ourselves on beds of ivory, and drink wine out of bowls, and care nothing for the captivity of Israel.

Lord, we see this among us. O deliver us, we pray Thee, from complacency. Deliver us from fallow ground. Deliver us from the unplowed heart. Deliver us from deadly contentment. O Lord, we beseech Thee, deliver us from taking by faith and not receiving.

Forgive us, we pray Thee, for our conventional Christianity. Forgive us, we pray Thee, because we’re afraid to be extreme. O Lord, cleanse our hearts from cowardice, and deliver us, we beseech Thee, from being little frightened preachers in the hour when we need lions and prophets and bold reformers and seers who wear the crown of spiritual ascendancy and rule by prayer and the Spoken Word.

We beseech Thee, disturb us, upset us. Let us not settle down to the grind of business, but rather let us, we pray Thee, while we do the business, always have the subconscious yearning, the longing, even if we have to push it out of our mind a little, may it come flaring back like a fire to burn in our bones. Until we seek Thy face and are filled with the Holy Ghost, we ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.

“The Enabling Power Of The Holy Spirit In Our Lives”

The Enabling Power of the Holy Spirit in our Lives

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 1, 1956

Summary

A.W. Tozer’s sermon, “The Enabling Power of the Holy Spirit in Our Lives,” emphasizes the essential role of the Holy Spirit in empowering believers and the church to live effective, spiritually vibrant lives. Mr. Tozer outlines three distinct periods in the lives of Jesus’s disciples: before the cross, after the resurrection but before Pentecost, and after Pentecost. He parallels these periods with the current state of the church, arguing that many are stuck in a phase of instruction without power, characterized by aimless activity, intermittent fellowship with Christ, and a lack of spiritual vitality. He urges believers to seek personal and collective repentance, purity, and the fullness of the Spirit to move beyond mere religious activity and into a life of true spiritual power and purpose.

Message

After these things, Jesus showed himself again to the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias. And on this wise showed he himself. There were together Simon Peter, Thomas called Didymus, Nathanael of Cana and Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples.

And Simon Peter saith unto them, I go fishing. They say unto him, well, we’ll go with you. So they went forth and entered into a ship immediately, and that night they caught nothing.

But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus. Then Jesus said to them, Children, have you any meat? And they answered him, no, no, we haven’t. So, He said, cast your net over on the other side, and they did, and they got fish.

Now, I want to talk tonight about these opening verses here, and with this we’ll bring the talks on John to an end. The seventeenth chapter of John was considered some two years ago, quite at length in a series of sermons, so naturally we’ll not repeat that. And the story found in John 18, 19, 20, and 21 have occupied our thoughts over the last weeks, the arrest of Jesus and the death and the resurrection, so that there scarcely it would not be proper to continue through these chapters, having been dealt with quite extensively. So, with this tonight, we will leave this blessed book of John, often, often to come back to it, but not to preach any longer in this series.

Now, this has to do tonight with the forty days in Tyrium, which is covered in Acts 1:1-8. The former treatise, said Luke, the former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day in which He was taken up after He had, through the Holy Ghost, given commandments unto the apostles whom He had chosen, to whom also He showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God, and being assembled together with them, commanded them they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith He, ye have heard of Me.

For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence. When they therefore were come together, they asked of Him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? And He said to them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. And when He had spoken these things, while they beheld, He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.

That is Luke’s story that parallels John’s story here in the twenty-first chapter of his book, the closing chapter of his book. Now, this forty-day interim period after Jesus had been raised from the dead, but before He had sent the Holy Ghost, it was a time of instruction without power.

Now, there was power in the Instructor, but there was not power in the one instructed. And it is an axiom, I think, of theology that it takes the same degree of power to understand truth as it does to preach truth. So that Jesus was instructing the minds of His disciples, but they had not the power to grasp it fully. And it was a time of intermittent fellowship with Jesus our Lord. He had risen from the grave, but they were with Him only part of the time. At one place, Thomas was not present at all. And at another time, there would only be one. At another time, there would be two or three. In another case, five hundred. And James at one time saw Him, and Peter saw Him. And the fellowship with Jesus was real, but it was intermittent. And it was a period of considerable uncertainty for these disciples.

They were uncertain about exactly what they should do. They reached a period that was something of a vacuum. It was quite empty, because it was between the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming down of the Holy Spirit. And it was a time of fruitless activity. You will notice in 21:2 that they were together aimlessly. It says here almost nonchalantly, aimlessly.

They were together, Simon Peter and Thomas called Didymus, Nathaniel of Canaan in Galilee and the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Now, they were not together by the Lord’s appointment. They were just together. They were there rather aimlessly. And being aimlessly together, naturally they had to do something, so the strongest one of them suggested they do something. He said, I’m going fishing.

He had forgotten that he had left his fishing boat to follow his Lord three years before. But now his Lord was coming and going. He was there, and then He was gone. He was present, and then He was absent. He was visible, and then He disappeared. And Peter, being an active, strong, aggressive type of man, couldn’t take this inactivity and particularly this uncertainty.

So, he said, I’m going fishing. And naturally what he suggested doing was patterned after the old life. And the strongest one, having suggested something for them to do, the ones not so strong followed their leader. So, they went along with him. And of course, it was a waste of effort and time. Verse 3, they caught nothing. And when He asked them if they had anything, they said no.

Now, I want to talk to you a little about three periods in the lives of these disciples, and three corresponding periods in churches and in individuals. There was the period before the cross and the resurrection, after they had become disciples, but before Jesus had died. That was a period of our Lord’s flesh. They went about with Him. They heard Him teach, and He was preparing them, mentally at least, for His passion, as they call it, His death and resurrection, and for the coming of the Spirit. But He was the Lord after the flesh to them. That period, after they had become disciples, but before Christ had died and risen again, we call the first period.

Then there was a second period after the cross and the resurrection, but before Pentecost. That’s the period we’re dealing with tonight, Acts 1:1-8, and John 21:1-8, or for that matter, to the end of the chapter. Then there was a third period after Pentecost, when there came to them a power and a radiance and an enthusiasm and a success that they had never known before. Now those three periods, any church or individual may be in any one of these three periods.

The first one, knowing Christ after the flesh as those disciples did. They never quite understood Jesus. They knew Him after the flesh, but they never quite understood Him. He was telling them things always that they couldn’t grasp, and He said they couldn’t grasp it. He said these things that I’m telling you, you don’t understand now, but you’ll understand when the Holy Spirit has come. We can have this same kind of situation today as individuals and as churches. Know Christ after the flesh. Know about the rest, historically, of course. But put the emphasis on the manger and on good deeds and on moral teaching, but not experiencing the cross, not experiencing the resurrection or the triumph of our Savior.

Now there are churches that are in that condition. They know Christ after the flesh. I wish I never had to rebuke or protest. I wish that always that I could avoid that, but how can you avoid it? How can you possibly avoid it, when it’s perfectly obvious that churches know Christ after the flesh, but never seem to be able to grasp the Christ, the risen Christ, the Christ who had risen and been glorified and who had sent the Holy Ghost down, never grasp that Savior at all, never experience his cross, talk about it, put it on top of the steeple, wear it around the neck, but never experience that cross in their lives at all, and never experience the power of the resurrection, then smell the Easter lily, and go through all that we do to celebrate the resurrection, but still the only Christ we know is the Christ after the flesh.

Now that can be true of a church, I say. It can also be true of an individual. Then there’s that second period, which the disciples went through back there, and which we may go through now as churches or as individuals, to know Christ and know the cross and the resurrection, and believe in the finished atonement, and know the peace of sins forgiven, and believe in the bodily resurrection, and believe His promise to return, but never experience Pentecost.

Then there’s the third period that any church can go through, or any individual can go through, when they pass on through to the other period, when the promise of the Father is fulfilled in the hearts of individuals, and they are filled with the Spirit of God. A congregation of Christian believers can also know this.

Now I want to ask the question, where are we? Which period do we find ourselves in as individuals and as a church? I would first eliminate one period and say that the situation that the average fundamentalist church finds itself in does not accord with what we call that period between Christ’s death and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Ghost.

It accords not with that first period before Christ died, but with that second period after the resurrection. Let me explain it like this now. I said that that period, that interim period, before the Holy Spirit came, but after our Lord had risen from the dead, was a time of instruction without a power.

And we have that almost everywhere these days, theological instruction without power. In the case of Jesus, there was power in the Instructor, but no power in the listener. But in the case of many churches today, and I would say the majority of them, there’s neither power in the instructor nor in the hearer, but there is an effort to rationalize the gospel of Christ and to teach it.

I hear it sometimes on the radio, and I listen here and there where I go, instructing, but no power in the instruction. Nobody’s angry, nobody’s glad, nobody’s mad, nobody’s helped, nobody’s transformed, but it’s simply instruction without power and of intermittent fellowship with Christ.

Now I want to ask you if that does not describe the present situation–intermittent fellowship with Christ. The average Christian in our time does not have an unbroken fellowship with the Savior, but an intermittent fellowship. They’re with Him today and tomorrow they’re not, and tonight it’s very sweet and wonderful, tomorrow morning it’s gone, and two days later there is some sort of an experience, and then three days later that has evaporated. So, the experience, the fellowship, is intermittent. And then in the church of Christ today there’s considerable personal uncertainty.

I find this astonishing thing, that there are hundreds of people, hundreds, I suppose it runs into the hundreds of thousands if the truth were known, but my experience doesn’t cover that many, of persons who have had theological training but don’t know what to do. They don’t know what to do with themselves. They have gone to this or that Bible school, they hold a diploma from this or that theological institution, but they don’t know what to do with themselves. They’re in a state of personal uncertainty. They’re where the disciples were after Christ had risen from the dead, but before the Holy Ghost had come at Pentecost, and therefore they are running with other Christians, and much of their meeting together is aimless.

Now there were together Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other of His disciples. There was a little meeting going on. I suppose strong Peter called that meeting together, and there they were anyway. I hear the announcements, let’s come and have a good time in the Lord.

We’re all going to meet at such and such a time, and such and such a place, and a good deal of our religious activity today consists of gathering all the sheep in one place, and then later, next week or next month, gathering all the sheep somewhere else. But never anybody quite knowing what it’s all about, personal uncertainty and fruitless activity.

Coming together aimlessly is the weakness of a lot of us Protestant Christians. We don’t know why we come together. We’re here, and we like it in a way, but just what’s it all about? And so the strongest one suggested they do something, but he hadn’t any orders from the Lord about what to do, so he scratched his fisherman’s head and said, now let me see.

The Lord’s here today and gone tomorrow. He appears now, and then He’s gone, and we’re not certain of anything, and we’re in this vacuum. We ought to be active, Christians ought to be active. We’re followers of the Lord. Let’s do something. But what was there to do? Well, naturally, he drew upon his experience of the time before he knew the Lord and said, let’s go fishing. And these weaker ones gathered around him.

Brethren, I’m describing fundamentalism today. I’m describing evangelicalism. It is where we’re unsure of ourselves. We have no afflatus. No voice has spoken. Nobody’s hearing anything. And so, the strong-willed ones are saying, let’s do so-and-so.

So, we gather over here, and we do that. And then a strong-willed one over here will say, well, I think we ought to do this. But the whole thing is uncertain. There’s no prophet to say this is the way we should go. This is what we should be doing. This is why we come together. This is the meaning of it all.

But we subscribe to magazines. We read books, and we go about here and there to conventions and Bible conferences. And usually some strong-willed fellow has said, let’s start this, or let’s do that. What do you say that we begin this?

And so, fundamentalism is a world of wheels within wheels within wheels within wheels. Ezekiel saw a wheel in the middle of a wheel. But Protestantism has not only one wheel in the middle of a big wheel, but has wheels within wheels within wheels, world without end.

But there seems to be a lack of specific direction in the thing. We turn out students from our schools, give them their diploma. They don’t know. Most of them don’t know what they went there for. A lot of them go to escape. Some parents send them there because they want to have them somewhere where they’re safe. And some of them go because their friends have gone. And some go because it’s romantic to do it. And some go to get out of the army. And some go because they’re lazy.

I heard Dr. Mosley say one time to a group of the students, if we learn, if we learn of one man who has come to this school to get out of the army, we’ll throw him out on his ear. But nevertheless, that does happen, and it’s because of the period we’re in spiritually.

We’re in a period after Christ has risen from the dead, but before the Holy Ghost has come. And we know He’s alive. We know He’s risen. We talk about Him on His throne. We expound Romans and Colossians and Ephesians. We know the truth all right. Historically, we know He’s at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and we repeat the creed and believe it, but our fellowship is uncertain. And today we see Him and tomorrow He’s gone. And we are not sure what we’re to do.

And so, we’re looking around, waiting for some strong-voiced fisherman who doesn’t know either, but who has a strong personality to say, I think we ought to do this. So, we form an organization and get a letterhead and a magazine and an office and a secretary, and we do this. I go fishing, said Peter, I go fishing.

The Lord had delivered Peter from the fisherman’s boat three years before, but there wasn’t anything to do. So, Peter normally did what there was to do. He did what he knew how to do. He went back to fishing. When the Lord God Almighty had called him to catch men, but there was a pocket there. They had reached a vacuum, and nothing was happening, and that kills some people. If they’re not busy at something, they’re not spiritual.

Brother Maxey told me about a dear woman down here somewhere. He preached about their tarrying and waiting and being filled with the Spirit. And a woman said afterward, Mr. Maxey, I have never heard this before. She said, I thought that the more active you are, the more spiritual you are. She said, honestly, that was my belief, that the more active you are, the more spiritual you are. She was perfectly willing to accept a change of viewpoint, but she was honest enough to say, that’s what I believed up to now.

Well, that seems to be the general belief, that inactivity, it’s unspeakable, it’s awful, it’s like those ten seconds with nothing going on the radio that Peter Joshua told us about, that awful dead ten seconds with nobody yelling and nobody running and nobody selling. And Peter, being a fisherman, couldn’t stand that. Well, he said, I go fishing.

Now, there wasn’t any sin in that. It was simply uninspired, undirected, and it turned out to be fruitless activity. Now, does that describe us or not, brethren? Does that describe us or not? Do we know why we’re saved? Do we know why we’re here? Do we know what it’s all about? Why is it necessary to hold all these discussions? Why is it necessary to put five ignorant people around a table and each pump the other one?

Why is it necessary for ten people to gather around a board, none of which knows anything about the guidance of the Holy Ghost, and then pool their ignorance in order to find out what to do? And of course, naturally, when they pool their ignorance, not having any divine gleam, not any divine call or upward tug or direction of the Spirit, they will pattern what they do religiously after what they have done out in the secular world.

And so we have a multitude of wheels within wheels, all patterned after the secular world, because Christ has risen, but the Holy Ghost has not come, because they know He’s alive, but they’re not able to keep contact with Him, and they’re afraid not to be active.

So, we have the religious jitters, and this is where we seem to be today, I’m afraid. We certainly don’t fit into that first period, when they knew Christ after the flesh and knew Him no other way. Certainly, we know Him in some other way. Surely, we don’t make the mistake in this church of putting the emphasis upon the manger. Surely, we don’t make the mistake in this church of laying the emphasis upon the moral teachings of Jesus or the good deeds of Jesus or the example of Jesus. Certainly, our Jesus is more than a human being, more than a man in the flesh. We’re not there. And surely, we are over into the Book of Acts, where they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and got up and went out to speak the word of God with power.

But we’re in an interim, and there’s a pocket in there, and there’s where most of the people are today. And brethren, much of the evangelism today does not lead people out of that uncertainty in a period of activity without leadership. It only creates more activity but doesn’t lead people into the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

And that’s why I can’t get all steamed up about making more converts to an effete Christianity. That’s why I can’t get all steamed up about going all around the world making converts to something that is only halfway in, and not all the way in. Jaffray and Glover and others went to South China, established their work in Wuzhou. They had this strange experience. They made converts, but they couldn’t get anybody to go on beyond that first initial conversion. And they multiplied their converts. Many people believed in Christ and accepted the Lord, as we say. And they became converts. They were baptized, and they joined the little churches there in China.

But Dr. Jaffray was not satisfied. He said, this won’t do. This won’t do. There’s something wrong here. Our Christians are carnal. They’re fleshly. They live after the flesh. Their fellowship with Christ is intermittent and spotty. They live aimlessly. They need something more from God.

And so those men of God got on their knees and prayed. And in those little churches, one church after the other, there came a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost upon those Chinese Christians, and took them from this period, this interim period, this halfway-in period, took them on into the mighty fullness of the Spirit of God.

And I’m perfectly prepared to say, and base my conclusions upon the Scriptures, and believe that there is historic proof of it, that there would not be one shred nor trace of Christianity left in China today if they had not done that thing. There would not be one trace of Christianity left in China if Dr. Sung and the rest of them had not preached the word of God and had gone on to teach them that they ought to be filled with the mighty Spirit of God. But here we are.

What about you? What about your personal relation to the Lord? Now, I don’t think you’d be in this church if you only believed in Christ after the flesh. The newspapers only know Christ after the flesh. They publish the story of Jesus on the front page around Easter or Christmas, and they’re very sympathetic, and we’re glad they are, and it does help a little, but it’s Jesus after the flesh.

And Paul scornfully said, once I knew Christ after the flesh, but hence I know Him no more. Jesus that walked in Galilee is not the Christ that we have to do with now. That Jesus died on a cross. That Christ died and rose, and He’s the same Jesus, of course, but He’s a Jesus now in an altogether different position. That in Him which could die, died, And God raised Him from the dead, and He sits now at the right hand of the Father. And from there He sends down the blessed Holy Ghost.

I’m glad there are some people listening—not too many in this church, I suppose, but there are those listening—and we’re disturbed, greatly disturbed.

Somebody handed me this morning a magazine, a tear sheet from a magazine. I think the magazine’s a liberal magazine. But in it there was an article. What’s the matter with religion in our time? What’s the matter with this thing? And this young man, whose name happened to be Stanley Lowell—two of my boys’ names—Stanley Lowell, pastor of the Methodist Church. And this fellow with trenching analysis, says the trouble with religion now, the trouble with all this wave of religion that we’ve got is that there is no protest, that God sent the churches to stand as a fiery protest against wickedness and iniquity. But the churches have lost their power to protest. There’s no protest anymore.

But the great leaders are busy trying to be as smooth and suave as they can and stand against nobody and try to get along with everybody. And have friends among the big and the great and the very important persons.

This Methodist preacher, God bless the memory of John and Charles and Fletcher and Taylor and the rest of them. He’s got enough fire left in him, this young preacher, to cry and say, when is our prophet coming and from whence is he coming to teach the church not to get along with the world but to contest with the world and protest against the world; and to stand as followers of Jesus Christ the Lord and take the consequences.

The Methodist church would wake up and listen to this young man. They won’t. But if they’d listen to this young man, brothers and sisters, how wonderful it would be to go out not to try to find a common ground of agreement, not to prove that we’re just like the world, only a little bit better because we believe in Jesus, but to go boldly out declaring what we’ve seen and heard and take the consequences. And if they didn’t like it, let them persecute us.

The best thing that could happen to the church would be fiery persecution. If there had been a penalty attached to going to church, the churches in Chicago would not have been crowded to the doors this Easter morning with people with new hats. If there had been a penalty attached to going to church, they’d have stayed away in vast numbers.

I am not praying for persecution, but I’m not going for one second to pray that there shall not be persecution. For whenever the church dares to take the cross of Jesus, always remember this, brethren, that the cross is an instrument of death and negation. The cross is a denunciatory, accusative thing. And when we follow Christ and take up His cross, we can’t possibly go along with the rest. They can’t possibly ride along on the popularity of presidents and kings and the great of the world.

Not one of the world’s great would walk down the street with Jesus while he lived. And as soon as Paul was converted to Jesus, not one of the world’s great would dare to line up with him. And when Luther nailed his theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, scarcely one of the great would dare to line up with him at first. They did later, but scarcely at first.

But because we’re afraid to protest, we’re afraid to be different, we’re busy trying to—I go fishing, we say. We don’t know what to do because the Holy Ghost has not come to our hearts, and all we have is the text of the Scripture and tradition. And so, there’s fruitless activity, personal uncertainty, intermittent fellowship, a gathering together without knowing why. And the strong leader says, well, let’s do it this way. And then the weak ones all say, all right, let’s do it that way.

And so, they go fishing. Children, have you any meat? No, we have numbers and names and offices and literature and printing presses and mimeograph machines and talk, but we don’t have any meat. Well, he said, they haven’t had any leadership, that’s why. You’re gathering together aimlessly. And this is the condition that we’re in today. I tell you this now, this is the situation that we’re in, and we’re waiting.

What is the further step? Well, let me read it to you. He shall receive power after the Holy Ghost has come upon you. You shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Samaria and unto the outermost part of the earth. And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as a fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. And they were dwelling at Jerusalem, Jews, devout men out of every nation under heaven.

And from there a fiery church went forth, filled with fire. She was like a flamethrower. She burst forth in a blaze of light. Nothing could stand before her. She stood in sharp contrast to the world in which she was. She was as separated from the world as Noah’s Ark was separated from the floodwaters upon which it rose.

She had two messages. She had a message of denunciation and protest, or protest, and she had a message of salvation and forgiveness through the blood of the Lamb. And for the first, they put her in jail. And for the second, after a while, with tears and sorrow, they turned in numbers and were converted to Jesus, Christ the Lord.

What is the greatest need in this church? That we should have a $45,000 missionary offering this year? No, I hope we get that. But that isn’t the greatest need. The greatest need in this church is that we as individuals and as members of a spiritual, social unit become so right individually and so right harmoniously toward each other that God can, without violating his nature, trust us with the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Brethren, that’s what we need.

I talked to Brother Parris Reidhead. I don’t know any man in the modern day that has a more penetrating, prophetic insight than Parris Reidhead. We sat and talked. I told him about the 102 missionaries the Alliance was going to send out this year. And this man himself, a missionary blazing with missionary fire, said, in a way, Brother Tozer, I’m sorry about that. And I said, why, Brother Paris, why are you sorry? We’re going to send out 102 new missionaries. He said, If we succeed in sending out 102 new missionaries and boost our personnel well over 800, it will set back for years any repentance, any rethinking, any reexamination of our position, and we will travel on our numerical success.

He said, that isn’t what we need the most right now. What we need the most right now is a heart-searching repentance and penitence, a revival within the individuals, a getting right and getting straightened out, and opening our hearts to the mighty down coming of the Holy Ghost. And he said, if we succeed in our present state of sending out 102 new missionaries without a corresponding spiritual rise of the tide, he said, I’m afraid that it’s going to do us harm and not good.

That was not said by a man who doesn’t believe in missions. That was said by a missionary who preaches missions in a way that I scarcely ever heard anybody preach missions. But he’s too wise to be taken in by numbers.

And brethren, what we need in this Church is not greater numbers. What we need in this Church is individual house cleanings, the gossiping, the criticizing, the carnality, the flesh, the selfishness, the extravagance, the cruel waste of life and money and time, the hardness toward each other, the flippancy, I’ll go fishing, I’ll go with you–the aimlessness. What we need is to get that all straightened out.

Don’t say, When the Holy Ghost comes, that’ll straighten out. No, no. The Holy Ghost will never come until it is straightened out. It’s a great mistake to believe that the Spirit of God came to make the people one. They had to be one before He came, being of one accord in one place. Brother McAfee, you know from the Greek that that oneness of accord is a musical term. It comes from music. It means a piano in tune.

Last week the piano was out of tune, and everybody said, What raucous sounds. And then a master came here last Thursday and crawled over the painting things and put it back in tune. Did you notice the difference Friday night? Harmony, harmony, the tune, the things in tune. And it says that they were all together in tune and then suddenly they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.

Don’t pray, oh, send the Holy Ghost to take the gossip out of us. Send the Holy Ghost to take away the bitterness. Send the Holy Ghost to make us one. Never waste your prayers until we get straightened out, the Holy Ghost can never come in any measure upon us.

The greatest evangelist whose feet ever touched the shores of America was Charles Grandison Finney. And Charles G. Finney said bluntly, don’t try to love each other. Don’t try to love each other. The Bible says love everybody. He said, don’t try to love everybody. You can’t love that which is unlovable. He said, get people right with God so they can be loved, and then we’ll love each other normally and naturally. He said, how can you love carnal men, gossips? How can you love critics and bitter fault finders? How can we love without hypocrisy? This great evangelist said, Let’s get straightened out. Come on, confess your sins. Get so people can love you, and you’ll be loved.

Now, that’s exactly backwards from all of this soft, old-maidish palaver that we hear these days. But that man proved that he was right by the fact that he had hundreds of thousands of converts, and the largest percentage of them stood with any man that’s preached since that time—more than Moody, more than any other man.

So, brethren, what we need is revival. What we need is a personal housekeeping. What we need is to use Easter as a ramp to take off from, something to bump us a bit, maybe, and get us started, and then go to our rooms with our Bible and with God. I have this to say to you, that I have read for more than forty years with great avidity.

There is hardly any field except higher mathematics in which I have not read and into which I am a stranger. But everything that God has ever used in me to help others, he has given me on my knees with my open Bible. God has been pleased to use the book, The Pursuit of God, far beyond the borders of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, selling now at the same rate it sold eight years ago when it came out. It is now translated into Chinese. I’ve seen it, some of it.

In almost every chapter, I got on my knees with God alone, seeking cleansing and power and purity and righteousness in my own spirit. Then with a notebook, taking down notes from that writing. Brethren, that’s what we need, more than we need anything else in the wide world. I hope we get forty-five thousand for missions this year, but if we get it at the cost of repentance and housecleaning and righteousness and the fullness of the Holy Ghost. If we get it only by the techniques of men, pressure methods, we’re better off without it.

I want God to give us spiritual ability to sustain anything He does for us, any increase in Sunday school, any increase in giving, anything. I want Him to give us spiritual power and ability to sustain it, stand up under it. Gifts without grace can be deadly, but for every gift I want grace to sustain that gift. That’s what I want for this church. That’s why I often preach to empty seats, as you know, because I will not fool. One of these times, nobody knows when it’ll be, I may fool you.

I talked to some fellow over the radio, and he said, oh, Brother Tozer said, we don’t want you to overdo, we want to keep you. Some preachers from the northwest side, oh, I said, I’ll probably be pallbearer for some of you fellows that are praying for me so hard. I don’t expect to die right away, but I don’t know, but I may. And you don’t know, but you may. Virus can hit you like that, and you’re gone. Brethren, we can’t afford to fool around.

Where are we in our spiritual lives? We’re not back there with the liberal friends talking about a Jesus after the flesh, or back there with our Catholic friends, talking about a Jesus baby in a manger. But surely, we’re not out with our Moravian friends, filled with power and the Holy Ghost, going forth as the greatest missionary impetus since Paul. Remember it, that what gave the impulse to modern missions was not a lot of fellows getting together and saying, I think we ought to go to the heathen, not telling touching stories about the heathen. Not looking at maps or consulting statistics.

What gave the impetus to modern missions and caused such societies like ours to be born were seventy-five Moravians present in a church at once, when they had confessed to each other and gotten right and gotten straightened out, and everybody was expectant, and suddenly there fell upon them a loving nearness of the Savior, instantaneously bestowed.

And they went out of that church hardly knowing whether they were on earth or had already died and gone to heaven. And under the leadership of that great Zinzendorf, they did more in twenty years than the whole church had done in two hundred. And out of it was born the Methodism, Salvation Army, Christian Missionary Alliance, China Inland Mission, you can name all the missionary activities, date their spiritual lineage back to that mighty hour, when only seventy-five people met God.

And they went out from there a happy people. Zinzendorf said, the happiest people in the world are these Moravians. He said, I don’t know anybody, there so happy that it’s wonderful. And they blazed forth. They didn’t do it after the technique of Peter, let’s go fishing. They didn’t meet together a half a dozen of them, and some fellow looked at a map and said, I think we ought to go over here.

But the mighty Holy Ghost came on them, and they went because they couldn’t stay in any place. They went because they had to go. They went led by the fire and the cloud by day and by night. They went all around the world. And they made converts of John Wesley and Charles Wesley. And out of that was born the great movements that have made America Christian.

Brethren, where are we? Where are you? Think about it, will you? Don’t get mad at me. Don’t say he’s getting gloomier as he gets older. I’m not. But I’m just wanting to be honest and wanting God to do something for us. Would you bow your heads in prayer?

O Lord, our Lord, thou knowest we are thy sheep in the mountain. We are thy little band of soldiers surrounded by the enemy. And we don’t want to waste our lives. We don’t want to waste our money. We don’t want to waste our time.

We don’t want to waste our gifts. Oh, we don’t want to be as Peter and Didymus and the rest of them were there, sympathetic, friendly, believing in Thee, believing that Thou art risen, but not knowing what to do, because the Holy Ghost had not yet come. We don’t want to simply follow some tall fellow who doesn’t know what to do either, but because he’s got a strong personality and good leadership, he said, let’s go do this.

We don’t want to waste our time and money and give up our precious, precious days following a man who’s doing something he hasn’t been sent to do. Lord, we’d rather join some little band of unheard-of strange people somewhere and live right and follow thee and be filled and be right, to ride in on the crest of popular religion. Bless these friends, Lord, who listen tonight. They’re here. They must want something. They wouldn’t have come. God bless them. Jesus, take each one by the hand and lead us knee deep, we pray, knee deep into succulent, juicy pastures. Lead us, we pray thee, to the still waters. Lead us, we pray thee, on to the fulfillment of thy promise, the promise of the Father.

Now, Lord, search us, search us. What we were, what we were yesterday or last year, that isn’t anything, Lord. We’ll start now. We’ll start clean now. We’ll confess to thee now. We’ll ask thee to pardon us now. Lord, thou hast heard today, criticism. Thou hast heard today, whispered things. Thou hast seen today, tight mouths and set jaws as people pass each other. Thou hast heard today and seen and beheld the pride and the carnality. O Lord Jesus, we don’t hide behind anything, and we don’t deny anything. We confess it. As a people, as a church, we would confess. We would ask thee to forgive.

We would ask thee to wash us whiter than the snow. And oh, that cleansing stream our sister sang about. That, that cleansing, that fountain, that overwhelming flood of cleansing power. Let it come to one after another of us.

Save us, we pray, from the suave, smooth get-along-with-everybody spirit. And help us to stand, we pray, with shiny eyes and with full understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Bless thy people, O Lord, in this great city. Bless every good man of God who stands to declare the truth. Bless him up to the light he has. Bless all the churches up to the light they have. And for everyone, we thank Thee. For every poor sheep, we thank Thee. For every struggling, lame little lamb, we thank Thee. For everybody, Lord, that has looked longingly in Thy direction, we thank Thee, O Lord Jesus. But O Christ, thou knowest the endless rat race, the constant wheel in the middle of a wheel, the buzzing, everlasting squirrel cage of empty activity.

Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly dove. Come with all Thy quickening power. Come, shed abroad a Savior’s love, that it may quicken ours.

If we are not lovable, forgive us, help us to become lovable. Help us to become so people can love us without straining. Help us, Lord, so they won’t have to be hypocrites to say they love us. Bring us into a place where meekness and humility and tenderness and kindness and long-suffering shall prevail. Bring us into the thirteenth of First Corinthians, Lord. It may cost us a lot. It’s hard on the flesh. It’s humbling. But there we know the mighty Holy Ghost will come. There we know he’ll fall and keep falling and keep flowing down and in and out.

Gracious Lord, send us out of here tonight. Don’t let anybody crack a joke at the door. Don’t let anybody be so full of levity that they’ll forget anything’s been said. Send us out, we pray thee, to wonder about our responsibility to this very critical week that lies ahead of us. Mighty Lord, Mighty Lord, the end of the ages are upon us.

The world has grown old, and the judgment draws near, and kingdoms rising against kingdom and nation against nation, and evil men and seducers wax worse and worse, and the love of many waxes cold. And thousands say, Lord, Lord, but do not the things that thou sayest. Save this people, we pray thee, from that quagmire.

Save us, we pray thee, from that hole in the swamp. And float us above it like Noah in the ark, riding above the storm. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.