Tag: Jesus Christ

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 5, 2025

“God and Man–The Duality of Jesus Christ“

God and Man–The Duality of Jesus Christ

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 27, 1955

The 11th verse, and the 17th and 18th, where our Lord Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. Verses 17 and 18, Therefore does my Father love Me, because I lay down My life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of My Father. Let us pray.

Dear Lord Jesus, Thou art the Good Shepherd. In ancient days Thou didst lead Israel and Joseph like a flock. And Thou art the same unchanged Lord. And Thou art leading them that trust in Thee. We pray that tonight Thou wilt add at least one sheep to thy flock who is lost now but will be found.

O Lord Jesus, encourage us on the hard, heavy, rough way. Make the clouds to roll back and the skies be a little brighter, our hope a little sharper, our faith a little brighter. Help us tonight. Bless these friends who have come out here this cold winter night and will now listen while thy word is being expounded. O Lord, Thou hast said, preach the word. We pray thou grant that we might rightly and worthily expound Thy truth this evening. In Christ’s name, amen.

Here in these verses, we have wonderful, lofty truth. Truth that is beautiful and inspiring, but we also have profound difficulties for the intellect. But I do not apologize, nor do I admit that there is any problem for faith. There is none. I remember the little stanza by Faber when He says, How thou canst love me as thou dost, and be the God thou art, is darkness to the intellect, but sunshine to the heart. What is darkness to the intellect may be sunshine to the heart. The effort to simplify and explain all the profundities of the Christian faith, are ill-timed and ill-considered. There will always be that which is blindness and darkness to the mind, but joy and sunshine to the soul.

Now the difficulty lies in verse 17. Therefore, doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I might take it again. Now there is the difficulty. That God’s love for the Son arose and arises from His willingness to lay down His life for His sheep. Because you remember that our Lord Jesus also said in praying to His Father, Thou lovest Me before the foundation of the world, back before time was, the Father loved His Son. Then, therefore doth the Father love Me, because I lay down My life for My sheep.

Now there lies the difficulty. You might simply pass that over, but if you’ll do a little bit of thinking, and certainly if ever there was a time when God’s people ought to think, now is the time. If ever there was a time when we ought to consider deeply the things pertaining to our faith, now is the time. If we think deeply, we would say, well, how could it be that if the teachings of the Christian faith are right, how could it be that God loved His Son only because He was willing to die on a cross and rise again? Well, it’s darkness, or rather it’s twilight to the intellect, but I do not think that it’s beyond our explaining.

You see, my friends, the Christian faith teaches, because the Bible teaches, the two natures of Christ. Christ is not two persons, but the two natures of Christ. This is taught in Christian theology. It has been taught down the years in Christian theology that Jesus has a divine and the human nature. Let me read to you from the ancient creed.

You that are of Dutch extraction and know something about the Dutch Reformed Church, the Dutch Reformed hymnal, you will find this somewhere in the back of your Dutch Reformed hymnal, and you’ll find it also very many other places. It says this in a long explanation of the mystery of the Trinity. It says this, furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation that we also believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now remember, this dates back to the fourth century and is called the Athanasian Creed. This is part of it. For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man. God of the substance of his Father, begotten before all worlds. Man of the substance of his Mother, born into the world. Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting. Equal to the Father as touching his Godhead, inferior to the Father as touching his manhood. Who, although He is God and man, yet is He not two, but one Christ. One, not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by the taking of the manhood into God. One altogether, not by the confusion of substance, but by the unity of person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ.

Now that is the teaching of the Church. Down the centuries she has believed that Jesus Christ was born or begotten of the Father before all worlds but born of the substance of His Mother into the world, being perfect God and perfect man. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.

Now we’ll explain that as we go along, because that says it for us. You know, part of learning is not getting new information, but having somebody that’s smarter than you say things for you that you wish you would have said. That’s part of learning, brethren. It isn’t that you get new information so much as you get it said for you so you can get right hold of it, so it fits into your head and into your heart.

This says for me what I never could have thought of if I lived to be 118 years old, I never could have said it. But now that somebody smarter than I am said it for me, and I realize that it’s Scriptural and fits the word of God to a tee, I can quote it and say, Now I wish I had said that. That’s it.

Now, the two natures of Christ, that’s where we find the explanation here. That He was a man and that He is man is not hard to prove. He was born as other men are born. That is, He was born of a woman. He was baby-sized when He came into the world. I don’t know how much He weighed. I don’t know how much Jewish babies weigh, but I suppose they weigh average, maybe eight, nine, six, eight, nine pounds, boys a little more than girls. But I guess maybe, say that this man, Jesus, say weighed eight pounds. Let’s say He weighed eight pounds, nine pounds, when He was born of a Jewish mother into the world.

And as soon as He was born, He began to eat and cry and grow. And He drank, of course, His mother’s milk. And when He got older, He drank the milk that they provided Him and ate food. And He worked in His supposed father’s shop and He slept. And they had to wake Him in the morning and imagine come and pull Him out of bed as they do little boys. For He was a boy among boys.

Remember it always. He was a man. And sin accepted, He lived like other men. Sin accepted. And the weaknesses contingent upon sin, He had none of them. But He was a man. And I’m sure that Mary, His mother, had to come lots of times and wake Him twice. I never knew a boy to get up the first time. The boy that gets up the first time he’s waked, unless it’s Christmas morning, never was born. And so, huh? Never, never. Nobody, no boy ever gets up. And I don’t think any girl when they’re first waked.

I mention this not to cheapen our conception of Christ, but to humanize it and to show you that this Jesus was born a baby and cried like a baby and ate like a baby and was looked after like a baby and grew like a little boy and ate and drank and worked and slept and finally died. He was a man.

And He called Himself the Son of Man. He loved that title. He was the only person that ever called Himself that. I do not think that, if I think I’m right, that anybody in the New Testament ever called Jesus the Son of Man. But He called Himself the Son of Man. Just as Abraham never said, God is the God of Abraham, but God said, I am the God of Abraham. And Jacob, surely Jacob never would have said, God is the God of Jacob, but God said, I am the God of Jacob.

So, nobody ever said, thou art the Son of Man, but Jesus said, I am the Son of Man and talked about Himself as the Son of Man. And Pilate, when the great old judge there or king, when He saw Him standing before Him the day before the crucifixion or the morning of the crucifixion, He said, ex homo, behold the man. There’s the man. He was struck with the manhood of the man Christ Jesus.

Now we know that He was a man. I don’t think that anybody would doubt that. Our Jewish friends admit that and say that He was. And some of their leaders say that He was the flower of Jewish manhood. So we all agree, Jew and Gentile and Catholic, on this, that Jesus was a man.

Now that He was and is also God is also shown in the Scriptures. He said, for instance, before Abraham was, I am, and I am is the name of Jehovah. Therefore, when He said before Abraham was, I am, He was using the same words, title, I am, as Jehovah had used, though Jesus was not Jehovah, but the son of Jehovah by eternal generation.

And He said, I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven. Now that was before the foundation of the earth. And therefore He said it, and He must have been God. And He said, destroy this temple and I will raise it up the third day. And He said, the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sin. And He said, the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of Man and they that hear shall live. And He said, He that has seen Me has seen the Heavenly Father. And He said, whatever ye ask the Father in My name, the Father will give you. And He said in prayer, the glory that I had with Thee before the world was, and Thou lovest Me before the foundation of the world.

So, He claimed here that He went back of creation, claimed that He went back before the world was, claimed that He had such power that the Father would give anything in His name, claimed that He had power on earth to forgive sin, claimed that He had power to raise the dead, claimed that if they destroyed His body He would rise again the third day, claimed that He antedated Abraham and saw Satan in the ancient beginnings fall from heaven.

Now there’s what He claimed for Himself, this Man of whom I’ve spoken. And I say bluntly to you, my listening people, that He was either God or lunatic and there is no middle ground. We do Him no honor and we do not complement our own intellects when we say that He was a good man only. If He was but a good man and not God, then He was a frightfully deceived man to the point of being psychopathic. He was either God or He was lunatic.

Now let us pick out the best men that the world ever knew and let us put in their mouths the words that He spoke so quietly, so calmly. For remember this man Jesus was not a raving maniac. He was not a flaming-eyed, long-haired dreamer that walked about a demagogue rousing the multitudes. He did not lift up His voice nor make his voice heard loudly in the streets, but He walked quietly among the people and only His deeds of power and His wonderful quiet words made Him any different from other men.

He looked so much like all the other Jews that walked up and down in Jerusalem that the very Roman soldier did not know which one He was. The only way they could know which one to crucify was if Judas planted a kiss on Him. He said, I know him. I have been with Him three years and I will kiss Him and then you grab Him. That will be the one.

So, He was betrayed with a kiss. If He had stood out a noble, strong, tall, shining face, beautiful one, they would not have had to go to plant a kiss on His cheek to tell which one He was. There was no beauty in Him that men should desire Him. He looked like other men. And yet the things that He said put in the mouth of any other man that ever lived would turn that man into a blasphemer and a lunatic.

Let us imagine Abraham or Moses. Let us take Moses, the lawgiver. Let us hear Moses say, Before Abraham was, I am. Well, do we know He could not have said that? We know the mother of Moses, and we know that Moses was in descent from Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. We know that Moses would have been a lunatic if He had said, Before Abraham was, I am.

Let us imagine David saying, destroy my body and I will raise it up the third day. Imagine Daniel saying, I have power on earth to forgive sin. Imagine Paul saying, The dead shall hear my voice and they that hear shall live. Imagine John saying, He that has seen me has seen the Father. Imagine Augustine saying, whatever ye ask the Father in my name He will give it you. Imagine Martin Luther saying, the glory that I had with thee before the world was. Imagine it if you can. It would make lunatics out of those men.

Not a one of them dared say it. Not the sweet singer of Israel, not the mighty harpist Isaiah, not the strong seer Ezekiel. No man dared say it, and no man could say it. And the man who said it was either right in saying it and therefore was God, or He was wrong in saying it and was mentally deranged.

But now I ask you, my brethren, could a man who thought He was God and who thought He had seen Abraham and before Abraham was, He was, who thought He could forgive sins only and was deceived, who thought that if He died He’d rise again, who thought that He had been with God before the foundation of the world, who thought that He had power in His name that prayers could be answered, who thought only that the dead should hear His voice and should rise. Suppose He only thought that, and it wasn’t true?

How then, I want to ask you, could He have done the wonderful deeds that He did? Why did the mothers bring their baby to have Him bless them? Why did the poor harlot crawl to His feet and be forgiven? Why did the publican and sinner come to Him and receive words of mercy? Why did that group, that group composed of the finest, some of the finest of the Jewish nation, why did they turn their eyes upon Him and love Him and see Him go into heaven and hear Him say that He would come back again? And why did they rise and in His name go forth to preach Him to the nations?

And why is it that wherever He is preached, men are better for it? You cannot preach a lunatic and make men better. You cannot go to Skid Row and tell a drunkard, here, believe in this lunatic, and the drunkard believes and gets free from his drunkenness. You cannot go into a death cell and preach a lunatic and have that man ready to die, die happy and singing hymns. You cannot go to a man who is bound in the throes of drink and gambling and say to that man, here, believe on this lunatic, and have him get up and believe in that man.

You cannot sit down at the bedside of a dying man and read to him out of the letters of a lunatic and that man smile and raise his feeble hand and mutter the sweet name as he goes off into the next world. You cannot take the name of a lunatic to Borneo and have them turn from head hunting and head shrinking and cannibalism to be hymn singing, joyful, happy people loving each other and living and working and doing fine deeds for other men. You cannot go to the depths of Africa and there among the mud huts and the thatched roof shacks, talk to people who eat their own relatives or eat those of other tribes.

You cannot go and preach to them a lunatic and have them stop their cannibalism and stop their idolatry and burn their idols and turn their eyes toward God in heaven and believe and stop their drinking and stop their taking of drugs and live good, happy, restful, blessed lives. No, no, my friend.

You cannot preach a lunatic and for two thousand years have people come from every clime and nation and tribe and tongue and people around the world and come and give of their substance to help the church. You cannot preach a lunatic to a young man and have him go and give up all and go to the ends of the world for nothing, for a cheap, poor little salary that you couldn’t live on in America one month. No, no, no.

These are not the words of a lunatic. Before Abraham was, I am. All a lunatic can do is make other lunatics. All a man who is a psychopathic case can do when he talks is make other people like himself.

But this quiet, peaceful, peace-loving, loving Man makes others like Himself. And the man of bad temper quiets down, and the man who beats his wife stops beating his wife, and the man who gambles begins to spend his money for groceries and good furniture, and the man who lies around drunk comes home now nights and sleeps in his own bed, and the thief stops stealing, and the liar stops lying, and the drunkard stops drinking, and the jealous person begins to hate his jealousy and seek to be freed from it. And the mean man starts being sweet-tempered, and the evil woman starts being friendly and kind.

This Man does it, and He does it because He is God. He does it because He is of the substance of His Father begotten before the world was, and of the substance of His mother born into the world. A reasonable soul and human flesh consisting, who though He is both God and man, yet is He not two but one Christ. One not by the degrading of His Godhead into flesh, but by the lifting up of manhood into God.

Oh, the nobility of this kind of truth, my brother. You don’t have to apologize for this. You don’t have to go among men looking down at the ground and wishing you were a modernist. You don’t have to go anywhere in the world and take a back seat and say, I’m sorry, but I want the lowest place because I’m just a poor Christian. The noblest, loftiest truths that ever crowned the mountain peaks of thought are found in the New Testament.

And He says, Therefore doth my Father love Me because if the Father had loved Him without any cause from the foundation of the world, if He had been with the Father before a star shone or a mountain reared its head, if He had been with God before there was an angel or a seraphim or an archangel by the sea of God, why did He have to say, Therefore my Father loves Me because I laid down my life for the sheep?

There were two natures there, my brethren. Equal to His Father as touching His godhood, less than His Father as touching His manhood. When He talked about Himself as God and equal with God, He spoke these wonderful words. But when He talked about himself as man, He humbled himself and spoke meekly as man.

Now let’s give you some examples here to illustrate what I have in mind. His two natures are here. He spoke sometimes of His godhead and sometimes of His manhood. When He said, I and my Father are one, He spoke of His ancient and unborn godhead. When He said, My Father is greater than I, He spoke of His manhood. When He said, Thou lovest me before the foundation of the world, He spoke of His godhood. When He said, therefore doth my Father love me because I lay down my life, He spoke of His manhood. When He said, all men should honor the Son as they honor the Father, He spoke of His godhood. When He said, The Son can do nothing of Himself, He spoke of His manhood.

So, the Son is God in Himself, but not God of Himself, but of the Father alone. So, there’s the darkness of it, but I think there’s a little light in that darkness.

A man wrote me a five-page letter and accused me, among other things, of being too metaphysical. He heard me preach once and said He didn’t like it. But He accused me of being metaphysical. I don’t know whether He called this metaphysics or not, but I know that it has gotten into our hymnbooks, and we have sung it, and the simple people who don’t know what the word metaphysics means have sung it. Little, black-robed ladies down the years and noble bearded men as well as fine young people have risen and sung of the deity of Jesus and of the wonders of God. They have sung the psalms of David and the golden sentences of Paul set to sweet music by a Bernard or a Montgomery or a Watts or a Wesley.

So we have here the Good Shepherd. So, when you read in the Bible and it sounds humble and lowly, and He disclaims any credit or any power or any wisdom or any goodness, no, He’s talking about His manhood.

And then when wonderfully He speaks boldly as though He were God—remember He’s speaking about His Godhood—who though He be both God and man, yet is He not two but one Christ, God that He might represent God the Father, man that He might represent us, and that He might unite God and man in one holy Person, that He might take God by His right hand and man by His right hand and clasp them together and acquaint them one with another and introduce the wandering sheep to the Heavenly Father. And He said here, the Good Shepherd giveth His life for His sheep. No man taketh it from Me. He was not a martyr.

Let us not listen to those who paint a picture of Jesus as a good man who went too far, a good man that was so extreme and so zealous that they finally slew Him and He became a martyr to a noble idea. He said, No man taketh it from Me. Not all of Jewry could have done it. Not all the armies of Rome could have done it. In the Old Testament we read of Elijah, and they sent out fifty men to take Elijah. Elijah looked up casually and said, look down there, God. He said, Fifty men. Fire came down and destroyed those men. It was repeated over and finally one man came crawling on his hands and knees and said, Please, Elijah, please.

He said, don’t burn me. How much more could this man? He said, If I wanted to, twelve legions of angels would come to My help now. Legion, they tell me, a thousand. He said, these could have come to my aid. No, no man taketh it from Me. Because He could say, Before Abraham was, I am. Destroy my body and I’ll raise it again. I have power to forgive sin. I will speak and the dead shall rise. I will sit on the throne of My great glory and before Me shall all nations come for judgment.

No man could have taken His life away from Him. A Stephen they could kill. A James they could kill with the sword. But Jesus they could not have touched. No man taketh it from Me. He wasn’t a martyr. The man who wrote about the martyr and the maid and all, He was wise enough to begin with Stephen and not with Jesus. He said, that martyr first whose eagle eye could scan beyond the blue.

That was Stephen, not Jesus. Jesus was not a martyr. No martyr lays his life down. They take away from him. But He said, I lay it down of Myself. He was a sacrifice, not a martyr. John the Baptist said, Behold the Lamb of God. And the Lamb is dear to the heart of every Jew, dear to the heart of every Jewish family from the days of Moses and the Passover. The Lamb, the Passover Lamb, they all had the Lamb. And I still guess in some Jewish circles they still do have the Passover Lamb or go through some kind of ceremony that dates back there.

But when John saw Jesus, He said, Behold the Lamb. It wasn’t a Gentile that said, Behold the Lamb. It was a Jew that said it. And He didn’t say it about a Gentile. He said it about another Jew, for Jesus was a Jew. Behold the Lamb of God. So, He was a sacrifice, not a martyr.

Now, it was by the covenant between the Father and the Son. I have power to lay My life down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father. There was the covenant and the full agreement between the Father and the Son. He came from the heart of the Father to take flesh by the agreement of the Father and by the agreement of His own heart in covenant with the Father that He might die for His sheep.

Now, the Shepherd has three offices. The Good Shepherd, John 10:11, we’ve talked about, dies for His sheep. And the Great Shepherd in Hebrews 13 lives for His sheep. And the Chief Shepherd in 1 Peter 5 comes for His sheep. Notice that Hebrew passage, a very wonderful passage. It says, Now the God of peace that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that Great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. He is here called the Great Shepherd of the sheep. What is He as a Great Shepherd doing? As a Great Shepherd He is at the right hand of the Father, caring for His sheep, praying for His sheep.

Arise, my soul, arise, we sang tonight. Shake off thy guilty fear as the Bleeding Sacrifice that in thy behalf appears. Who is that bleeding sacrifice? The man, Christ Jesus.

That Great Shepherd is a good, faithful, loyal Shepherd. He voluntarily laid down His life for His sheep. And you know He laid down His life for you, whether you believe it or not. He laid down His life for you, whether you knew it or not up to tonight. He laid down His life for you, whether you ever do anything about it or not. He did it. He put you everlastingly in debt, this shepherd, by laying down His life for the sheep. And if you turn against Him and smite the very cheek that was once dead on a cross for you, it’s still true. The Shepherd laid down His life for the sheep, the good, faithful Shepherd.

Now the Great Shepherd, above all man’s hate, and above death, and above sickness, and above time, and above space, and at the right hand of the Almighty God, He sits and advocates above, the Savior by the throne of love. And on His hands are the names of His people, and on His shoulders and cut into His bosom, like the high priest of the ancient temple, He carries the names of His people. My poor little name, so little known in this world, but there engraven on the stone carried by the great high priest, Jesus Christ, at the right hand of God, the Good Shepherd, the Great Shepherd, the Shepherd of Israel, and the Shepherd of His people.

So, He’s there, the Great Shepherd. But that’s not all. First Peter 5 says, feed the flock of God which is among you. You see, He had this in mind. Peter had heard this 10th chapter of John spoken by Jesus himself, and so He said, feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, willingly, not for filthy lucre’s sake, but of a ready mind, neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock.

And when the Chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away. Here He’s called the Chief Shepherd. As the Good Shepherd, He dies for His sheep. As the Great Shepherd, He lives for His sheep. And as the Chief Shepherd, He comes for His sheep.

Brethren, the next major event in the history of the world will not be the dropping of a cobalt bomb on Moscow or New York. It will not be the defeat or the victory of Russia. It will not be common commercial supersonic travel. It will not be any of the scientific wonders that will certainly develop within the next few years. It will not be any of those things. The next major event in the history of the world will be when the Chief Shepherd appears to crown His faithful people and take His flock out of a dingy, sin-blasted world to take them to be with Him. That’s the next major event of the world.

Now, I don’t know when it’ll happen. Don’t you dare to interpret what I say as being that I teach that the Lord will come tonight or tomorrow. I don’t know when He’ll come. I’m not that close to the secret counsels of the Almighty. I only know that there’ll never be an event as major as that event when He does come. If it’s a thousand years or a hundred or ten or five or one, when it comes, it’ll be an event second only to His first coming.

When the Chief Shepherd appears, then He shall crown those who have been faithful to Him. There’s a motive, you see. There is an objective. There’s something to drive at. There’s a reason for being a Christian.

I want to close now by asking, He is the Good Shepherd and He died for you. And He is the Great Shepherd and He is pleading for His sheep. And He is the Chief Shepherd and He’s coming for His sheep. But I want to ask you, are you one of His found sheep? Are you one of His found sheep? The Good Shepherd.

I heard the voice of Jesus say, come unto me and rest. Lay down, thou weary one, lay down thy head upon My breast. I came to Jesus as I was weary and worn and sad. I found in Him a resting place and He has made me glad. I heard the voice of Jesus say, I am this dark world light. Come unto me, thy morn shall rise and all thy days be bright. I came to Jesus and I found in Him my star, my sun. And in His light of life, I’ll walk till traveling days are done.

Have you heard His voice calling you home? Have you come? Will you come? Will you come now? The Good Shepherd who claims you by right of life laid down. If He wanted your money or wanted your vote, I wouldn’t represent Him. If He wanted to make you a victim and a blind follower, I wouldn’t represent Him. But He proved that He had nothing to claim from you by giving you all He had. He poured out His life for you, wonderful love.

And when the Good Shepherd gave His life for the sheep surely, He wasn’t out to get anything from the sheep. He doesn’t want anything you have; He wants your love. Remember that the shepherd-sheep relationship is a relationship of faith and love, not a relationship of law, but of faith and love and loyalty and trust.

So, you can right now, where you are, turn your faith and love to the Shepherd of the sheep. And right where you are, you can this minute believe and put your trust in the great Good Shepherd who died for you. And from the right hand of the Father, He’ll be your Great Shepherd. And when He comes as the Chief Shepherd of the world, He’ll receive you and take you to Himself. Are you, His sheep?

Oh, I think of myself as being a pretty scrubby sheep. Sheep come in with cockleburrs in their wool and Spanish needles and chunks torn out where they sneaked under a barbed wire fence, and bruises where they carelessly batted up against a sharp rock. But they’re still sheep, and they’re still recognized by the shepherd, and they’re still known by him, and they still know his voice.

And that’s what He meant when He had David write, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, and He leadeth me beside the still waters, and He restoreth my soul. What does that mean, He restoreth my soul? Why, his soul got bit out of quack, and the Great Shepherd restores his soul again.

And He anointeth my head with oil, and only one person out of ten thousand knows what it meant. He anointeth my head with oil. But the old Jewish shepherds used to call their sheep in at the cool of the day, when the night birds were beginning to croak in the dark shadows of the trees, when the first stars were appearing.

As He stood in the door, and they passed by him, and He grabbed each head and pulled it up and looked down at the face. And if there were any scars or rather new, fresh wounds where maybe they’d gotten bumped or some old sheep had batted them or they had bumped into a rock or had gotten scratched, He had a horn of oil, and He carefully poured this oil and rubbed it into the sore. The next morning it was beginning to heal, and in a day or two it was all right. He anointeth my head with oil.

My cup runneth over, and how many know what that means? The shepherd not only had his horn of oil for the sheep that had a bruised head, but He had a bit of water there for the sheep that had been too slow or too stupid or too stubborn. When the Lord let them beside the still water, the sheep was too busy and didn’t get a drink.

And so, when the shepherd looked at him, He notices he’s thirsty, and so He has some water for him. My cup runneth over. He gives him a cup of water, not a little stingy, grudging cup, but runs it over. The sheep gets all He wants.

Well, all I want to know is, tonight, is He your Shepherd? If He isn’t, this would be the night, the very night.

Tags God Man, Jesus Christ

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date August 10, 2025

“A Portrait of Jesus Christ”

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A Portrait of Jesus Christ

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

February 1, 1959

Please turn to Revelation 1 and we’ll begin at the 9th verse and read responsibly to the end of the chapter. You will help me in this. Reading, after I read verse 9, you read verse 10, and so on to the end of the chapter.

I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.

And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.

And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death. Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter; the mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.

Verse 9, I, John. I, John, says John. I wonder who wrote the book of Revelation, says the critic, I, John, says John. The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave unto him, shall unto his servants the things which must surely come to pass. And he says, and signified by his angel unto his servant John. I wonder, says the learned man, who that could have been that wrote the book of Revelation. I, John, says John.

The conclusion I have come to, brothers and sisters, is this, that there are two ways to be ignorant. One is not to go to school at all, and the other is to go too long. If you don’t go to school at all, you are likely to be ignorant, because there hasn’t been any breakfast food invented yet that would instruct a man without some little intellectual quiver of his mental muscles. So, if you do not go to school at all, you are likely to be ignorant. But if you go to school too long, you are likely to get educated beyond your intelligence.

I am saying this because I have been reading about these men who say, I wonder who wrote the book of Revelation. I, John, says John. So, I’m going to accept that John wrote the book of Revelation. He says, the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, and the Word of God, and the testimony of Christ.

Now, what does this add up to? Here we have it, the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, and the Word of God, and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Do you know what that adds up to now? They tell us that adds up to a lot of prosperity here below. Kingdom and patience of God.

I’m a Christian, I’m born again, and I carry my Bible, and I make God my partner, and I witness wherever I go. And therefore, I get big contracts, and I have been patient in the kingdom, and therefore I get promotions. I was only once a stock boy, and now I’m vice president.

The kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, and the Word of God, and the testimony of the gospel. What does it add up to? It means that once I was a bat boy, but now I’m in the big leagues. I’m prospering. Why, it pays to serve Jesus. It pays, doesn’t it, brother? Slap. So we go about that kind of Christianity has taken over the day in which we live. We slap each other’s back and say, you to be a Christian, boy it pays. I used to not give, and now I give.

Now I have more than I had before I didn’t give, or before I started giving. And that’s the modern Christianity, and of course that’s heresy. That’s just as much heresy as to teach that Mary was a virgin born, or that she had an assumption into heaven, or that there’s virtue in bones, or something. It’s just the same, only it’s Protestant. And it isn’t even old Protestant, it’s modern Protestant. It’s the gospel that’s in the hands of the vice presidents and the chairman of the board.

And so we have the adding up of all the witness and faithfulness and prayer and all the rest. We have a long car and a big home and prosperity, and we win at sports, and we get promoted, and we get along well in school, and we get all our blessing now. But what did this add up to back there? The kingdom and patience of God and the Word of the Lord and the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Why, it says, I was in the Isle of Patmos on the Lord’s Day. What was he doing in the Isle of Patmos? He’d gone over there on vacation. Had he decided that he was working a little too hard as Bishop of Ephesus and needed to bathe himself a little in the waters of the sea over there in Patmos.

No, he was over there because he was too hot to handle. They didn’t know what to do with him back in Ephesus. He was a Christian, you know, and his testimony was too hot, and his patience was too long. They tried to wear him out and found he was made out of vulcanized rubber. They couldn’t wear him out. He lived to be over a hundred, we’re told.

And so, they said, well, we won’t have him around here. Some of these Christians don’t harm us any. They just walk around quiet and half-scared and look down their nose and say little. But this man’s vocal. He’s got the testimony, the testimony of Jesus Christ. He’s always going around saying, God is love, and He sent his Son. We can’t stand it. So they put him on the Isle of Patmos. That’s what it added up to there.

But if John had had our Christian philosophy, John would have had his reward back home. He would have had peace of mind, prosperity, and the friendship of the great. But there never would have been any book of Revelation. There never would have been any visions. John no doubt would have played golf with Caesar, but he never would have seen the door opened in heaven and the One that sat on the throne. He never would have seen the vision of One standing in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks. He never would have seen the woman clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet and her crown with stars around her head. He never would have seen the new Jerusalem, pure and white, coming down out of heaven from God. He never would have seen that.

And we’d have closed the book with Jude, and we’d never have had Revelation. He’d have had his reward all right, and he’d have written a tract, and we’d have left the tract behind, and he’d have written a testimony, and we’d have published it in the Alliance of Witnesses, saying this Christian businessman gave a faithful testimony, and he immediately started up the ladder.

Now look, he has two long cars, and he’s in who’s who. But we never would have had a vision, we never would have had a revelation, we never would have had this word portrait of Jesus Christ the Lord. I don’t know, I sort of want to string along with John.

I sort of want to go along with John. I don’t know whether I’d have his courage or not, you know, but I do know that I like his Christian philosophy better than I do this modern Christian philosophy. Well, going on, he says, I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and now I want to tell you right now that here are two nails I’m not going to get hung up on.

You know, when you’re walking down the corridor through the Kingdom of God, there are nails in the wall, and sometimes you can tear your clothing on the nails, and some fellows get hung up there, and that’s as far as they ever get. Now the two nails are, what does it mean in the Spirit, and what does it mean the Lord’s Day? They argue about what does it mean I was in the Spirit, and they argue about what does it mean the Lord’s Day. Some say the Lord’s Day means Sunday, and some say the Lord’s day means the day of the Lord, the prophetic future.

Well, now, you’re not going to get me in a corner on this, brother. All I know is that there was a man named John, or if it wasn’t John, it was somebody named John. You know, they have a literary argument on about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, and some say that Lord Bacon wrote them, and some say Sheridan wrote them, and others say somebody else, and Mark Twain said that he had the answer. He said it wasn’t Shakespeare that wrote the plays at all. It was a fellow named Shakespeare.

And so I’m going to accept it that John, the critics and the scholars and the learned brethren whose heads are filled with learned lumber, they say he didn’t write it. But we’ll say John didn’t write it, but a man named John wrote it, and he said he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. Now, that’s all I want to know. And he heard behind him the great voices as of a trumpet.

And I’d like to inquire why it is that so many of the Lord’s people, when they hear the voice of the Lord, they hear it behind them. You know why? Because they’re going the wrong direction. John was facing the wrong way. Even John must have been facing the wrong way because he wasn’t facing toward the owner of that voice. Even John was turned a little round. And I believe that this is a very significant and important thing throughout the Scripture, if not here, certainly other places in the Bible, that we’re faced the wrong way and the Lord speaks. And when we hear the voice, we turn and then we see it.

I told Brother McAfee upstairs that I’m not going to preach on it tonight, but I’m willing to give any young preacher here a sermon outline. And I’m not going to deal with it, but I’d like to hear somebody preach on it, somebody who really knows how to preach the word. It says that I heard a voice behind me, and when I turned, I saw. Now, I believe that this is the whole history of mankind, brothers and sisters. I believe that you and I are going in the wrong direction and the arresting voice of God speaks. And if we’re wise enough to stop and turn around, we’ll see. I heard, and I turned around, and I saw. I heard a voice, and I turned around, and I saw a vision.

And that’s exactly what happened to John. John had been as stubborn as some of my friends. He’d have set his jaw and said, I don’t know who that man is behind me, but I am not turning around. Let him come around to me. But John turned around, and when he turned around, he saw. He saw a vision. I just recommend that, my friend.

Maybe the reason you’ve never seen anything is because you’ve never turned around. You will hear the voice and turn around, and I’m sure that there will be some kind of a spiritual vision there for you, some sort of deliverance or some sort of glory that God has for you.

Well, I heard behind me the voices of a trumpet, and when I turned around, I saw seven golden candlesticks. Now, of course, that means lampstands, but even I know that, and I don’t have to have new translation of the New Testament to find that out, because a lampstand was a receptacle in which a candle was placed, that’s all. It was made out of wood or metal or gold or silver or just whatever they happened to have around. The rich had some precious metals, and the poor had wood or clay, but its purpose was to hold up a candle, put a candle in, that’s all, and the churches here are called candlesticks or lampstands.

Now, you can remove a candlestick, and you haven’t hurt the light any, because the light and the candlestick are two different things. And so the church and the truth of the church gives forth two different things. The light is the truth, and the truth is the light, and the church in any given location, at 70th and Union in Chicago, say, is a candlestick. It’s a lampstand. It’s a receptacle, a human thing in which the light is.

Now, the candlestick can cease to bear the light and thus be useless, just a piece of material there, or it can continue to have the light. But always remember that the candlestick and the light are two different things. That’s why I don’t walk out and start another denomination. And that’s why I don’t believe that denominationalism is as evil as some people say it is, because you see a local church or group of Christians anywhere, they are the human candlestick. But the testimony they give is the light, and they are shining with their testimony, and the testimony is never theirs. It belongs to God. It is called the testimony of Jesus Christ. They give it, but it isn’t their testimony.

As soon as a church starts giving its testimony, that church is already halfway on the wrong track, and if they listened, they’ll hear a voice behind them because they’ve turned their face the wrong way. I know how we say, I gave my testimony, and what we mean by it, and I’m not criticizing that. I’m only pointing out that the only truth I have any right to preach is what’s given to me and shown unto the servant by His servant John or His servant Paul or His servant Isaiah or His servant Luke or some other servant.

I haven’t any right to manufacture a light, and I haven’t any right whatsoever to stand up here and to give out some kind of intellectual or moral or soulish light. I’m merely a candlestick, you’re merely a candlestick, a lampstand, a place where the divine light is put. There it is, that’s the church as we read later on.

And in the midst of the candlestick, seven of them, and I suppose the seven means perfection, I don’t know. That’s what they tell me must be true because it’s in the Schofield Bible, and I have no reason whatsoever to doubt it. So, we’ll accept it as being the number of perfection, and what the Lord meant simply was the churches, the churches you know.

And they were lampstands, and in the midst of these churches, and in the midst of all the churches, in the midst of His great church, there was seen someone standing. And that one that stood there looked like a son of man. Some say the Son of Man, and that’s exactly where He said He would be.

Do you remember that? Exactly where He said he would be. He said, if either two or three gathered together, I’m there in the midst. And He said, go into all the world and preach the gospel, and lo, I am in the midst of you, and I’m with you. And Paul said, while you’re taking communion at Corinth, and you’ve all forgotten that the Lord’s in the midst of you. Why, he said, no wonder you get sick and some of you die under the disciplinary judgment of God. Why, recognize the Lord. The Lord’s in the midst. Don’t you know that? Even the heathens said the Lord’s in the midst, and they got to fooling around and forgot about it. So, the Lord was right where He said he would be.

And do you know that He is here in this church tonight? He is where he said he would be. I almost stopped preaching when I think of this. That is, it almost shuts me up. How can a man stand in the presence of the Lord Jesus and talk? Well, he’s told to do it. And Augustine said, how can we speak? And then he said, well, if we don’t, there’ll be universal silence, and so somebody’s got to speak.

Well, it might as well be I tonight, I suppose. So, in the midst of the candlesticks, there stood one. Then we have a picture of Him here, and it says He was clothed with a garment down to the foot. And now here we have the brethren at it again. Some say that robe was a royal robe, and it’s His kingly robe. And others say it’s a priestly robe, and it’s the robe of His priesthood.

Well, since He’s a kingly Priest and a priestly King, why can’t we say it both? Why do we have to say either or? Why can’t we say both and, and get together and put our arms around each other? And instead of writing an angry book to show that this is not a priestly robe, this is a kingly robe, and another man writing a bitter attack to show that it’s not a kingly robe, it’s a priestly robe, why can’t we say He being priest and king wears the royal robe of both the king and the priest? Because He’s both priest and king, and there He is in the midst of His church. His job in the midst of His church, His function now is a priestly function. And He is the High Priest.

When He appears in the midst of His church, He’s the High Priest. And do you know when we see Him here, now this incidentally is the only real picture we have of the present Jesus. Artists have tried to paint Him and they’ve done their best. And they’ve tried to paint His humanity, but nobody knows what He looks like except as He has been given, we’ve been given this word picture. Here He stands in His majesty, clothed down to the foot. And as the king He rules and as a priest He’s there to represent God to us and represent us to God. That’s the business of the priest and the prophet, and He’s all three.

Now, He’s girded about with a golden girdle. Now this is the insignia of royalty without any doubt. This girdle around His belt here, which was always in the Bible, the sign that He was a traveler. They gathered their great robe up and bound themselves around and away they went. They girded themselves for the fight.

But what incidentally, this doesn’t belong to this sermon, but just struck me. What would a modern soldier do with a bunch of fellows in Mother Hubbards, back there in that day with ropes around their belts to keep them falling over the front end of their dress? They did it, they fought in those days like that, you know, done up in robes. And that’s outside, but I can imagine what a young soldier dressed, stripped, streamlined down and with his bayonet would do with a bunch of those soldiers then.

That’s the way they lived then, but not this Savior. We don’t see Him here with His loins girded. We see Him here staying. He’s not going anyplace. He’s in the midst of it. He’s here. It’s His place to be. He has a work to do. And He’s in the midst of His church, not girded with the intention of leaving, but round His breast with the intention of staying. The high priest had a royal girdle, you know, about him, but it was made of, I think, a number of things, and gold enwoven. But this was pure gold. This is royalty.

We have here Jesus Christ the King, girt about the breast with a gold girdle. And His head and His hair were white as wool, as white as snow. We were talking about snow blindness coming down, that up in the Northland or anywhere where there’s a great new fallen snow and men get on their snowshoes or even in cars, the whiteness of the snow with the sun shining down upon it slowly, slowly into the eye until men go blind. And some have been found wandering about in blindness because their eyes couldn’t take the whiteness of the snow with the sun shining on it. And here was one whose head and the hairs were white as snow, white as wool.

Now there are two views of this again. Some say that this pure whiteness is the whiteness and holiness of heaven, and others say that it is the stamp of age, that it means pure knowledge and solid judgment. And we have here a picture of the ancient of days. I do know that Christ never was gray and that He isn’t gray.

Christ died when He was 33 at the peak of His wonderful manhood, and I know that there is no death in Him there and no decay. But I also could see how that God could present Him as wiser than Solomon, wiser than the seven sages of antiquity, wiser than the wisest angel before the throne, standing in the purity of His white head and His white hair, there standing in the midst of the church.

Oh, my friends, listen. You need to go to Him. He’s called the Counselor. The Counselor. Oh, I don’t know. I get weary. I listen sometimes on the radio when I’m lying down and resting, and I listen to these programs where young people are asked questions and asked to discuss them.

Dear God, what do they know about them? There is a Man who is called a Wonderful Counselor, who has upon Him the Spirit of Jehovah and the Spirit of Wisdom and of might and the Spirit of Counsel and the fear of the Lord. He’s the One we go to. He’s in the midst of His church, and if you don’t know a thing, go to Him.

You know, we ask each other too many questions. We want to know. Somebody wrote me the other day and said, Dear Brother Tozer, we’d like to have you. My husband and I are Christians, and we live out here on a farm, and we’d like to know, could Jesus sin or couldn’t Jesus sin? I wrote them an answer back, and then I got an answer from them saying, Thank you. We thought we believed too. They wanted me to answer them, but why didn’t they go to the Counselor? He would have told them.

I went one time and got all tied up. When you give the commentators enough rope, they’ll not only hang themselves, but they’ll have you dangling there too in some lonesome valley.

So the commentator got me dangling on who the Prodigal Son was. He couldn’t have been a Christian because it says, this my son was lost, and the Christian couldn’t be lost, so he couldn’t be unsaved because he said, This my son. So, I got tired of the commentators and all other kinds, and I went to God about it. I spent a few hours in prayer about it, and I got my answer.

I have my answer, and that was many, many long years ago when this head was as black as a raven’s wing, and I have never needed to change my mind. I have never found any teachings any place. I know who the Prodigal Son was.

I’m not telling you tonight, though sometime I might preach on it. I went to the Lord about other matters like that. I remember down in Urbana some years ago, the InterVarsity Missions Fellowship and a lot of other people were met.

{See end of this document for the Mr. Tozer’s understanding of the Prodical Son he gave in his message “The Grace of God” from October 26, 1958}

There were a bunch of preachers around there, and Al Redpath of Moody Church and I were, well, you’d say the main speakers in that we’d jostle back and forth and preach. He and I had some others, and somebody among that learned crowd called attention to this. They said, did you stop to think that the two main speakers here never went to any theological school in their lives? Al Redpath never did, and I never did.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to be dumb or that you have to walk around meekly saying, well, I don’t know. There is Somebody here with hair as white as wool, and His name is Counselor, and He’s here in the midst of the golden candlesticks, and He has a mouth and a voice and words, and you have a perfect right to go to Him and find out things.

And my brethren, it’s not what I’ve read in books that gives any extra thrust, as they say, to my message, but it’s what God has given me. But I know it’s here in the book. I even go to the King James Version and get it, you know. I’ve read so many others that I know where the King James Version mistakes are, but I even go to the King James Version, you know.

Some people say, well, that King James Version is so old-fashioned nobody can understand it anymore. Listen, my brother, I was converted when I was 17 years old, and I merely had intelligence enough to find my way home if the moon was full. And I had no education whatsoever except a little in a white schoolhouse, and I began to read the King James Version and never had any trouble with it at all.

And I had never read anything up to that time except love stories that would lie around the house, you know, how John broke his wife’s heart and so on, and I read those gooey love stories. That’s all I’d read. And then Wild West stories, I’d read them.

So, my literary knowledge was very nil, and everything else was very nil. I was very modest, and as Churchill said about Attlee, I had an awful lot to be modest about. And I read it and I read it and I’ve understood it ever since, and I’ve never had any need to, if it says, cometh and goeth, why in God’s world don’t you know what cometh and goeth mean, brother? Do you have to have a new translation to know what cometh means? Cometh means come. He comes. And so is everything else.

Well, anyhow, the Lord’s the best teacher, He’s the best teacher, and I’d suggest to everybody in the theological school, going to school anywhere, listen to your teacher and then smile and ask God what it means. Because He’ll tell you what it means, and the teachers may not know unless they’ve gone to Him first.

Well, then He had eyes as a flame of fire. Ah, those eyes, those eyes as a flame of fire. How can we face those eyes? Looking through you, looking through you, and seeing everything. You know, Shakespeare said we can smile and smile and be a villain still, and I’ve met people who smile and smile, but they’re villains inside. But there are eyes in the midst of the church, and they see you. They see all through you. They see all directions. They know all about you. They see through your motives. They see through your purposes and tensions, those fiery flaming eyes of Jesus. And He has feet like fine brass, as though it burned in a furnace.

And all through the Old Testament that was judgment. So here we have somebody in the midst. Now he isn’t the tender, bearded weakling that the artists have painted, nor is He the mild, weak, and lowly lamb that some of the old made poets have painted, or have written about, painted with words.

But He’s got two things here, fiery eyes and feet like brass, and He’s here in the midst of the church. For you see, the church is a lot of things. The church is a group of candlesticks shining its light out to the world. The church is a fold where the sheep are gathered. The church is an armory where soldiers come in to get their weapons and out from which they go to fight the battles. The church is a hospital where weak and sick people are treated. The church is a farm where the great husbandman plows and harrows and sends the rain and the storms. The church is a little of everything, and here we have Him in the midst of us. Not to comfort and console us, there will be lots of time for consolation and comfort in the day to come, but He’s here with fiery eyes to judge us.

And you know you’ll be glad for that in that day, you’ll be glad for that. Because you want to know the worst about yourself now, don’t you? You want to know the worst about yourself now. What kind of fool would I be to seek consolation at any cost and then go to judgment with my life undisciplined, uncleansed, untreated, without penitence, without restitution, without everything done that I can do that I might obey my Lord and stand before him without shame? So I’m glad He’s here like that.

I’m glad that long robe tells me that He’s here as a priest, the Healing Surgeon, the priest, here to plead my cause before His God and to plead God’s cause before His people, but here also with fiery eyes to see all through me.

Ah, preachers get away with murder, don’t think they don’t, brother. They get away with murder. They can loaf all week, you know, and play around, and then get a verse and shout around and beat the pulpit and the poor dewy-eyed lambs will bleat on. And when he stands at the door, then they’ll say, wonderful, pastor, and the guy hasn’t put five cents worth of anything into it. But the Lord knows about that.

He knows whether they have or not. I have a conviction growing on me that nothing will ever come to birth without pain. I have a conviction growing on me that no seed will ever grow until the plow’s been there, and that there will be no victory until there has been battle, and that the man can get away with anything, fed chicken and given long cars and nice homes and sent to Florida and all the rest of it. It’s all right. You don’t want to suggest anything, but it’s all right. You can do those things.

But brethren, remember one thing. I don’t make my last reckoning to my official board. I make my last reckoning to the Man in the midst of us. Annual night, I read a report. The board meeting in New York, 27 saints gathered around there, I made a report. Buffalo next summer, May, I go if I still live, and I make a report.

I tell them what I’ve been doing to the magazine. But that’s not my last report. I’ve got another one. I’ve got one I’m not writing down and can’t write down, and it isn’t finished yet. And I have got to tell the Man in the midst about that. And He’s so kind that He died for me, but He is so severe that His eyes are like flames of fire and His feet like burnished brass. And I love Him for all of it. And I don’t want Him to be anything else but that. To have a weak effeminate Jesus with a big lap that every carnal skunk can climb up onto and get consolation, I don’t like that conception of Christ at all.

Christ has a broad lap, and He has a beautiful shoulder. Many is the saint that’s wept on that tender shoulder, for his own name is written. But He has eyes that see through and He has feet that judge. And a voice that is the sound of many waters. I don’t know what to say about this. I’ve been thinking about that voice, strong, majestic and deep.

And then I have been thinking about the piping voices of men and the raucous voices of politicians and the harsh, scolding voices of angry mothers and the bold, commanding voices of soldiers. And then I read of the voice like the sound of many waters, like when you come to the sounding of the ocean, down by the sound of the sea, wrote the poet. And in that little simple line, I think he has put as much of sheer musical poetry, down by the sound of the sea.

Isn’t that a beautiful phrase? Down by the sound of the sea. And here I hear it coming to me, the sound of many waters, so gentle, so healing, so restful, so completely poised, so sure of itself. It drowns out all the voices of men. And I’m glad, for I want to hear that, Voice. And in His hand are the seven stars, and they are the messengers of the seven churches.

I know some of you have been very distressed over the death of Melvin Lobston of this church. Our fine young friend, Melvin Lobston, one of our missionaries, got in an airplane, Air Jordan, they said it was, over in Jerusalem. He had just been there and was going away on a missionary trip, and the engine blew up a little way off the ground, and he was seven other Americans, eight others, two of them Americans, he was killed. And some have said, how could it be? Oh, I don’t know, but I do know one thing. Melvin Lobston was a messenger of the church. And I know that the crash of the plane didn’t take him out of the hand of his Lord. I know that.

And I know that a man who’s a true messenger, he’s in the hand of the Lord. Finney used to remind the churches they’d better be careful how they treat their preachers. He said, God let the preacher die, let him die, let you kill him, but He’ll judge you, and he’s right. For He holds them in His hands, seven stars, and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword. And of course, that’s the Word we won’t talk about that, because everybody knows that, and His face as the sun shining in its full strength.

Somebody ought to preach on the face of Jesus. Somebody ought to. Oh, that face of Jesus. You know, when you look into that Face, you see anything you need to see? If you don’t predispose yourself to see something, if you don’t go with your mind badly made up about what you’ll see, you’ll see anything you need to see in that Face. If you’re frightened, you’ll see assurance. If you’re proud, you’ll see rebuke. And if you’re weak, you’ll see strength. And if you’re doubting, you’ll see courage. You’ll see it all in that face, that face of Jesus.

Does it mean anything to you that you’re going to look on that face actually sometimes? John turned and saw him. You and I don’t see him fully. That is, we don’t see him with our eyes, but we see him with our faith and our hearts. Does it mean anything to you? I don’t think it means much to anybody anymore that there’s a heaven. We have been so mixed up with eschatology the last 50 years that the old-fashioned idea of dying and going to heaven and seeing Jesus has sort of passed away.

You know, Longfellow’s village blacksmith, he wrote back there when people were just plain people. They hadn’t got so smart yet. He wrote one of the days when simple old, black-bonneted women, you know, would stand up in church and sing with tears in their eyes about looking over Jordan. Do you remember? We used to sing, they stand on Jordan’s stormy bank, I stand and cast a wishful eye where my possessions there, but no, not that anymore.

He wrote at that time, and he said about the blacksmith, he says he goes in Sunday to the church and he sits among his boys and he hears the parson pray and preach and he hears his daughter’s voice singing in the village choir and it makes him think of her mother’s voice singing in paradise and with his hard rough hand he wipes a tear out of his eye. All week long he’d swung the great ten-pound hammer, wham, wham, you could hear the music of the anvil ringing out for a mile in all directions. Rough it was and hard, but not so rough and hard that he couldn’t wipe tear out of his eye thinking of Mama yonder in paradise.

People don’t think with tears of paradise anymore much. They’re all mixed up and what’s going to happen in Jordan, what’s going to happen in Berlin, what’s Daniel’s bear mean, what’s Daniel’s leopard mean, and we’re so smart that we’re completely stupid. What we need to do is get childlike again and listen and look into the Face that shines like the sun.

You don’t have to know Greek to look into it, you don’t have to know Hebrew, they’ll both help you they tell me, and you don’t have to have gone anywhere to school, all that helps us all too. I talk like a fool because actually I’ve done an awful lot of reading and studying in my time and I recommend it, but I saw the Face before I saw the Book. I wonder if I’d seen a Book before I saw the Face, if I wouldn’t have been one of those smart alecks who knew more than was good for me. But I saw the Face first and then I got interested in the Book afterwards, and when the Lord regenerated my heart He woke up my head. But that Face with all that we need.

Well now, there he was standing and the effect of this, he said, I fell at His feet as dead. And I read almost the same thing in Daniel 10 through to 9. You see, Daniel and John and Isaiah and the rest of them, mystical bishops, they heard a Voice, and they turned and when they turned, they saw. We don’t hear the Voice, and if we do, we don’t turn and so we don’t see. We depend upon hearsay.

They heard a voice, they turned, they saw. And what they saw knocked them to their faces, knocked them to their faces. Oh how desperately, how desperately we need a crop of young men who’ve been knocked flat. How we need young people who’ve looked on a Face and a white hair and head and have seen a man with a sword coming out of His mouth and seen Him moving up and down in tenderness among the churches and have fallen flat and had to be helped to their feet again. You know, that’s what we need in our pulpits, brethren. That’s what we need.

Now we’re trying to get learned. And you get magazines so learned that if you can understand them, they consider they’ve failed you. That if you can understand what the article meant, why they say, well, we’ll have to do something about that, they understood it.

So they make it harder and harder and harder all the time. But we don’t need that kind of brain-weary, muscle-bound intellectual. What we need is a whole crop of intelligent young fellows who will study and work hard at it, but who’ve seen the Face. And because they’ve seen the Face, they’re never sure of themselves afterward, but oh brother, are they are sure of Jesus. They’re never sure of themselves. None of that brassy, I did this and I did that, it’s all gone. And in its place, there’s the tender certainty that God’s all right, but O Lord, I don’t know about myself. I need help.

There are two pictures of Jesus given in the Bible. This portrait here, this final portrait done in beautiful words by John, but there was another one once back there, maybe I can without too much trouble read it. Listen, behold my servant, said God, Jehovah, as many were astonished at thee, His visage was so marred more than any man and His form more than the sons of men, so shall He sprinkle many nations. His visage was so marred, so marred more than the sons of men.

There’s one picture of Him, that’s no more, that was the old photograph, the old picture. That wasn’t a pretty picture at all. Let nobody paint the cross beautiful, let nobody show a pretty Christ on a tree, let nobody by the use of form or color show a pretty sight there on a hillside. Gallows aren’t pretty, electric chairs aren’t pretty, crosses aren’t pretty.

So, God said people were astonished at him and turned their face away, for it was an ugly sight there, blue-lipped, fly-blown flies diving down to the blood, blood dripping off his toes, wasn’t a pretty sight. But don’t think of Him like that anymore, my brethren, no, no.

John said, I heard a voice, and it was a voice that sounded like a silver trumpet through the universe, and I turned, and when I turned, I saw. And he tried to describe what he saw, and I’ve gone over just weakly tonight, almost casually, what can a man say about perfection? How can you gild a lily or set a candle to the sun? How can you teach the nightingale to sing? And how can I add anything to what John has given us?

But there He stands, with a garment down to the foot, and a girth about the breast with a golden girdle, head and hair as white as wool, eyes of the flame of fire, feet like fine brass, voice as of the sound of the sea. In His hands, seven stars, and out of His mouth goeth the sharp sword and a Face of the sun shining in its strength.

There He is in the midst of us, Jesus Christ. They met the conditions, they saw the vision, they fell flat. We meet no conditions, see no visions, and imagine that we’re in lineal descent from the apostles.

How far can we go, Brethren? If the Romanists have gone off in that direction, we’ve gone off in the other. May God bring us all to the middle, so we can behold Jesus Christ as He is, Christ the Son of God.

Well, I recommend Him to you, my friends. I recommend Him to you. You need Him, and you don’t have to cross the street to find Him. You don’t have to come out to this church to find Him. You don’t have to make a long trip. We want you to come, but you don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything except, in your heart, when you hear the Voice of the gospel, turn. And when you turn, you’ll see. And when you see, you’ll fall. And when you fall, you’ll be lifted up again.

And I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead, and He laid His right hand upon me, saying, Fear not, I am the first and the last. I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of the hell and of the death, keys of hell and of death. Ah, all that walk the globe are but a handful to the myriad that slumber in its bosom. Death has ridden her pale horse around the world since the day that Adam ate the fruit and brought woe into the world.

But I look into the face of One tonight who holds the keys of death and of hell. I recommend Him to you, turn to Him, pick the Word of God, get the Gospel of John, get on your knees, read it. You need not that any man teach you. He’ll teach you, if you obey, if you repent, if you hate sin, if you love righteousness, if you have no confidence in yourself or in the flesh, he’ll take you over.

I’ve seen in this Church instances of young men who were converted and young women and blossomed out into the Christian life so fast that you’d think they’d been converted 25 years, and they’d only been converted a year. You follow Him, you look into His face, and all will be well with you.

O Jesus, Jesus, dearest Lord! Forgive me if I say, For very love, Thy sacred name. A thousand times a day Let us sing, Brother McAffee.

A.W. Tozer’s understanding of the Prodical Son from the sermon, “The Grace of God” October 26, 1958 https://tozertalks.com/tozer-talks-13/

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 prodical. 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.

Tags Jesus Christ, Revelation, Worship

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 26, 2025

“Whom Having Not Seen Ye Love”

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Whom Having Not Seen Ye Love

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

October 4, 1953

I want you to notice verses 7 and 8, again, of 1 Peter 1, where the Holy Spirit says, verse 8, I believe, and verse 7 we’ll pass as having examined that to our satisfaction. In verse 8, whom having not seen, ye love, in whom though now ye see him not. Now that is what we’re interested in this morning. Whom having not seen, ye love, and in whom though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

Now, we have these two expressions very much alike, except in their tense. Whom having not seen, and now, ye see Him not. Having not seen has to do with any possible seeing him in the past, and now ye see him not, has to do with any possible seeing him now. And these Christians, these elect brethren, who were God’s by sanctification of the Spirit and sprinkling by the blood of Christ, were believers in that which they had not seen, and that that they were not seeing.

This is contrary to the current, and I suppose universal, proverb that seeing is believing. Believing that must depend upon seeing is a kind of believing, for it is a conclusion drawn from the testimony of the senses. But believing that depends upon seeing is not New Testament believing at all, for New Testament believing is a believing of a report about things unseen. And that is the difference between real New Testament faith and every other kind of so-called believing.

Now, I say they believed in the invisible, that’s another way of stating it. And this brings it close to Hebrews 11, 27, where it is written of the man of God Abraham that he was able to endure because he was looking at the things that were invisible. If you and I could see, actually see the invisible.

Now let us put it like this. Being what we are, we pretty much trust what we see, humanly. And if we could see all around us the wonders, the invisible things of the creation, we would never be lonely for a moment, and we would never doubt for a moment. But the invisible things are there, but they’re simply not seen unless you have faith. And Abraham had faith and was able to carry on because he could see that which was not seen and could not be seen.

And it says here that in so doing, these Christians experienced the invisible so vividly and so satisfyingly that they were able to rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. I suppose that outside of our seeing, there is no time when we’re as dishonest as we are when we are praying.

We sing songs that are so dishonest that I hesitate to sing them, and yet I don’t want to be a speckled bird altogether. I have speckles enough on me now that I don’t want to become clear off my rocker. But the average song, when we sing it, if God Almighty were compelling us to be entirely 100 percent realistic, we just couldn’t sing it because it’s not true of us.

It was true probably of the man who wrote the song, My Faith Looks Up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary, Savior Divine. That’s a beautiful song. And the man who wrote it said, the last line, oh, bear me safely up a ransomed soul. And the man who wrote it said, I was so moved by what I was writing and what I was thinking about that the last verse was written in a flood of tears. Now that man meant it. But I wonder how many of us mean it when we sing it today. My Faith Looks Up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary. It is only by a charitable adaptation of the truth that we are able to sing most of the hymns that we sing at all. Love Divine, All Love’s Excelling, is another one of the hymns that we sing with very little meaning.

But I was thinking especially of a camp meeting number. I don’t know whether we ever sing it here or not, but we’ve all sung it at some time. The waves of glory roll, my shouts I can’t control, when comes the love of Jesus sweeping o’er my soul.

Now I can easily believe that the old brother who wrote that was so lost in the grace of God that when he said, the waves of glory roll, my shouts I can’t control, that he was literally telling the truth. But how many of us have sung that song? The waves of glory roll, my shouts I can’t control, and if the devil had a sense of humor, I am quite sure that he had both hands wrapped around his stomach to keep from exploding with laughter. For a lot of us who sing my shouts I can’t control can control our shouts easier than we can control our lusts. We can control our shouts easier than we can control our temper.

If the average Christian were to sing the waves of glory roll, my tongue I can’t control, he’d be telling the truth. But to say my shouts I can’t control is to lie to the face of God Almighty. And yet we do an awful lot of it.

Now I don’t want to work against Brother McAfee here and suggest that if you can’t feel it, don’t sing it. Rather, let’s compromise it and let’s put it like this. Let’s sing it, sing in our hearts, Oh God, it isn’t true, but I want it to be true. It isn’t so, Lord, but please make it so. Then I think God will understand, as when we sang this morning, our souls, how heavily they go to seek immortal joy. Some people have made great fun of that song, and they have said, How could it be?

Well, how could it be that we could sing a song like that? We grovel here below, fond of these earthly toys. Isaac Watts wrote this song, and he says, Look how we grovel here below, fond of these earthly toys. Our souls, how heavily they go. Some editor got to this and spoiled it, but Isaac Watts wrote, our souls, how heavily they go to reach eternal joys. I’ve heard that made fun of and satirized and lampooned by holiness preachers.

But brethren, if we are absolutely honest, the average Christian will sing, see how I grovel here below, fond of these earthly toys, rather than sing the waves of glory roll my shouts I can’t control. For the average man can control his shouts better than he can control his love of these earthly toys.

Now, the invisible. They saw the invisible and believed in it and rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory. I don’t know how to tell you to get that. I only know they got it. They got it by believing in what they couldn’t see. And I suppose that’s the only way you and I’ll ever have a joy unspeakable and a shout that we can’t control.

Now, I want to call attention to this, that it’s characteristic of a Christian, that he believes in things that he cannot see. That is, he’s a believer in the invisible. He believes that there is a real world coexisting with this world, touching this world, and accessible to this world. I want you to get those three qualifying words, that there is a real world. I repeat, that there is never any contradiction between spirit and reality.

The contradiction is between spirit and matter, never between the spiritual and the real. So that the believer accepts and believes in a real world of which God is the King, an eternal kingdom, an eternal world, a spiritual and invisible world, coexisting with, touching, and accessible to this world.

Heaven is not so far away that we must take a jet airplane and continue through light years of speedy travel to get to heaven. That’s what the average Christian thinks of heaven, as being so far away. And it’s only again by accommodation that we sing about heaven being near and glory coming down our souls to greet.

The fact is, brethren, that the eternal world of which God is the King, which is inhabited by immortal spirits, and which has taken our dead Christian loved ones for a little time out of our sight, that world is as real, in fact, more real than the physical world at which we are so very familiar. And it coexists with our world. There is not a great vacuum gap between. As the stars in the heavens, there is a star. Then there are a few million light years of space, and then another star. No, my brethren, that is not the way with heaven and earth, but that the world you and I now see, and the invisible things of Him, are coexistent with each other.

Now, I said yesterday on the radio, maybe a couple of you listened, but I said yesterday that two things of equal density could not occupy the same place at the same time. And that is so widely and commonly known that I almost apologize for quoting it. But here is something we must remember on the other side, that two things that are not of equal density may coexist in the same place at the same time.

For instance, if you’re sitting in front of your fireplace, nobody does anymore, but if you should be sitting in front of a fireplace with a fire on, there would be two things coexisting for you. There would be light and heat. They are not of equal density, they’re not mutually exclusive, they’re mutually compatible. And they are the two things that are coming out of that fireplace.

Or change the figure to the sun in the heaven above. We have two things coming from the sun at the same time, coexisting with each other, heat and light. We’re warmed by the sun and were lighted by the sun. And light and heat do not exclude each other, they’re compatible, they intertwine each other and live together.

So, the world that God has made, we call nature, and the world that God has made, and he calls the heavens, are coexistent with each other. And not only coexistent with each other, but they touch each other. And they’re accessible to each other so that God could put a ladder up on the earth and have its top reach the sky, and angels ascending and descending upon that ladder.

The one world was accessible to the other world either way, the gates swung both directions, so that God could send His only begotten Son down, and He could carry Stephen up, and our prayers can go up and the answers can come down. The two worlds touch and are coexistent with each other and accessible one to the other.

Now, the believers in 1 Peter, that Peter wrote about there, were believers in that. They believed in the world that was real, the invisible world. And this distinguished them from every kind of materialist and materialism. Materialism has fallen on evil times in our day, so that the newspapers and magazines and radio commentators are all over on the side of the spiritual rather than the material, that is, in a carnal kind of way.

So, the materialism is not now the problem it used to be, but it’s still a problem. And it recurs and has a recrudescence every once in a while, of interest, that all that we see is simply made of matter, and that’s the end of it, that matter is all. We still run on to people that believe that, and if we live and the Lord tarries another twenty-five years, it’ll probably be back in the saddle, because materialism and spiritism chase each other in and out off the throne over the centuries, and Christians keep right on believing, no matter who may be on the popular throne, the materialists or the spiritists.

But a Christian is sharply distinguished from all kinds of materialism and all sorts of materialists. He does not believe that what he sees is of any great value. He does not believe that what he is able to touch with his hands ever is really worth very much. He endures as seeing the invisible, the immaterial, the spiritual in other worlds, not ghostly and phantom, but the spiritual, that which has real existence but is spirit instead of matter.

And a Christian believes that and lives in the light of it, and that distinguishes him forever from all of brands of materialism. But it also distinguishes him from all kinds of superstition and idolatry, for the idolater believes in the invisible too.

But the difference is that a Christian is one whose faith in the invisible has been corrected and chastened and purified by divine revelation, so that a heathen in Africa can kneel down before a stone, and if he’s an intelligent heathen, you say to him, why do you worship that stone? And he answers, I don’t. I worship the deity resident in the stone.

The Greeks used to kneel in front of Mount Olympus, and if you said to them, why are you worshiping toward Mount Olympus, they said, we do not worship a mountain, we worship the gods in the mountain. And even today, there are those who kneel before statues in churches, and if they’re instructed in their own beliefs, and you say to them, why do you worship that image? They say, we don’t worship that image. We worship God, of whom that image reminds us.

So that it’s possible to be a believer in the invisible and not be a Christian. But it’s not possible to be a Christian and not be a believer in the invisible. It’s possible to believe that there’s some kind of a spooky world somewhere that we’ve got to placate with rabbits’ feet and chestnuts and strange sayings and chains around our neck and medallions and all sorts of things.

That’s a belief in the invisible, but it’s a pagan, erroneous belief. But when Jesus Christ came and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, and He stood upon His feet or sat down and opened His mouth and taught us, He corrected that false and sinful belief in superstitious things and told us what the real world really was. The only one who’d ever been there to come back and tell us.

Abraham died and sleeps, his body in the cave of Machpelah and his spirit is with God, but he’s never been back to tell us what it’s like. But Jesus had been there from eternity, and when He came, He told us of things of heaven and chided us because we didn’t accept what He said when He told us of things above.

So, the Christian is not a materialist, believing in the validity of all material things, and he is not an idolater but just believing vaguely in the existence of another world. He is a Christian who believes in what he was taught by the One who had been there and come across the threshold into our world, smelling of myrrh and aloes out of the ivory palaces, fragrant from the presence of the eternal King.

Now, not only does the Christian believe in the invisible world, but he figures on it. He acts and plans and lives as one who counts on the reality of the invisible. The businessman doesn’t. That is, the unsaved businessman. The man of the earth doesn’t believe in, or if he believes in, in the sense that he nods dutifully toward the belief in another world, he doesn’t let it change his plans any. He acts just the same as if there was no other world. He lays his plans precisely the same as if there wasn’t any invisible world, and he continues to live as if heaven was a myth and didn’t exist.

But the Christian counts on the other world, so that the invisible presence of Him, God and His eternal kingdom, and the spirits of just men made perfect in the holy Church of the Firstborn and the Holy Ghost and the invisible world, actually influences his life, actually shapes his plans, actually determines his habits, and as well as comforts and consoles and supports him.

It is a comforting thought that there is God near us. It is a comforting thought that there are invisible worlds near us, and it consoles us to know that when Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, there came a legion of angels, or there came angels, to comfort him. And He said He could have had legions of angels by His side.

Now, nothing has changed, my brethren. The angels keep their wanted places. But it is we, it is we who have failed to see it. It is our unbelieving hearts that have missed the many-splendored thing. The angels are still here. There is a world, and that world, God and the presence of God and the Spirit of God and the inhabitants of that world into which really you and I have entered in our spirits, for we live in that world, too.

We live, as Thomas Kelly says, on two planes. We live on the plane of the natural, and we live on the plane of the spiritual. And that is why a Christian is such a wonderful and weird and strange and puzzling creature, because he is both animal and spiritual, and he insists upon living for the spiritual while he is down here in his mortal body. And that makes a Christian a funny fellow.

Oftentimes two men living on the same street together at 1631 and 1633, side by side, one of them is a good-natured, easy-going, relaxed, downright old sinner on his way to hell and doesn’t believe it, and is easy to get along with, and nobody bothers nobody, and he is friendly and waves when he goes down the street. He is a sinner, an Esau, a good-natured rebel on his way to hell.

Alongside of him there lives a Christian, one who has been born again and who has been given the blessed Holy Ghost as the wedding ring, and he has his troubles. He weeps when there is apparently nothing to weep about, he is moody when apparently there is nothing to change a mood at all, preoccupied when somebody else or the man next to him is all wanting to talk, he is preoccupied.

When the man next door can’t keep his radio off, he is worried about whether them bums will win the series. This fellow may put his Bible under his arm and start off somewhere to a street meeting or to a prayer meeting. He is not as comfortable a fellow as the sinner. He doesn’t act quite the same. Why? Because the sinner lives on only one plane, the physical, and the Christian lives on both. In his body he is down here in the flesh, but in his spirit, he is up yonder with God. And the result is that he is not as comfortable a being to be around, maybe, as he might be. I have always said that prophets are never comfortable people to have around, but they are indispensable if we are not going to rot.

Now, the Christian is also, it is characteristic of him, that he is preoccupied with the invisible, but I think I’ve said enough about that. Now, I would speak briefly about the invisible and the Lord’s Supper.

What is a sacrament? A sacrament is that wherein the invisible meets and touches the visible. The eternal meets and touches the temporal. Water baptism we call a sacrament, and there, material water and material river, material tank, is made to body forth an invisible and spiritual truth. The Lord’s Supper is another sacrament wherein we use the material as a thin garment to disguise the spiritual. Wherein we use the temporal as a plate upon which we serve the eternal. That has always been the belief of the Christians.

Now there are two schools of thought about the Lord’s Supper, the sacrament. One is that the elements actually become visible, the invisible becomes visible, and that when you take the cake from the tray, you are touching consciously and lifting the very body that Mary gave to Jesus. That seems to me unworthy of a serious answer.

There is another school of thought, and that is that the invisible is present in, underneath and behind the visible, and I believe in that. I believe that wherever faith has eyes to see, there is the smiling presence of the Son of God. I believe that in the Lord’s Supper, the bread and wine, we can trace it, we know where it came from, we bought it, there is nothing magic about it. It could be fed to the birds, it could be drunk by any sinner, there is nothing magic about it. But it is an object lesson. It sets forth in material terms the spiritual. It sets forth in temporal terms the eternal. And wherever faith is present, we touch and handle things unseen.

Now, Paul rebuked the Corinthian Christians because they failed to discern the Lord’s body. What did he mean by that? He meant you have been engrossed with the material, and you have not recognized the spiritual. He meant that you have drunk the wine and enjoyed it, eaten the bread and been full, but in doing it you have not had faith in the invisible. You have not discerned the Lord’s body. You are materialists, he said, and your eating and drinking at he Lord’s Supper is a carnal thing, and it will condemn you. And some of you actually will die early because of it. You will get sick and sleep because you have grieved God by your materialistic thinking.

He said, don’t you know that this is the approach to the invisible, that this is the doorway to the spiritual? And when you take the Lord’s Supper by faith, you recognize that you’ll receive the spiritual, though you know what the elements are, and the chemists could tell you. Nevertheless, it is through the gateway of the material that we reach the spiritual in this instance. So that the spiritual and the invisible and the eternal are right here. Faith recognizes it. Unbelief waits until the service is over and thinks it is too long.

Now, said the man of God, now do we touch and handle things unseen, exquisitely said. Now do we touch and handle things unseen. If he had meant, now do we touch the bread, now do we touch the wine, he wouldn’t have said unseen. Now do we touch and handle things unseen.

And Jesus said, I have meat to eat that you know not of. Here was the tired, dusty, weary Jesus, hungry from a long day of travel and fasting. And when they came to him, He said, don’t worry about Me, I have meat to eat that ye know not of. He was feasting on the invisible. Be known to us, the man of God prayed, be known to us in breaking bread, but do not then depart. Savior, divide with us and spread thy table in our heart. Then sup with us in love divine, thy body and thy blood, that living bread, that heavenly wine, be our immortal food.

Some of the old Saints called the sacraments the food of immortality. Why can’t we believe it today? Not believing superstitiously in the magic of words, not believing ignorantly in some woozy, ghostly ideas of another world, but believing with clean, sharp belief in the revealed truth that Jesus Christ brought. And believe that heaven is not far away only, but nigh at hand. That the eternal God is not in some Olympia, hidden in clouds, but is accessible to the human heart wherever faith is. That ought to transform our simple Protestant communion service into a heavenly service.

Now, Father, we would repent before Thee this morning. Lord, rather than just pray, we would repent before Thee, O Lord, for our materialistic minds, thinking in terms of this world, judging, weighing, measuring, valuing as men do. Father, this is wrong, forgive us.

And Father, our preoccupation with earthly things also, we would repent this morning. As a people, we would repent for our absorption in the things that pass away. O Lord, forgive us, cleanse us, wash us, so that as we quiet our hearts and in silence hear a voice, we may not have on us the ragged, lint and dust of unconfessed sin. That our garments may be white this morning, pure, shining, that we may receive as unworthy but believing people. Break the bread of life this morning, O Bread of Life, break it, Wine of the Soul, spill it, feed us, till we want no more. In Jesus’ holy name, Amen.

Tags Jesus Christ

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date May 5, 2024

“Jesus Christ the Rock”

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Jesus Christ the Rock

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 22, 1959

Now, Lord, we are before Thee again for another hour of worship, the reading of Thy Word, singing of the hymns of worship and praise, meditating together over the things that matter. We thank Thee for this passage that we just read. This tells us what is to be and what will come, prepares us mentally to receive it. We pray Thee then Lord, prepare us in our hearts because what we know with our minds, sometimes we don’t know really. And these things that are before us that are up there waiting, when we come into them, even though we know and could turn to the Scripture where they’re found, when they come, they’re shocking, terrible, and incredible.

So, we pray that Thou will give us faith. Give us steadfastness and give us that which Thou didst mean when Thou did say, they that endure unto the end. Lord, we won’t let anybody interpret this away for us. We won’t let anybody divide this and dispensationalize it. We stand by it. Here it is. They that shall endure unto the end they shall be saved. Lord, we would before Thee ask that Thou wilt help us that we may get our hearts ready for quiet endurance. And then whatever comes and whatever it means, we’re on the right side. Help us Lord to endure patiently whatever comes to us. We haven’t any of us Lord endured much yet. Certainly, we have not endured unto blood, striving against sin. Certainly, Father, we are among those who have to admit that we’ve been treated like spoiled children, and we haven’t much. We haven’t much to show, not many scars, Lord, and not many things that ever happened to us. But, O God, we pray that Thou will prepare us for our time. And prepare this church and prepare the people of it and prepare those that are here this morning for that hour when things will begin to move and the world will catch fire, and those enemies that we thought we had bottled up and that they were safe. They will break out and get loose on the earth and things will begin to burn.

And then, we ask Thee to help us Lord that we might know where the Rock is that’s higher than we are. That Rock that is higher than I which the Psalmist spoke and that the hymn pleads, to the Rock that is higher than I, let me fly. Lord, help us, and bless us this morning. Wilt Thou, we pray Thee, help us that our faith may lay hold on Thee, our hope may be cheerful and bright, our expectation may meet Thy promises, that our giving may be sacrificial, that our worship may be pure and inward, and that we may get great help out of this morning service.

Not only us, O God, but we think of the other churches. We pray for them all where the gospel is preached. Gracious Father, help the struggling churches. Help those, Lord, that are prospering, and the very prosperity may become a cause of their downfall. Help those that are struggling and let not their struggles cause them to give up. But keep us, all of us, all types and kinds where we meet in Thy name all over. Help us we pray, Our Father, that we may not fail to quietly endure. Now help us. Be with us. Send in all the funds that are needed to carry on Thy work. Bless the expounding of the Word and the singing of the hymns. We ask it in Christ’s holy name. Amen.

I returned yesterday from a very pleasant and very rigorous visit to Toledo where Brother William Bryan is the pastor, a little church where Brother Zeemer preached for many years. They had splendid crowds. Not because I was there, but because they just have them. They always have them, excellent crowds. They were pushing for a $90,000 missionary offering, hoping for it. Mrs. Constance of Colombia, Mrs. Notson of the Philippine Islands and John Vectral of Hong Kong were there and spoke at various times. I preached every night and once during the day.

There was a convention of engineers there. I don’t know what they were engineers of, but Friday night, they decided to blow the place up. So about 11 o’clock was when I had nicely tucked down for the night. They started drinking, singing, yelling, pounding on doors and generally acting like delinquents until four in the morning. So, four in the morning, I might as well have been with them because I was just as drunk as they were, only in another way. I was bleary-eyed and miserable so I got what little I could out of it from there on. But I’m still feeling it. There were women among them too, women, wives, I suppose. I don’t understand such things. I lay there in bed and composed a letter to the management which I never wrote and will never send.

But really, they weren’t to blame. They did their best. House detectives beat on the door and yelled, this is the house detective, quiet. But they might as well talk to the delinquents that they were. The next morning everybody was down in the breakfast room trying to look just as meek and nice and civilized as ever. If the engineers of Ohio are that kind of people, I don’t know what the machinery of Ohio is going to be when they get through with it. Outside of that it was a beautiful week that I had with the brethren.

Now you’ll excuse me if I approach another angle here. This is Palm Sunday. Christ rode into Jerusalem. But I want to read a passage here that our Lord spoke, for it’s practically all entirely what He said. Matthew, the 21st chapter, 42nd Verse and following. This followed His triumphal entry. This was spoken between the day He entered and the time He was crucified. Jesus saith unto them, verse 42, did you never read in the Scriptures, the stone which the builders rejected, the same has become the head of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing and it’s marvelous in our eyes. That’s the quotation. Therefore, say I unto you, Jesus went on, the kingdom of God shall be taken from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall it will grind into powder. When the chief priests and Pharisees had heard His parables, they perceived that He spake of them. But when they sought to lay hands on Him, they feared the multitude because they took Him for a prophet.

There were always these Pharisees, chief priests, they were always caught just like the politicians are now. Always a little afraid of the public. They’re always wanting to do something nasty, but they’re a little afraid to do it because of the people. They despised the people, but they had them to deal with. They sought to lay hands on Him, violent hands, that would mean. But they feared the multitude because the multitude thought he was a prophet. And when a Jew thought a man was a prophet, the people, they weren’t ready that he should be crucified quite yet.

Now I want to talk a little about Jesus Christ, the Rock. This familiar figure, you come on it every once in a while, in the Scriptures. And it has certain qualities, as we all know, the qualities of strength. Solid as a rock, we say. And the quality of hardness, impenetrable. We have a word we call adamant. When a man is stubborn, refuses absolutely to yield, we say he’s adamant. That’s comes from a certain rock, adamant rock.

And then the permanence of a rock. I’ve traveled through the country, and I see gray mesas, they call them out West, great rocks, standing up, short mountains, great rocks. I muse over how many generations they’ve seen come and go. How many generations they’ve seen come up and go down, come up, and go down, come up and go down. Because a rock is a pretty permanent thing. Sailors know about the rock; they want to avoid them. Or they want to use them occasionally. And certainly, soldiers know, at least the soldiers of old days knew, they got behind rocks and they fought from behind rocks. Even in our own America, Indians used to get behind rocks and fight from there.

And the traveler knows about the rock. The shadow of a great rock in a weary land is word expression that comes from Palestine, where, when a man traveled over sandy ways until his tongue was dry, thick with thirst, he came to a rock and found the spraying and the shadow. And the cool moss growing there on the moist side of the rock, and he sat down. It was like being born physically over again. The builder knows about the rock. He chisels or hews it down and fits it into place and builds his great building. Now here, Christ quotes and applies the Scripture concerning the rock to Himself and to them. The stone He said, which was rejected by the builders, the same has become the head of the corner.

Now briefly, and I remember trying to explain this when I was in Peter back here, First Peter, that these religionists were builders, and they were busy erecting a temple. That is, they were not actually building a temple. It stood there in Jerusalem. I don’t mean that literally. I mean, that they were building a religious temple, composed of human righteousness and legal requirements and interpretations and texts and prohibitions and tradition, commandments. They were building themselves a building, but the trouble is that it was their building. They were building according to their blueprint instead of according to God.

That’s what I always am fearful of. When I hear men high pressuring, stampeding an audience, trying to get them to do this or that, or to give to this or that, I’m always afraid of it because I’m afraid that the young fellow may have a blueprint that God didn’t draw. God said to Moses, be careful that thou build everything according to the pattern shown thee in the mount. And these religionists of Jesus’ day, we’re building a temple composed of human righteousness, as I say, and prohibitions and traditions and customs and ways, and they were building after their blueprint, but they hadn’t consulted God. They thought they had but they hadn’t. It wasn’t God’s blueprint. So, they were putting stone after stone in, and it looked good what they were building and then they came to a stone that wouldn’t fit. There was one stone they couldn’t make work.

It wasn’t shaped so as to go along with their, the dimensions, the directions that their building was taking, and they couldn’t do anything with this stone. It was too hard to chisel. I don’t know what a stonemason calls it. What does a stonemason call it when he cuts an edge of a thing. Does he call it, chiseling it? Is that the word they use? I don’t know myself. So, I probably will speak like an amateur here, and I am not a stonemason. But whatever they do to stones, to chip the thing down and get the side off of it and get it shaped up. They wouldn’t work on this. They hit this stone, and they couldn’t do anything with it. It sort of was alive somehow.

And they fought back, and they couldn’t do anything with it. So, they just threw it away. They said this stone is no good. It didn’t fit into their plan, so they rejected it as worthless. But it happened to be the only stone God ever had anything to do with here. It happened to be God. But because they were building their building and this stone was God’s stone to be the headstone of another building, it didn’t work. And I don’t complain that Jesus Christ has no place in the average church. I don’t mind that at all. I don’t mind it because, why should He? Why should He?

They’re building their churches. I don’t mean buildings now, but their religious structures, their religious thinking, their codes of ethics, their plans, what they do; they’re building, and Christ doesn’t fit there. It is about the same way Socrates does and Benjamin Franklin, but He doesn’t really fit there. So, I don’t mind their rejecting, because why should they not reject Him. He’s not shaped for a lot of these churches. But He is shaped for the church of God, the church of God. So, they rejected Him as worthless. They threw him out and said, this rock, we don’t know what kind of a rock it is. We’re not familiar with it.

So, they threw it aside, and God responded by rejecting their whole building; picking up the Rock they’d rejected and setting it in the corner to be the chief cornerstone, determining the direction and size and shape of all the rest of the building. And they were out in the cold with their homemade building. And we’re still, by the grace of God, working on that vast cathedral of the sky, which God is building, His Son Jesus Christ being the Head of the corner. And that’s all Peter said about it, but Jesus said more. Jesus said, on whomsoever that stone falls, it’s ground into powder.

These are very sentimental times, very sentimental times; right this moment, this hour, because this is holy week starting today, isn’t it today? Yes, today. It’s Holy Week. I am not too much up on my church calendar. But it’s Holy Week, and everybody gets misty eyed in Holy Week. But we’re likely to overlook something here, that right here in Holy Week, the Man stood up and said, there’s a rock and on whomsoever it fall, it will grind him to powder. There’s a danger of forgetting that this Rock is not only a wonderful Friend, but He’s a dangerous enemy. The messianic prophecies of the Old Testament showed the duality about Jesus. It fits perfectly into the attributes of God, for it was said about God, the kindness and severity of God.

And you will find all through the Bible a kindness that’s incredible. God has been so kind and is so kind that it’s all but unbelievable. And He’s been so severe. I’m reading the book of Numbers again. And I find that God is capable of being tremendously, terribly severe. You will find the same all through here about the Messiah. Take that second chapter or take that second Psalm, why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against Jehovah and against His anointed, saying, let us break their bands asunder. Let us cast their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in His wrath and vex them in His sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

Now, in Jesus’ time when He walked the earth, whoever ran head on into Jesus, usually went away rubbing the said’s head. When they came to Jesus in trouble, they always got help no matter who it was, the Publican’s child, the poor fellow with leprosy all over his body. Anybody that came to Him humbly went away blessed. Any that came to Him arrogantly, went away whimpering and angry, because this was a Rock here. And I, for my part, am mighty delighted there’s a Rock somewhere.

There’s a black preacher in this town I often quote, who is marvelously Spirit-taught in some things. And he never preaches a sermon, but what somewhere in it he says, Jesus is my Rock. He’s known as the Rock among the colored folks, the Rock.

Well, Herod and the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and all the rest, found that this gentle Jesus, this Lamb of God most lowly, was also a rock when He needed to be. And I just would like to remind you that this Rock, this Stone, is going to be our Judge at last. And everyone who rejects, neglects, disobeys; the rich, the proud, the arrogant, the self-sufficient, are all going to have to deal with it. We’re in danger of getting so brotherly in our time, and so brotherly, everybody whimpers on everybody else’s shoulder and cries on everybody’s neck. We’re so kind, so nice, so brotherly, we’re likely to forget one thing, that Jesus Christ stood up, hard and solid, and said, who is not for Me is against Me.

I had the extreme pleasure; it was a pleasure, and I said it and mean it, I had extreme pleasure of preaching every night to a Hindu young man. Two degrees he has, an MBA and MA. He’s a consulting engineer of one of the big concerns in Toledo. He came to hear me the first night and after that they couldn’t keep him away. He told me the last night he was so tired, but he decided that he’d have to come because he had to hear me one more time.

He’s a Hindu, and he’s a devout Hindu, and he prays. He brought his Hindu books with him when he came. And quite to his astonishment, I knew about his Hindu books, and I had read them and I knew about his gods and could identify them and so on. Well, he talked about Jesus being a manifestation of God. He said he believed in Him. He believed in him since he was 10 years old. He’s a manifestation of God. And he’s such a nice man. I hated to push him. I wouldn’t make a good salesman because I like people and I hate to bother them. And I didn’t like to push him, but I thought I only had that one chance and sitting there in the hotel room, I decided that I was going to give him the works.

So, I pushed him, and I said, now, remember this one thing, what would you think of Christ? You heard Him say, not only am I a manifestation of God, I’m the only manifestation of God and thus sweep away, your Krishna and all the rest. What would you think of Him if He said no man cometh unto the Father but by Me? What would you think if you heard Him say, he that is not with me, is against me.

He said, I believe that. I believe that. I don’t know. You couldn’t do anything with him. We left friends, but he wasn’t converted. And I doubt whether he ever will be unless the Holy Ghost does a miracle in his heart, because he’s equated Christ with everybody else. And that’s the way it is, you see now. We’re so ecumenical and so brotherly and so tolerant, that everybody believes in everything, and so the result is, nobody believes in anything.

But here stands Jesus and says, the Rock, the Stone which the builders rejected. There it is. There’s the Stone. And everything that doesn’t have that Stone as the head of the corner gets thrown out. But He said again here, whosoever falls on this Stone shall be broken to pieces. Now that sounds terrible. He’s the Chief Cornerstone you say. What did He mean by that? He meant that He was the one everybody was judged by. And here’s a Stone, all every which way and they bring it to this Stone and cut it in line with that stone. They cut it in line with that Chief Cornerstone. The Chief Cornerstone is the shape that determines the shape of all the stones in the building.

And so, they have to be broken to fit. You have to break them, chisel them, drill holes in them and break them to fit. This is the doctrine that’s at large in the New Testament, very large. Blessed are the poor in spirit. He submits himself to be broken. He doesn’t come saying, God, I am the right shape. Well, let the church be like me. He doesn’t get up as the woman did in an Alliance Church over in Ohio and say, Mr. Chairman, I nominate my husband. I’ve been his backbone for 15 years. He doesn’t want anything shaped according to him, but according to the Lord Himself.

And that’s all large there I say. Blessed are the poor in spirit and blessed are the meek and blessed are the humble and blessed are the lowly. And Jesus said, let him forsake all and let him carry the cross and let him come and let him bend and let him be ready to be cut and chiseled and bored and shaped to the right shape. If he falls on this stone, he’ll be broken. If he comes to that Stone, he’ll have the whole shape of him changed. And this is the trouble with Christianity now. We want people to be converted with the least inconvenience to everybody concerned, you know. We want everybody converted but with the least inconvenience.

Miss Jones, we’d like to have you accept Christ. All right, I’d be glad to do it. Mrs. Carbuncle did it down here two blocks, and she seemed quite happy. Well, Mrs. Jones, three packs of happy, happy, happy melbury or whatever they are that you’ve been singing about. I suppose you’d have to quit that. And those cocktails, I don’t imagine that the Lord would let you go on with your cocktails, and chiseling on your income tax, that wouldn’t do. And stepping out on your husband, that wouldn’t do. And those long bridge parties, that wouldn’t do. And those cocktail parties and you come away staggering to your Cadillac, that wouldn’t do. Oh, well she said, in that case, I’m not interested. I’d like to have that happy, happy that Mr. Carbuncle had, but I don’t want any of these things to change in me. I want the least inconvenienced to everybody concerned.

A cross was never a convenient thing. They say nobody ever found a convenient place to have a boil. And having had a few, I can say that usually wherever they are, that’s the worst possible place. And I have never found anybody yet that would be willing to say that a cross is convenient. It picks you up, disregards you, and kills you.

He that falls on this stone, he shall be broken to pieces. God has broken them all down the years, the great, mighty Paul, Peter and down the centuries. But he will beautify the meek with salvation. And you will find all of those that came humbly to take His shape and be shaped according to Him, children, Mary and Nathaniel, Nicodemus and the Centurion, and Paul and the rest of them. They all came and they were shaped, chains were broken, broken.

People are afraid of that word broken. They don’t want to be broken. And the weary and the heartache and those with the heartache and sinful, were never turned away. Never. They find Him as soft and gentle as the arms of an adoring mother. They will come and be broken, yield and let Him change them.

Now, that’s what our Lord said. He said that in Holy Week. Isn’t that a strange time to be saying it. But He said it in Holy Week. Some people fear this expression, whoever falls on this stone shall be broken. Shall be broken, they’re afraid of that. But let me tell you something. Something is going to break you. I don’t care how tall you are and how much you weigh. I don’t care if when you go to a doctor, the doctor slaps your back and says, get out of here, you’re healthier than I am. I don’t care, something’s going to break you.

Sickness is going to break you. Age will break you. Sorrow will break you. Worry will break you. Time will break you. Toil will break you. I read just recently that they think that what ages people is radiation. If they keep on testing atom bombs, there’ll be a world full of old gray beards here on our hands in no time. That’s what does it. But they say it may be radiation that breaks you down, makes you get old. But it will come, just as sure as you live, something will break you. You’re the rock. You’re the granite. Your heart is adamant. No, my brother, you’re just a person. And Sister, you’re just a person.

And as a person, something’s going to break you. Now, it depends on whether you’re to be broken by circumstances or by the Lord Himself. And the only reason He breaks you is because he wants you to fit into his everlasting temple. He wants you to be part of that grand cathedral of the universe. That vast cathedral where choirs of angels will be singing the glory of God forever. For they will rest not day nor night, saying, holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty. He wants you to be part of that, but he can’t make you part of it, the shape you’re in, morally and spiritually. So, he’s going to change that by breaking you and making you new.

So, in love, He fits us in. In love, He breaks us. In love, He changes our shape to fit His and with Himself as the model, He makes us after His own likeness. So that when He comes, we shall be like Him and shall see Him as He is.

A great ambition of the church of Christ ought to be to be like Christ. So, we can come, we can come to Him and come as little children, tramping on our own wisdom and our own goodness and all the rest and letting Him be everything. But it’s here and it’s good to notice that He said it in Holy Week. Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

So, the thing to do then is to come and fall. The Pharisees took it wrong; you see. The Pharisees took it wrong. They perceived that He spake of them and they sought to lay hands on Him. Isn’t humanity a weird outfit? Go to a doctor, and the doctor looks over and says you have something, and you want to kill the doctor right away. You come to Christ and Christ says, the trouble with you is sin, and they want to lay hands on Jesus immediately. They always want to kill the doctor.

A fellow is found wandering around and he thinks he’s in Ohio when he is in Missouri. And the policeman drives up and says you’re not in Ohio. You’re in Missouri. And he gets mad at the policeman instead of saying, well, I’m awfully sorry. I’m a big fool. My compass must have misguided me. And going where he ought to be, he gets angry with the man who locates him. That’s the odd thing about humanity. Jesus walked around among the people telling him them about themselves, and instead of looking at themselves and saying, say that’s true isn’t it. I ought to do something about it, they wanted to kill Him. It’s always been like that.

So dear friends, let’s remember that this one who rode so meekly into Jerusalem and who died so humbly a week later, rose again from the dead, and He’s at the right hand of God, and He is the Rock. And if it’s necessary for Him to fall on the nation, He will do it. Sometime, He will do it. But all who come and fall upon Him shall be changed into His image and likeness, and shall be like Him, and shall see Him as He is. It’s wonderful, I think. It’s wonderful.

So, I go on instead of losing interest in all this. I’m gaining interest. I can see more and more that this is the only thing that’s worthwhile. This is all. Who is it, they said when He rode into Jerusalem? But we’d better find out, for a lot of people don’t know. We better find who is this? We better find out. He is God’s Lamb. He is God’s Lion. He’s God’s Rock. He’s God’s Great Physician. He’s God’s Shepherd of sheep. He’s God’s Healer of human wounds.

So let us think about Him today and let’s think about Him this week, and let’s let Him have his way with us. The highest ambition a human being could have would be to be like Jesus. And if a man attains, even in some degree, likeness to Christ, he’s wiser. And having done it, he’s wiser than all and greater than all of the great of the world.

Be like Jesus, this my song, Jesus, Jesus only. Tonight. I want to talk on that fifth chapter of Revelation, giving the closing out of that fifth chapter Revelation, where all the creatures worship and say, worthy is the Lamb. I’d like to have you come back and bring your friends along. We’ll have a great evening.

Tags Jesus Christ, The Rock

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 31, 2024

“The Moral Implication of the Resurrection of our Lord”

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The Moral Implication of the Resurrection of our Lord

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 10, 1955

I cannot let this day close without pointing to the moral implications of the resurrection of our Lord. And that would be the topic I would assign myself tonight, “The Moral Implications of the Resurrection of our Lord. And we’ll continue to think about this 28th chapter of the book of Matthew. In the end of the Sabbath, that is, not at night, but in the morning, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and that other Mary, to see the sepulcher. I suppose they hadn’t been asleep all the night. And as soon as there was any hope of light, they appeared. And behold, there was a great earthquake. For the angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the door and sat upon it.

It would be very easy for a vivid Christian imagination here, to introduce a lot of things that are not in the text. Why did the angel from heaven sat upon the roll back stone? I think I know. If God had said to me, now you go down. My Son is in the grave. And I want you to go down and roll back that stone. He is coming out to be alive forevermore. He will never die again, but He’ll stay in life forever, a mortal life forever. Go down and confound hell and glorify the Father. And I think I know where I would have set when the stone was rolled back. I think I’d have sat where the angel did. Now that might not be the reason the angels sat there, but it looks all right to me.

Then verse three, the countenance of this angel was like lightning and his raiment white as snow. And for fear of him, the keepers did shake and became as dead men. And the angel answered, that is, answered the unspoken inquiry of the women and said, fear not ye. For I know whom ye seek. It is Jesus which was crucified. But He is not here. For He is risen as He said. And if you are doubtful about it, come and see the place where the Lord once lay, but lies no more.

Now, there are two thoughts here, the magnificence of this angel that rolled the stone away, this messenger from God and the warm love of these two Marys that came to the sepulcher to mourn their Lord. And then, the annunciation, He is not here. He is risen. Come and see the place where the Lord lay. And then in verse eight it says about these disciples, that they departed quickly from the sepulcher with fear and great joy and did run to bring His disciples word.

The fear that was here was not the fear that they had once felt. Not the fear that keeps men in bondage all their lifetime, that is, fear of death. The fear that they felt was another kind of fear. It was a fear that was replete with joy. That is, it was reverence. It was the sense of being suddenly found in the presence of the supernatural and the heavenly, and to know that the Lord had risen and was out of the grave. This brought a sense of the heavenly-ness upon them, a sense of another world, the sense of mystery and life and well-being and the presence of God.

And so, there was the fear of it there, and it was a fear mixed with joy. And they departed from the sepulcher. Someone said, I don’t recall whom I was talking lately, that religion lies in the prepositions. And here we have religion lying in another preposition. They departed quickly from the sepulcher. “From” is a preposition. It is a word of direction. They had come to the sepulcher. That was their religion that they had before they knew Jesus had risen from the dead. The direction was toward the sepulcher. They came to the sepulcher. There you have a preposition. The direction is toward the sepulcher.

And as soon as they heard the joyful news that He had risen from the dead as He said, and that you could actually see the place where He lay. Then the Scripture said, they departed from the sepulcher. They changed their preposition from to, to from. The direction was now not toward the grave, but away from the grave. Not toward the end, but the end was past and now it was toward endlessness. And they departed quickly from the sepulcher and did run to bring the disciples word.

And then verse sixteen, the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. What a wonderful thing for a man to do. He appointed to meet these disciples before his death, apparently, and said, I will meet you. I’m going to die tomorrow, and in three days, I will meet you; make an appointment for three days after He was to die. That’s what He did alright. And so they came and they found Him there. Verse eighteen, Jesus came. They saw Him and they worshipped Him. But being like you and me, there were some that were wondering about it all. It says, doubted, here.

In verse eighteen, Jesus came and spake unto them and said, all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth, all power. He had died in weakness. And they had seen Him limp and cold and dead on the cross. They’d seen Him taken down and removed and placed in a grave. Now, they heard Him say, all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. That might have been hard to believe except for one thing. He was there to prove that His words were real. If He had said that and not come through, and they had been looking down on His dead face and they had remembered that he said, all power is given unto me, they might have shrugged and looked at each other and shaking their heads and walked sadly away. For it would have been speaking, and not making good on your speech.

But there He was, keeping an appointment three days after death. There He was, present, in His own warm, living, pulsating, immortal person. And He said, all power is given unto me, in heaven and in earth. Now, how could they deny it? If a man just makes talk, you have a right to doubt him. But if a man stands before you risen from the dead, then you have a right to listen to him.

And when Jesus said, all power is given unto Me, He was there out of the grave, alive, to give weight and meaning, finality to what He was saying. And the church has believed that, that all power belongs to Jesus Christ our Lord. He doesn’t exercise it all yet, but He has it all. He can command the armies of the world any moment. He can change the course of nations with a wave of His hand or word of His mouth. He can raise the dead, for they shall hear His voice and come forth from their lowly graves. All power is his, all authority, the authority of a raised and living Savior, the authority of a dying Lamb, the authority of a King, the authority of a High Priest forever, the authority of the second person of the Trinity, it’s all his authority and it’s all His power.

So, He said, all power is given unto me in heaven and earth. That is why I for one, cannot as the old writers would say, I cannot away with, it means I can’t tolerate this pitying kind of religion. It’s pitying the Lord Jesus Christ all the time. Come weep with me awhile. Come, weep with me awhile. Let us kneel down by the cross and let us weep a while. Come weep awhile as though the Lord were a victim, a martyr, a victim of his own zeal, a poor pitiable man with good intention, but that found the world was too big for Him and life too much for Him. So, He sank down in the helplessness of death. And now, when we weep for a while beside His tomb and grieve awhile beside His cross and walk around in black.

No, no my brethren, He says, all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Here is the mighty Jesus, the mighty Christ, the mighty Lord. At Christmas time I said, the power doth not lie in the manger. And now I say to you that power does not lie at the cross. Power lies in the glory. The man who died on the cross died in weakness. The Bible says so. But He rose in power. And if we forget the resurrection and the glory and the fact that He is seated at the right hand of God, we lose all the meaning of Christianity.

Power does not lie with a babe in a manger. Power does not lie with a man helpless on a cross. Power lies with a man who died on that cross and went into a grave and came out the third day and rose to the right hand of power. There is where power lies. And the Savior that we serve is not a Savior to be pitied. And our business is not to mourn and weep awhile beside a grave. Our business is to thank God with tearful reverence that He ever went into that grave. To thank God, with joy, that He ever went to that cross. To understand what that cross meant and means and understand what that burial means, and then understand what the resurrection means that placed a glorious crown upon all His sufferings.

So, at His Father’s right hand, He sits in absolute majesty and kingly powers, sovereign over all the world. But you say, Mr. Tozer, isn’t that just big talk? If He is sovereign over all the world, what about Russia? What about juvenile delinquency? What about atom bombs and hydrogen bombs? If He is Sovereign over all the world, why is the West at the throat of the East? And why is there an armament race? Because, He has a prophetic plan that He’s working by.

And His plan calls for the nations of the earth to play themselves like checkers over the face of the world as over a checkerboard. And it calls for the return of Israel to Palestine. And it calls for the king of the north, to beat himself out. And it calls for the West to evangelize the world. And He’s waiting, waiting, though He has all the power, He’s waiting to exercise it. He exercises it in a limited way now through His church and would exercise it with unlimited power if His church was ready to believe that He would and could do it. All power is given unto Me in heaven and earth.

Now what are we to do? What are the moral implications of it? The answer is, go ye therefore. Therefore, is the word that means, as a result of what I just said, that all power is given unto Me in heaven and earth. Go ye and disciple all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son of the Holy Ghost.

Now, my friends, I want you to see here that Easter did not come and end. It’s not something to be celebrated each year as a something in itself, that began and ended in itself. It was but a beginning of some vaster and grander thing. I am out of the grave. I’m alive forevermore. All power is given unto me. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And then the rest of it says, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

You know how tenderly we take the knife of bad teaching and separate that little passage from the rest, as you might take a rine off an orange. We peel it off and put it on our mottos and on our calendars and in the back of our book or draw a line through it, lo, I am with you always even unto the end of the world, but He didn’t say that. Don’t make him say something He didn’t say. Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. He didn’t say that. He said, and lo, I am with you alway. That conjunction is not there by accident. He said go ye therefore and lo, I am with you always.

There’s the point. Easter did not come to give you and me a chance to smell sweet flowers. And you can’t imagine what a circle of fragrance there is around those lilies, beautiful, and I’m a flower man. I don’t know one from the other, but I love them. I do know that’s a lily. And I love all that goes with it. I’d whisper to you ladies that I even like the color that comes with Easter in the clothing. I don’t mind it at all. I’m not such an old fuddy duddy and just frown upon color. I like color. God made color. He made all in color there is. The devil never invented a color yet. He doesn’t know how. He can’t do it. He can’t make anything pretty. God makes the pretty things, and the devil makes the ugly things.

But Easter isn’t a time for us to smell flowers only, not a time for us to buy the new clothing only. And certainly, God knows it’s not a time to be the proudest fellow in the Easter parade. It’s a time for us seriously to consider the moral implications of the resurrection. If this is all true, if this is not more Santa Claus stuff. This isn’t simply more sentimentality and poetry. If this is history. If this is real. If this happened, and this church is founded upon the belief that it happened. And I stand tonight upon the faith that it happened. This is historically true.

Then if it is true, was does it mean to me? Does it have any bite in it? Does it get hold of me? Does it mean anything to me? Am I to listen to a cantata and sing, up from the grave He arose, smell the flowers and go home and forget it? No, it has a moral application. It lays hold upon us with all the authority of sovereign obligation, and says, go, you. You go. Everybody knows the grammatical construction here. You is the subject of that sentence. Go is the verb go. You, you go and teach all nations. Or as the margin has it, make disciples among all nations, or make Christians in all the nations.

So, the moral obligation of the resurrection of Christ is the missionary obligation. It is the obligation to carry the message and to tell the story and to be a financial and personal and praying part of this great commission. There are those who so rightly divide the Word of Truth wrongly, that they put this great commission in what they call the tribulation days and say it doesn’t belong to the church of Christ.

The devil is slicker than the communists. Communists are dumb. Every time they try to pull a fast one. They’re so dumb that it’s amazing how they can get along at all. If they didn’t have so much brass, they couldn’t. They cover their ignorance and stupidity with brass. But the devil isn’t so stupid. And he well knows that if he can succeed in getting us to be satisfied with a celebration, and say, oh, He’s risen from the dead. Let everybody say amen.

I even heard a man last night on the radio as I was sampling the station to see if there was anything worth listening to, comparing Jesus Christ to a baseball player who died when he was 38, Lou Gehrig. He said, Lou Gehrig, he was 38 years old when he got leukemia and died. He said he was a wonderful fellow, and incidentally, he was, a wonderful young man, a prince among young men from all I can learn about him. But he died when he was 38, and said, the unctuous voiced announcer, he died at 38, and come to think of it, Jesus died about that time. But look what Lou Gehrig accomplished, and look what Jesus accomplished.

And so, if we can get all soft voice and dewy-eyed and talk about Jesus and Lou Gehrig, the devil will be a happy boy. He’ll say, that’s what I want them to do. I want them to talk about Easter. I want them to have cartoons about Jesus rising from the dead. I want them to put on cantatas and sing great anthems and preach sermons about Him. But I always want them to think about Him as being just like any other big hero, a Lincoln, a Lou Gehrig, I don’t ever want them to remember for a minute that He is now seated in the place of power, and I’m a poor frightened fugitive. The devil never wants that, He wants us to think about Easter and buttercups and the bluebirds coming back.

But he doesn’t want us to remember that his Lord is at the right hand of God now and can put him in hell when the time comes. He can send him there and chain him and hurl him down the moment He wants to do it in the prophetic plan. He doesn’t want anybody to remember that. He knows he can keep the Christians mourning a while. Oh, mourn with me a while and weep with me beside the tree. He knows he’s got us. And he knows that he’s got a bunch of sentimental blubberers.

But if we can see that He is risen, and that He’s no longer dead, no longer mortal. Not even mortal, to say nothing of being dead. He can’t die anymore. Death has no more dominion. And that He has all the authority in heaven, earth and hell, and holds the keys thereof. Then we get our chest back and begin to look and think and feel differently about things. And it’ll be no more a celebration once a year, and no more mournful thinking about a pitiful Jesus that went out to die. But we’ll understand what the cross was for.

Next Saturday on the radio, I’m going to preach on, what did the cross mean? And as soon as we get a hold of that and we know the meaning of the cross and the meaning of the resurrection, then power begins to move in, and we take the offensive and become the aggressors. And our witness and our testimony become positive and final, and we’re to spread this all over the earth. I wouldn’t be pastor five minutes of a church that wouldn’t be a missionary church and wouldn’t have missionary interests, missionaries clinging around and missionaries going out sometimes and missionaries coming back, because that’s the obligation.

That’s the moral obligation of our Lord’s resurrection. It is that we surrender to His Lordship. All power is given unto me. It is that we obey His command, go ye therefore and teach all nations. It is that we believe His promise, lo, I’m with you alway even unto the end of the world. But let’s not separate them. Let’s not refuse to have anything to do with the going or the sending. Let’s not forget the nations and then say, lo I’m with you. He didn’t say it. He said, you do what I told you to do and lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

Well, next week we begin our 33rd missionary convention. Next Sunday night I’m going back to John again. I’m still in John. I’m going to preach a missionary sermon out of John following Brother Notson’s missionary message. And then I’m going to pray, and I know you will and do everything possible to see whether we can’t push up our missionary offering another $10,000 this year from whatever it’s been before.

Then, in addition to that, we have a crop of teenage young people now coming up in our church. Now, what’s it going to be for them? Where are they going? Are they going to mature, marry, settle down, get old, quick thinking, get into a groove and wear it deeper and deeper as the years go by as so many, many have done, or are they going to hear the voice of God speak to them? Are they going to listen to this voice spoken, O earth, hear the word of the Lord, says the Holy Ghost. And here it is. I am no longer in the grave. I am out and here I am, He said. And My power is all power there is. It’s mine. Heaven listens. Earth listens. Hell listens. It’s all mine. Now because it’s all mine, I can protect you. I can support you. I can go ahead of you. I can give you effectiveness and meaning and efficiency.

You therefore go and make disciples out of all the nations of the world, all the nations, and I will be with you. I will be with you. The American soldier goes out. He has the goodwill and the good wishes and the prayers and the love of his people behind him. But he may be caught somewhere in a foxhole all alone. And all 160 million Americans and all the unthinkable power of our American military, can’t help him at all. But there was never a Christian caught in a foxhole alone. Never. Paul said, my friends all left me, but nevertheless, the Lord stood with me. Hear that? He remembered that the Lord stood with him. Nobody, nobody’s ever been deserted by the Lord yet.

Twelve to fourteen years ago, a great big handsome fellow used to play with my boys. Oh, they were big enough now, 17-18; but they still played and fooled around there. They used to come over and I’d see him, a round-faced, handsome big fellow full of smiles; a very close friend to one of my boys. He became a flyer over Germany. He went out one night, and I think over the English Channel if I remember. Some of the mates, some of those who were with him in the squadron flying, saw his plane take fire and start to spiral downward and plunge. And I don’t know if they have ever found the body yet after all these years. Nobody could help him then. 160 million Americans back here, untold power, flew the air and floated on the sea and marched on the land, Marines, Air Corps, WACS, WAVES, Army, military power untold, but a handsome, young fellow, too late, spiraled down into the sea with the rest of his crew. And they have never been heard of since.

But no soldier ever went out yet for the Lord Jesus, ever went anywhere yet by himself. Never could be said yet of a man, a missionary, or a messenger of the truth. Here he is, all alone. Jesus Christ has all the power there is, but he’s way yonder and the man is alone. Poor fellow, it’s too bad, Jesus couldn’t get some of that power to him, too bad.

No, no, nobody ever said that that had sense in his head. For you said, lo, I am with you always even to the end of the world. And there never was a martyr yet on a mission field of the world, never a missionary that laid down his life in a cannibal jungle. Never a missionary that perished shooting the rapids or going over the falls, never a one, but the Lord Jesus Christ didn’t have him by the hand and lead him triumphantly victoriously through. Lo, I am with you always. But that itself is based upon the obligation, understood and accepted. Go ye therefore and teach all nations.

I hope that this church and all of us here and myself and these pastors and all of you friends, I hope that we’ll all see that Easter is not a time for celebration only. It’s a time for obligation. It is a time for moral implications. It’s a time to understand that if He rose, then we’ve got to do something. If He rose, then we can’t sit. If He rose, then we can’t settle back down in religious apathy. If He rose, and all power is His, then there’s something for you and me to do!

Tags Jesus Christ, Resurrection

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 24, 2024

“I am Crucified with Christ“

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I am Crucified with Christ

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

September 20, 1959

Having read most of the story of Saul and the prophet Samuel from 1 Samuel 15, I’ll refer to it only as an illustration, but I want to take a text now from Galatians, the second chapter. Paul says, I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

Now, what I want to say tonight, will not be new to you, and it certainly will not be new to me. I want to sum up what I believe on a certain important phase of Christianity. I have said this. I have weaved it in here and there, as a weaver might weave in a favorite color into almost every tapestry that he created. But I want to sort of concentrate tonight and speak from the Lord. I don’t know what you will do about what I say.

And I’d like also to say this, that I will not teach anything that isn’t believed by every fundamentalist in the world. Every fundamentalist in the world believes what I’m going to preach tonight. But the difference is this, that most of them seem satisfied to teach it and hold it as a doctrine. But I insist that if it is true, then it is too important to let lie quiescent. It ought to be detonated. It ought to be set off and allowed to explode; and then, after the smoke is cleared, see what you have left. And if you don’t have anything left, you didn’t have anything left to start with, anyhow. If you do have anything left, it will be eternal.

These words by the man Paul are a very strange verse. So strange, that the man might be accused of deliberately confounding or confusing people at least. He said, I am crucified with Christ. And of course, the tense is, I have been crucified with Christ; and a man who has been crucified isn’t around anymore. So, it’s very odd that a man should say, I have been crucified. Nobody else has ever said it. A man might say, I am to be crucified. He might say, I am being crucified, but nobody ever put it in the past perfect and said, I have been crucified. He’s dead, he couldn’t talk.

But here’s a man talking. He said, I have been crucified. Nevertheless, I live a strange kind of crucifixion that, and he apologizes and says yet, I don’t mean that I live. What do I mean? I mean that Christ lives in me. And yet, Paul, you’re alive and you’re among us. We hear your voice and we see your little body, wearing it’s old fashioned toga. You’re among us, you’re alive, yes, I know. But the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. There’s only one conclusion here. The man who said I have been crucified. He had a resurrection, otherwise he couldn’t have said this. He had to explain that I was crucified and the fact that I’m alive here. I’m no ghost. I’m living now by the faith of the Man who loved me and died for me and rose for me.

Now, that’s what Paul said, and I haven’t added anything. I’ve just tried to explain a little bit. And I insist that if this kind of life was an apostolic life, if this is true, then you and I ought to be greatly disturbed about the way we’re living. And we ought to do something about it. Because you see, Paul here gives us the way of God. This is the way of God; the way God does things. God sets life and death over against each other and they’re eternal opposites.

You’ll find in your Bible, that there are opposites always standing against each other. Musical directors, and even pastors sometimes, in conspiracy with the musical directors, set up a service in which everything in it is like everything else. The pastor is going to preach about heaven. They sing about heaven, read Scripture about heaven. The soloist sings about heaven, and the offertory is “Jerusalem, the Golden. And it gets saccharin, because it’s all one thing. But life isn’t like that. Life is two things, always two things. One thing stands over against something else, totally opposite. We call the other sex from us the opposite sex.

Human life exists because there are opposites. If the whole world was made of men, we would last one generation and die. If it was made of women, one generation. But there’s the negative and the positive, life and death. And God sets them over against each other–eternal opposites. And do you know what death is? Death is the enemy, always the enemy. Death is the enemy and yet God makes it the gateway to life–strange. It’s here though. Paul said it. Life speaks of blessedness and peace and happiness and love and fulfillment. And death speaks of darkness and loss and eternal negation. And yet, strangely because we’re in the fix we’re in.

Now, mark you this, my friends, if we hadn’t fallen, all that I’m saying, would not need to be said. And if we hadn’t fallen, it would be foolish to say it. There are so many things that are tentatively true. That is, they’re true because of the fix we’re in. But as soon as the Lord comes and glorifies His church and sin is no more, that won’t be true anymore. I said a while ago, a man had to be stubborn, to serve God. That’s because we’re in a world surrounded by enemies. But five minutes after the Lord comes, I couldn’t say that and tell the truth.

In heaven, nobody is stubborn. Everybody lives in the will of God, smoothness and sweetness, and so will it be in that glad day when the Lord comes and glorifies his people. And then so many things that are true now won’t be true then. They won’t need to be true then. Take up your cross and follow me. Give up all. Leave your family and come and follow Me. It won’t have to be so then. Nothing like that up there. It’s down here true, but it’s not up there true.

So, here’s death and life, and they stand over against each other. And the reason for it is because the human race is bad, we’re bad. And we’re so bad that you can’t make us good. That’s the doctrine that Paul teaches. That’s the doctrine that Jesus taught. That’s the doctrine that the Old Testament story taught. Were so bad, you can’t make us good. God doesn’t try to. He doesn’t want to. It isn’t His plan nor His purpose to do it. We’re so bad that He doesn’t try to make us good. We’re so bad, the only way we can be made good is to be killed. There are some people so bad that the society pronounces a death sentence on them, and they die because they can’t be made good. They’re considered to be beyond salvation, beyond hope, beyond reclamation.

And the whole human race before the eyes of God is so bad, it can’t be made good. God can’t patch it up. He never meant to patch it up. He never came into the world that you and I should learn to think lofty thoughts and dream high dreams and learn etiquette and ethics and all the rest. He came into the world in order that He might fix it so a certain number of people could die with Him and rise with Him to a new life.

Paul never said I’m good. Paul said I died. Paul was so bad that the Lord couldn’t patch him up, couldn’t fix him up. It’s no use. There’s only one way to deal with Paul and that was crucify him. But a crucified man is of no account. He’s lying out there dead. So, the next thing, if God wants to use him at all, or to have his mouth filled with praise is to raise him from the dead a new man. The kind of man he ought to have been in the first place and wasn’t.

Now, what am I teaching? I am teaching Keswick doctrine, if you please. I’m teaching that which the Sunday School Times was founded on, the victorious life. I’m teaching that which gave birth to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. And yet, there are hundreds of thousands of us Christians who know this doctrine who’ve never made it work in our own lives or done anything about it. Now, I say it’s the way of God in this world in which we live. Put life over there and say there is life. Now, that’s what you want. When we start out for life and God said, no, you don’t get it that way. You get it by going the way of death. That’s the way of God. But it is the way of man to try to do the opposite. He wants to engraft the new life on the old life. That is my criticism of modern evangelism and a great deal of modern evangelicalism.

We don’t understand Paul, and we don’t understand the teaching of Christ and the cross. And so we take men and graft life on them. God never did it. He never meant to do it. He never tended to do it. He never planned it. He never ordained it that way. But we do it. We take the old life and then graft some new life on it. And we graft life in one hand and death in the other hand. We will not pass the judgment of death on ourselves; we just won’t do it.

We will save face. We acknowledge our sin. We admit our faults. We lose face and we get chagrined, and we get humbled, and we apologize, but we never pass the sentence of death on ourselves. Paul did. We curb the grosser manifestations of the flesh and count that enough. So, you see, the ways of God and the ways of man are contrary, the one to the other. And in the church of Christ, they are contrary, the one to the other. We get a fellow to admit that he’s accepted Christ, and we graph new life on him and get him fixed up. And pretty soon he gets so he can talk in public. And then after that, he gets on the board. And pretty soon he’s in a position where he’s exerting his authority and his weight in spiritual things. And he may be a good man and well-intentioned, but he’s had life graft on. He’s never understood what Paul meant when he said, I die with Christ. I have died. I’ve been crucified.

And so that man is trying to live like a man who had died when he hadn’t died. He’s trying to live like a man who had risen when he hasn’t risen. So, He’s halfway in between the old death and the new life, caught in the middle. Paul told us about it in the seventh chapter of Romans. Read that again sometime, that miserable, wretched seventh chapter in Romans.

Yet, the great man Paul said he was in that position. Such a man as I’ve described, won’t go all the way with God, but he won’t go all the way with the world either. He won’t go all the way to the cross, but he insists on going part of the way to the cross. And He says, I have been partly crucified with Christ. And so, he would have to admit, I nevertheless, I partly live. Because he’s partly dead, he partly lives, and that’s the kind of Christianity we have in our day. Partly dead and partly alive, everywhere, everywhere you go, it’s the same.

But the life, the victorious life, the life, the new wondrous life stands beckoning there, just on the other side. Not of an artistic gate. No artist ever painted that gate, that lovely, beautiful gate, not that. But it stands on the other side of a cross. And God says, if you want new life, then you will have to know death. Know death of what now? What kind of death are we talking about? Do I mean you’re going to have to die and go into the grave? Some people have foolishly interpreted it so. They say that we’re going to die and rise again; when we arise, then we’ll be good people.

Well, I want to talk about some of the things that have to be crucified and point out that God sent a man by the name of Saul, and said, these Amalekites aren’t fit to live. And I as the sovereign God who gave them life, now I want to take it from them. I have a right to do that. And I want you to go, and I want you to take an army and terminate them from the earth. Kill everything. Destroy it all, including their king and all of their fat cattle and sheep. And Saul said, I’m willing to go and he started. And he destroyed everything that didn’t do him any good. Everything he couldn’t use, he destroyed. But he thought it would be a nice mantelpiece to have around, to keep that king around to show him off.

And also, he wanted the cattle and the sheep. So, he kept the best of them. The old swayback heifers and the old lock horned steers, he killed them. But he kept all the fine-blooded cattle. The old wearied, dragged tailed sheep, that couldn’t keep the cockle burrs out of their wool, he let them die. The fine, young lambs and ewes, he kept. God had said destroy these enemies, and Saul decided that he knew better than God knew what to do with enemies. So, he made a distinction between enemies and enemies.

Now, what are the enemies that require the sentence of death? You and me? What are those enemies that keep you from growing in grace? Some of you haven’t grown in grace for years. You haven’t gotten any more spiritual in years. Why? What is it?

Well, first I’ll say that you can’t slay these enemies yourself. You can only pass sentence on them actually. You can only pass sentence on them. We call that slaying them because the slaying must be done by the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord. But I just wanted to point out a few of them to you; and one of them is self-righteousness. And now, self-righteousness, believing that we are in some measure righteous and not as bad as they say we are. We deny our self-righteousness in our creed, but we defend it in our conduct. We permit it to be felt in our hearts. Drunkenness and impurity and dishonesty in business affairs and lying out right and gambling, we say, oh, those are bad. Those are the vile things, and we get rid of those vile things. But self-righteousness can become a very beautiful thing. It can be artistic.

Then there’s self-confidence. And you know, self-confidence can be compatible with all the language of humility. We can feel deeply self-confident while at the same time we’ve learned the language of humility. We’ve learned the testimony and we’ve learned to weave into our sermons how humble we are when at the same time, we can be quite confident in ourselves.

And there’s self-sufficiency in life and in heart and in service. And there’s self-love, which indeed, is the source of all other evils, I suppose, the source of all hurt feelings. Hurt feelings do in the church of Christ, what certain diseases do for children.

You know, they say that children’s diseases are not injurious, not harmful. I know better than that. One of our boys can hear out of only one ear, because when he was a lad he had scarlet fever. It wasn’t the fault of his parents. We went to a child specialist. He didn’t know what he had. He told him to go back to school, let him go back to school because he was able to stagger. Then the rest of them got it and got it, and pretty soon we found what we had. We had scarlet fever. So, we imagine that these children’s diseases don’t hurt our children, but they do. They affect the eyes. They affect the ears if we don’t watch it.

So, self-love, is like it brings about hurt feelings, and hurt feelings in a church. They’re the children’s diseases for all the immature Christians, all the childish Christians that haven’t grown up yet. They get their feelings hurt because they’re subjected to it because they’re filled with self-love. They love themselves.

And they wear their feelings on their sleeve and they’re ready immediately to take umbrage if anybody said anything against them. And then those hurt feelings get into the church and then gets into the choir and then gets into the board and into the Sunday school, and pretty soon, you find that that little flare up of hurt feeling that you thought wasn’t anything, was a disease that has injured the body of Christ in that locality. And it all comes out of self-love.

We quote, I am crucified with Christ, but we haven’t been. We say, but we’ve crucified drunkenness. Yes, we’ve crucified gambling. Yes. We’ve crucified lying. Yes. We haven’t crucified hurt feelings and so we get it, and churches die of it. This thing goes on and on in churches until it divides whole sections of the church against each other. I never had it happen under my ministry. God’s good hand over these years has never allowed a division ever to happen under my ministry, and any hurt feelings, we got rid of very quickly. So, I’ve never seen it. But I’ve listened. I listened no later than a week or two ago to a long recital of a man who was sick inside because of what he’d had to go through in a certain church with hurt feelings, self-love, self-confidence, self-righteousness, self-pity. The source of all resentment is self-pity, so we pity ourselves.

God says this has to die. Go slay the Amalekites, and we say Lord, I used to smoke. I don’t smoke anymore. God said, I didn’t tell you to slay filter tips only, I told you to slay self-pity. You say, I kept that Father. I wanted to keep that around. I didn’t think that would be so bad. It’s a luxury to pity yourself sometimes.

Many a man, the only time he feels good during the day is when his wife bawls him out in the morning and he leaves home feeling he’s a martyr and goes off to the bus or train, feeling real good. He enjoys himself. If my neighbors only knew what I have to endure. I am a good man who makes a good living. I’ve been true and faithful and kind and look at the way she treats me. He enjoys shall self-pity. He picks up his newspaper down at 95th, 107th or 111th or wherever he lives and reads, family of six wiped out on highway 90. He reads it casually, never pities them. Too busy pitting himself. Self-pity, I say, is the source of all resentment; and resentment in the church is like another kind of disease in a family.

Then there is self-seeking. The source of much religious activity is self-seeking. If we could only know how often we serve God out of self-seeking and how often we serve God out of a desire to glorify God. I admit, I admit that bothers me sometimes. I admit that I have periods when I have to go to God and get light and help on it so that what I am doing that seems so good and right and all, won’t turn out to be self-seeking gone underground. The self-seeker can go underground and gnaw from underneath, and we’ll never know he’s there. The grass grows over him and we can’t hear him under there but he’s there, like a mole burrowing in the lawn. Many a book, many a sermon, many a song, many a school, many a church, gets their inception in self-seeking.

And there’s self-indulgence, not in low evil things of course. I am amazed when I go about and find how God’s people live. Maybe I was brought up wrong or brought up in a situation. I was brought up in a home where five cents was something you carefully laid on a shelf and reminded Mother it was there and you didn’t spend it without permission. And if you got candy, it was one penny’s worth. And if it was really a big day, was two pennies worth.

So, when businessmen take me out to lunch, “have a steak now Mr. Tozer, have a steak.” Six dollars and a half. No. But, have a steak, we want you to have it, have it now. I look at the right-hand side of the column and whatever it says is the cheapest I take, even though it’s being paid for. I can’t bring myself to indulge myself like that. Maybe that’s a form of self-aggrandizement or self-confidence or self-righteous? I don’t know. But what I started out to say was, that I’m astonished at how people pamper themselves in the name of the Lord. They put up at the best hotels. We have everything, the very best, and never seem to ever think of money long as they’ve got it. They can talk about God continually over a six-dollar and a half steak. And for $2, they could have had a hamburger. And there’s just as much nourishment in a hamburger as there is in a steak. Anybody knows that, Brother.

I don’t want you to think I’m after you, brother, just because you’re bigger than I am, doesn’t mean you eat $6 steaks, but I’m just trying to say that God’s people are so self-indulgent. We don’t take dope. But we indulge ourselves other ways. Self-aggrandizement, everything has to advance me, advance mine.

I talked to preachers, and I can’t talk to them five minutes, not one minute until they’ve taken off, revved up their motors and gone off into the wild blue yonder. And for the rest of the meal, I have to sit and listen to what they did, who they are, what they’ve written, where they’ve been, how they’ve traveled, self-aggrandizement. Poor people at home paying the bills while they go all around over the world and collect stories. I don’t like that kind of stuff. I never did and I can’t and I’m not any near to it now than I was when I was much younger.

Now, there is a path. There’s a path to life and power, and it’s the path that Paul knew here. He said, I have been crucified. He said, I have gone to Jesus Christ and by faith of the Son of God, I have so identified myself with Christ that I consider myself to have suffered what He suffered, to be an outcast from society. I consider myself to be what he was, and by faith identify myself with Him as He identified Himself with me.

I said one time that Christ identified Himself with Christians in the incarnation, and a good Plymouth Brethren came down and he was right. I admitted it. He said, Brother Tozer, never say that. Never say that Christ has identified Himself with us in the incarnation. He identified Himself with us in the crucifixion. And he’s right. But that’s what Paul says. He identified Himself with the human race and the incarnation. He identified Himself with God’s people in the crucifixion and the resurrection. I am crucified with Christ, he said. I have been. Nothing had happened to His body, nothing like that. He wasn’t even present when our Lord died it isn’t supposed. But he said, it’s by faith of the Son of God. I have gone to Jesus Christ in faith, and I have so identified myself with Him that I have learned to suffer along with Him, and I cease saying “I,” he said in effect.

Now we say, yes, Lord, I have put away these things, Lord. I have put them away, Lord. But what meaneth then the bleating of the sheep. The man Saul didn’t know that the sheep would bleat at the wrong time. If he’d had any sense, He would have known that sheep bleat continually. Any flock of sheep anywhere, are bleating all the time. Cattle, except when they’re feeding, are lowing all the time. These are not all at the same time lowing. They’re not all at the same time bleating, but there’s always one of them. The fine, thin voice of the lamb or the heavy authoritative voice of the old ram or the plaintiff, appealing voice of the ewe calling her lambs in, but they’re bleating.

And Saul overlooked that fact. He overlooked that these sheep would bleat just at the wrong time. If they can only shut them up just at the right time, he might have got away with that dirty deal, for a while. But, just when he was saying most eloquently, and being a Jew, I suppose he was using both hands, saying, oh, but I have done what you told me to do.

About that time, “Baaaa” was heard over there. He said, what’s that I hear? Oh, well, he said, excuse me, but that’s a few that my people insisted on keeping. He said, I know you, you’re a tyrant and when you want a thing you get it. You’re responsible for those sheep. About that time, an old cow let out a trombone blast that echoed down the hills. He said, What’s that? He said, there we are again. I’m sorry to have to tell you but the people insisted. And Saul said, I know you, you liar. You claim to serve God but you won’t obey Him, and God has cast you out, taking your kingdom from me and he’s given it to a neighbor better than thou.

I wonder how long the church is going to have to go on like this. I don’t mean this church, but the church of God. You say we believe in Christ. We’re saved from sin. We have eternal life and can’t lose it. Everything will be alright. One of these days the Lord will come and take us from one kind of fun to another kind of fun. He’ll take us from being happy down here to being happy up there.

Believe me what He’ll do to those liberals and moderns. We’ll lick up our chops when the Lord will trample those moderns under His feet. It is awful easy for us of the orthodox persuasion to talk like that, friends, forgetting that right while we’re making our pious protestations, the bleating of the sheep and the bellowing of the herd may be coming across the meadows to say to God they’re not telling the truth, Father. They think they are, but they’re not. What about you?

I’m supposed to come and preach at Keswick again this year. What does Keswick teach? Only this, that’s all, only this. Sometimes I think even Keswick gets you dead and doesn’t get you alive again. Dr. Maxwell, “Born Crucified” and some of his other books, that’s what he teaches. What do they teach, and Turnbull teach and the Sunday School times? What did Dr. Simpson teach of this? Dr. Simpson taught that when you rise again in newness of life after letting your evil nature die with Christ, you can be anointed with power to go out and do the will of God and live in the fellowship of God and the power of the Spirit. That’s why the Christian Alliance ever was born in the first place. It will be a bad day for us when we forget that. It will be a bad day for us. But how about you? You can’t help what 1100 churches will do, but you can help what you do. You can’t even help what this church will do, really.

But you can decide what you will do. What about it? The Lord says, put that self-righteousness to death. Pass sentence on it. Identify yourself with Christ on the cross and let that self-righteousness die. Let that delicious self-pity that you like to lick on, let that die, stop pitting yourself. Stop seeking aggrandizement, your self-advancement, stop seeking it. Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God and He will exalt you in due time. Up out of our stony grief of humility, God will raise us to newness of life.

Somewhere I preached, I don’t remember where, in fact it was in Brooklyn a couple of Sundays ago. And I told them there that if they would put themselves in God’s hands and ask God Almighty to set a chain of circumstances in motion in their lives, He would lead them to be nothing and God to be everything, that they’d be surprised, that’s what will begin to happen. And then I had to tell them this as I tell you tonight, the strange thing will be that as you get better, you won’t know you’re getting better. As you get more powerful, you won’t know you’re getting powerful. As you get more God-like, you won’t know you’re getting God-like. For it is a strange contradiction that the most god-like man is the man who feels least like a God-like man.

And the most powerful man is the man who feels less power. It’s not the little fellows with their light up ties that think they’re bad. It’s the Spurgeons and the Augustines and the Pauls and the Simpsons and the Wesleys, who say, I’m no good. I’m no good God. I’m no good. The little guys with the light up ties, they say, God and I just had a little huddle together. And God said to me, son, let’s do it this way. That kind of Christianity is a million miles from the faith of our fathers. The further you get into the Kingdom and the closer to the cross of Christ, the further you’ll feel away and the less you will trust yourself.

And the more trust God can put in you, the less you’ll put in yourself. And the more trust you put in yourself; the less God will trust you. And the more you seek advancement, the less God will advance you. And the more God, out of your humility advances you, the less you will feel advanced. It’s a strange contradiction, a strange anomaly, but it’s there; power where death was, peace where turmoil was, life where weakness was. This is it, brethren. I guess it isn’t any wonder that this kind of preaching doesn’t bring mobs around here. But it does excite people all over the continent who want to hear about it. Small groups here and small groups there, and people who will gather in and make large groups and say, come and talk to us about this. I suppose I’m the poorest example of it there is on the North American continent, but at least I’ll do my best trying to tell people this is the way of life.

Wesley said to Peter Bowler, Peter, my heart hasn’t experienced grace. What will I do? He said preach it till you do experience it. Preach it because it’s in the Bible. Then when you experience it, preach it because you have it. And Wesley went out and did it. It wasn’t very long until he experienced grace and set the world on fire.

Let’s pray. We are assembled here tonight, Lord Jesus, as Thy disciples. Thy servant has tried from the New Testament and from the Old to explain the way of power and life. Now, Lord, Thou knowest how much easier it is to stand up here and explain it, than it is to go out tomorrow and live it. And yet, it’s possible to live it, otherwise Thy word would be confusion and more confounded. We pray, O Christ, while the church goes on without power, without holiness, without radiance, plugging along, we thank Thee, Father, for everyone that’s plugging along.

Thank Thee, Father, for everyone who says any good thing about thy Son. Thank thee for everyone whose testimony, however hollow, still may be on Thy side. We remember Thy servant who said, I thank God that Christ is preached regardless of how He is preached. So, we’re glad for everybody, but O Lord, we mourn. The weakness, the carnality, the selfishness that’s in Thy church among Thy people. We mourn that we don’t grow up, that we don’t advance. We stay little when we could be great Christians. O Lord, help us now.

Before we conclude our prayer, dear people, how many would say, Mr. Tozer pray for me that God will teach me the meaning of this text, this doctrine, this truth which has been so wonderfully taught and lived by so many of God’s saints down the years. I want it in my life. Would you pray for me? Would you raise your hand? Yes. Yes. Who else? Yes. Who else? Yes, I see your hand back there. Others, who would like us to pray?

Father, we pray for those who have requested it. Thou hast said, pray one for another. And there’s a reason for Thy saying that. So, we pray Thee for these who have said, pray for me, men and women. We pray for them. We pray that they may tear themselves loose if they have to do it, do it by violence from the green briars and the barbed wire and get themselves out of all that, and escape the snares and traps of the flesh and follow Christ. And by faith, put themselves with Him on a cross and see themselves rise with Him into glorious light and freedom. Grant this we pray. Lead these dear friends on. Put the right books in their hands. Lead them to the right Scripture. Help them to find time during the day or night that they ordinarily don’t have, to settle some of these things privately. Grant it we pray.

And let this, we pray Thee, spread not only here to these who raised their hands but all among Thy children. Begin we pray Thee, O God, soon to draw a line between the swaggering, smiling, self-assured, self-confident, bold, Christians and the lowly and the meek and the humble and the merciful who deny self and follow Thee. Let the Holy Ghost come upon some people, the humble, the lowly, the crucified, that they may rise to newness of life to shine and be an example to the ones that aren’t. Let it be so, we pray. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Post author By pshappard
Post date March 17, 2024

“The Chief Cornerstone and Us as Stones”

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The Chief Cornerstone and Us as Stones

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 31, 1954

As you are aware, I am bringing sermons from First Peter every Sunday morning. We are now in the second chapter. I spoke last week on laying aside all malice and guile and hypocrisies and envies and evil speaking. As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word that ye may grow thereby. Then he continues without pause: If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious. To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ. I think those three verses will be enough for the morning. Beginning with, if so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.

Now, what he has to say, the following, rests upon the, ‘if ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.” One great error that we make in coming to the Bible is to assume that because a thing is true, it’s true of us. If it is in the Bible, it is true. But the error is to assume that it is true of us. It is not necessarily always so, even that which follows the truth of God, Peter conditions upon the little word “if” and says, if ye have tasted, then what I say from here on, is applicable to you. But if you have not tasted, then you should go back and taste before you go any further.

Now, this is required of us to be called New Testament Christians at all, that we have tasted the good Word of God and the powers of the world to come. That we have tasted that the Lord is gracious. And I want that word “tasted” to mean what it means in the Bible and not what it means when we mean we experiment. We mean that we test a thing by putting it to the tongue as a woman tests her cooking. They used to. I don’t know whether they still do, but they used to test their soup with a little spoon, taste of it, to see if it was salty enough and was all right. I suppose that’s ordinary.

But that’s never what the Bible means, to test the thing to see if it’s all right, with no intention maybe of eating it; maybe never going on to eat it at all, but at least knowing what it’s like. Now, that is not what the Bible means. We have only to look it up in its original and find that the word taste here means experienced, lived through. To in order that a thing may be real to us, and everlastingly ours, it must be experienced. It must be lived through.

Now that same word “tasted” that Peter uses here, the precise word is used about our Savior in the book of Hebrews. It says that Jesus was made a little lower than the angels, that He, by the grace of God should taste death for every man. Now those who teach the tasting doctrine ought to give this some attention here. If the word taste in the New Testament means tested with the tongue to see if we like it or not, then that’s all Jesus did with death. For the same word is used that He tasted death for every man.

So, you see, my brethren, the word taste here does not mean experiment–try it by a touch–but it means experienced, gone through, encountered, past into and through. And that’s exactly what happened to our Lord when He died on the cross. He did not experiment with death and see whether He liked it, taste it to see whether He dared go on. But He threw Himself recklessly out and gave Himself to die; and experienced death in the fullest sense of that word.

Now these believers had experienced, and they had experienced not the grace of God only, but that the Lord was gracious. I do not want to split hairs. I never was much of a hair splitter. But where there is a difference, we ought to note that difference and distinguish things that differ in the language of Paul. And here I do know the difference. He does not say, if so be that you have tasted of the grace of God. But He says, if so be that you have tasted that the Lord is gracious. There is a difference between testing or tasting or even experiencing the Word of God or the grace of God and experiencing the gracious God.

There is a difference there, my brethren. We never should separate a gift from the source of the gift. We never should say, I have forgiveness. We should say, God has forgiven. We never should say I have eternal life. We should say God has given me eternal life. And Christ is my life.

The point there is that God does not divorce Himself from His gifts. He gives Himself in whatever He gives. If a man has been forgiven, what has happened to him is that God, the forgiving God, has touched him and thus forgiven him. But it is God that matters more than the forgiveness. If a man has eternal life, it is that he might know Jesus Christ, God the Father and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. That word “know” is experienced there again.

So that we must be very careful that we do not divorce God’s gifts from God Himself. I think that is what’s wrong with this in our day. We have the gifts of God, but we forget the God of the gifts. There’s a difference between noble, strong, vigorous and satisfying spiritual experience and the other kind of spiritual experience, which takes the gifts of God but forgets the Giver.

An example of that, a most ignoble example, is found in the gospels where 10 lepers came to Jesus and were healed of their leprosy. Now, they did receive healing and they were delivered. The old spots went away. The old sores disappeared. The old symptoms were gone. They were 10 healthy men, and with this new gift of health, they all started away. And nine of them kept right on going, satisfied with the gift of health, but the 10th one happened to remember that he had received a gift from the Giver and his eyes went from the gift to the Giver. And he came back humbly and thanked the Lord Jesus. And Christ said sadly, where are the nine? The others were satisfied with the gift, but one came back to get better acquainted with the Giver.

It was Campbell Morgan that said, we ought never in our gospel preaching to offer men peace. We ought never in our gospel preaching to offer men repose from their conscience. We ought never to offer them anything short of life. And I repeat, that we should never divorce any gift we offer to men, we never should divorce it from the Giver. We should hold it for the Giver as we sing. So that, he did not say, ye have tasted the grace of God, though they had. But he said, you have tasted that the Lord is gracious. And that’s quite something else again.

Our selfish praying, when we come to God with a long grocery list and petition God to do this and do this and do this and do this. And if God answers our prayers, then we cross it off and go on down to the next list, and so on we go. It seems to me that it’s very saddening to the heart of God to be thus used as a convenience.

It seems to me that the Lord Jesus must be very heavy hearted, be times, when He finds His redeemed people more taken up with the redemption than they are with the Redeemer; his forgiven people more taken up with forgiveness than they are with the Forgiver, His living people with whom He has given life, more taken up with the life than they are with the Life Giver. We ought in our preaching and teaching and personal experience, to make a strong return to God himself, to the person of God. In fact, I am not sure but we could condense everything that we want into sentences beginning with God, or having God in it somewhere. God is. God is present. God loves. God’s Word, that God’s Holy Spirit, God’s Messiah, everything belongs and begins and ends and continues with God.

Now, he said, if you have tasted and experienced that the Lord is gracious. Your experience has been with the gracious Lord unto whom coming. Now this was true of them as it’s true of all real Christians everywhere. I give you four prepositions. I am not unmindful of the fact that I sometimes poke good-natured fun at the prepositional preaching. But I give you four prepositions, inconsistent or not, as you like.

You know what Emerson said about consistency. He said, It was the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. So, we’ll throw it aside and point out for prepositions here. First, they came out and then they came away and then they came together, and then they came on to. Now, not in that order, probably, and they didn’t do it together. They might have come one at a time or two at a time. But taken all together, these four things can be said about these Christians.

First of all, they came out of the world. We are now trying to take the world into the church, sanctify it, baptize it, anoint it, and try to hide its skulls and crossbones. I preached last night to a Baptist Men’s Fellowship on the North Side with 408 men were there, and I talked to them about coming out and separating ourselves from the world. Not this sermon, certainly. But I did introduce the idea there, and I repeat it to you now that there must be a coming out.

Israel had to come out of Egypt before she could come in to Palestine. Always Abraham had to come out before He could come in. And so, with everybody else, there must be a coming out. And any kind of Christianity, however orthodox it may sound, that does not major on the doctrine of coming out, that is, coming out of the world, is inadequate and imperfect.

And then after the word out, we have the word, away. They came away from the old life, whatever that old life might have been. To one person, it’s one thing to another, it is another. But whatever it is, the old life, we come away from, when we come to Jesus Christ. To taste the good grace of God and that the Lord is gracious there must be a coming away from the old life.

And then naturally, there is a coming on to Christ. That after all is–it’s what the gospel is–it’s a coming unto Christ. And then there is the word, together, a coming together. That is, they’re coming on to each other. As we gather unto Christ, naturally we gather unto each other. And the nearer we get to Christ naturally, the nearer we get to each other, so that the way to get Christians together is not to form some kind of a political united front. The way to get them together is to bring them close to Jesus Christ. Just as if we had something down here at the front of the church, some curio or missionary exhibit, and I wanted to get you all together, closer together even than you are now. And I invited you to come down and see it. Well, as you came onto it, you would come unto each other, and the closer you got to it, the closer you would be to each other until finally, shoulder would touch shoulder, and you’d be pushing close together to see this exhibit.

And so, when we come unto Christ, it’s automatic that we come unto each other. That is what I have never been able to understand this, monkish errormitic, if I might. I don’t know if there is such a word. There ought to be, and there is now. But this word that covers the idea of going off by yourself to be a Christian. There are people like that. They’re antisocial, or rather unsocial in disposition, so they do not like the fellowship of the saints. I remind you, my friend, that if you have heard, Jesus is, you’re surrounded by Jesus’ people. And therefore, we ought to make the fellowship of the church the biggest thing in our lives.

And I’d like to say right here at the risk of hurting somebody, for that isn’t too important after all. It may hurt a little, but it may do some good, that the important thing in the world today is the presence of an invisible spiritual entity called the church. And the Holy Ghost never works outside that entity. He works through that entity in some manner or other. That is why I’m a church man. I’m going to preach this week at a Bible school or Bible college, it is now. And I believe in them, of course. But I remember a Bible school president that once smiled good-naturedly and sort of kiddingly to me and he said, you’re church minded. You’re not school minded.

How could a minister of the church of Christ become school-minded? A school is simply an instrument with a temporary value which may for time serve a purpose. But it is not the school he said. I did not say on this school I will build my church. Or take the very many laymen’s organizations. I do not say but what they have some value in the world. I believe they do. But remember, they get their value from the church. And if God works in them at all, He works through His church. It is the church, that group that comes together unto Him.

And whether they’re red or yellow, black or white, whether they lived in the first century or the 20th, the coming together unto Christ makes the church. It’s a called-out assembly. So, those four words, they came out of the world, they came away from the old life, they came unto Christ, and they came together relative to each other.

Now he says, you’ve come unto Christ as unto a living stone. Now, this is a frequent Bible passage or a Bible figure, this stone or rock as it’s sometimes called. And it almost invariably, if not invariably, refers to a building. I think there may be a few places where David uses it as a great craggy rock where he hides. But for the most part, the figure has to do with a building. And because the Jews were a God-conscious people, their thought ran to a temple building. I should think somebody ought to write about this or talk about it, for the church, and make the people of God see that the Jewish nation, above all nations of the world, were a God-conscious nation.

America is not a God-conscious nation. We’re a secular people. We have what the Bible calls a profane mind. And even those who may toss God a sop when making a political speech, to get the votes of the religious-minded people. If you probe in far enough, for the most part, you’ll find that our leadership is composed of secular-minded people. I don’t use the word in a wrong sense, but in the sense that Esau was secular-minded. This world was the the point of interest for the man. And that’s all right, provided that we have another and higher interest. But Esau didn’t have it, and the nation of America doesn’t have it much.

But Israel had it. Israel, in fact, had nothing else. Have you forgotten that Israel had no civil laws at all? There was a day in England when she had two sets of laws, the ecclesiastical laws and the civil laws. Whether that’s still true, I don’t know. But they did for many centuries. And a man could be tried before the civil law and then turned loose and tried before the ecclesiastical law. The church could try a man for certain offenses and the civil law for certain other offenses.

And there were two kinds of officers, civil officers and ecclesiastical officers. And there were two worlds within, worlds mingling there, wheels within wheels. But not so in Israel. Israel had no civil officers. Israel had no civil law. Israel had no code, no code of jurisprudence. Israel had no statutes on her books, except those that were of God. The Bible was her code of law, and her priests and scribes were her officials, and her high priest, her leader and her king anointed of God was her ruler. So that Israel was a sacred nation. A people who were God conscious more than any people that have ever lived in the world. And never has been a nation as a God-conscious as Israel, so that Israel’s science was all God-founded.

We turn a telescope into the heavens now and we look at the stars. And we separate the stars from the God who made them, and we have astronomy. We dig in the rocks, and we have geology. And we monkey with the little flying, microscopic or sub microscopic matter, and we have physics. So we separate nature from God, but Israel never knew how to do that. God was everything. If an Israelite looked at a hill, it was God’s Hill. If he looked at a tree, the tree clapped its hands. If he looked at it raining, it was God who sent the rains.

So, a Jew never complained. He said, it was miserable weather, isn’t it? God sent that rain, and God was in everything. So that when a figure of speech occurred, it was a divine figure speech. And when they talked about a rock and a stone, they were talking about a building that was a temple building. Now, they had a temple building there, of course, but it was composed of dead stones, laid one upon another. They were hewn out, and then laid one upon another and joined to each other by cutting and mortaring.

And that was a dead temple. And God knew it was a dead temple. And the only living thing in it was the Shekinah that dwelt between the wings of the golden cherubim. The temple itself was a dead thing. And our Lord knew it. He pointed to its stones and said there will be a time when everything all that you see will fall to the ground and be no more, passed over; and they even plowed the place where the temple had been. That’s because it was a dead temple.

But this new temple unto which we are come, this new temple is composed of living stones and is a living temple. And its cornerstone is Christ, and its stones are redeemed men and women who are alive by the gift of eternal life. He says, ye also are living stones.

Just a side here, not a part of the sermon, but just for your ecclesiastical education, I might point out that this King James Version, which is supposed to be always inerrant, makes a cute little mistake here. It says that ye are come unto Christ, the living stone, and you are lively stones. Now I wonder why the translators did that because in the Greek, it’s exactly the same word. Both words mean living. But when the translators were translated in 340 some years ago, the word living and lively almost meant the same thing, but they don’t now. Lively means, you know, what your boy is, hopping around, never in one place twice. Like the Irishman who was sent out to count the chickens. He came back and said there were 37 and one that he couldn’t count. It traveled around too fast. And that’s what the word lively means. It means moving about so rapidly you can’t get it in one place long enough to count it.

But that word lively has lost its meaning. It doesn’t mean what it meant back there. It says the same thing about the church member as it says about the head of the church, Jesus Christ. He is the Living Stone and the members that make up the great temple are also living stones. There is a plural and a singular, but there is no difference in the adjective itself.

Now, Israel had a dead temple. And because Israel had a dead temple made of dead stone, she couldn’t use a living stone when she found one. And for that reason, He was disallowed indeed of men. And Israel could not use Jesus Christ when He came. He was the headstone, the living headstone of a new kind of temple, not one more stone to go in the old temple, but the headstone of a new kind of temple. And they looked at that stone, and the builder shook their heads and said, He doesn’t fit anywhere. We’ve got our temple. There it stands, stone upon stone, tear upon tear, stone upon stone, stone joined to stone. And it’s got a top on it and it’s there and it is set with beautiful jewels.

And they said, where does this man fit in? Jesus Christ could not fit into Israel. And so, Israel rejected Him and crucified Him because He wasn’t shaped right. He was the stone that was to be, the Guiding Stone for the new temple to come. And He didn’t fit into the old temple at all. But nevertheless, God says that He was chosen and precious. Look at this Stone. I think that it begins way back there when Jacob had that sleep in the wilderness. I will never know. I suppose until I die, and I am able to question Jacob himself, why he wanted a stone for a pillow. He took up of the stones of that place and set them for his pillows. I don’t know why he would use a stone for a pillow, but he did.

And when he saw that vision, he waked out of his sleep and turn that stone over, stood it on end and anointed it and it was called Bethel, the house of God. Then when Israel had come out of Egypt and had gone into the wilderness and were traveling about those 40 years, that same stone says, the Holy Ghost followed them. If it was not exactly the same chunk of rock, it was at least the same symbol, the same figure following through.

So, one day, they were thirsty, and Moses smote the rock and they all drank out of that same rock, at least symbolically, upon which Jacob had laid his head, and which he anointed and called Bethel.

And then when our Lord came, he said that if you fall upon this rock, you shall be saved in a word to that effect, but if it falls upon you, you will be crushed to death. And that was the same stone. And he said, on this rock, I will build my church. And let men say that’s Peter if they want to, but every figure, every type, every symbolism, every suggestion, every simile in the whole Bible indicates that that rock was none other than Jesus Christ Himself.

And then in Daniel, we read of the rock, or the stone that was cut out of the mountain without hands. That’s the second coming of Jesus, when He comes back to put down communists and fascists and all the rest, and to rule in the earth. So, there is our Savior, the Rock.

Now, what is the function of the house which is built around this new rock? It contrasts, I’ve said, with the Old Testament temple, in that the Old Testament temple was made of stones that were dead, and the New Testament made of spiritual stones that are live. And the priests of the old temple, walked into the temple and performed the functions of their office. But the priests of the New Testament are the temple. There is the difference. We have a movable, portable temple, a temple made of living human beings, and every one of those human beings, a priest in his own right.

And we have a great high priest at the right hand of God. And this temple of which we are a part is a temple of priests so that we do not need to have anybody run interference for us when we go into the presence of God. We can come straight to Jesus Christ ourselves. They tell us poor misguided friends, that Jesus is too great and wonderful. We can’t go to Him. But we can go to his mother, and she can go to Him. We don’t have any pull with Jesus, but she has. And if we get to her and get her ear, she’ll go and have a talk with Jesus and then it’ll be all right. We don’t need her, my brethren. She has performed her function, this lovely little Jewish lady. She brought into the world the man, Christ Jesus, and gave Him a body which was later offered as a sacrifice on Calvary. And she did her function when she brought Him up and fed Him at her breast and looked after Him and loved Him until He was a man. Then she passed out of the picture and Jesus Christ filled the horizon of believing men.

So, we are priests, and we need no other priest to help us. This temple is a shrine where God dwells. And in that temple, we offer not goats, not lambs, not doves, but spiritual sacrifices, says Peter; loving service and praise and song and worship. You know, the critics call us song singers. They called the old Scotch people, they said, a bunch of sam-singing Scotsman.

Oh, my brethren, those sam-singing Scotsman have made their mark in the world, I’m telling you. And our forebearers who walked the rugged shores of New England, and who stamped America with their noble character once, they were sam-singers too. They met in little groups, log buildings, dedicated to the worship, and there they sung songs and offered the fruits of their lips, praises unto God. But they didn’t stop there, they shouldered their axe and went out and felled a forest and established cities and build a civilization the likes of which the world had never known, those psalm-singing Puritans.

God hears songs when they’re sung in His name and for His glory. We’re offering up psalms to our Lord, and songs and spiritual melodies in the Holy Ghost. And the critical, cynical world sees us come, close our eyes and talk to someone we can’t see and say, what’s it all about? We answer, this is a temple of God, dedicated to the God of the temple. And we, the priests of the temple, sing these songs to God, the Unseen. And make our prayers to God, the Unseen. Though unseen, He is real, and though unseen, He is nigh, and we’re not such fools as the world would make us out to be.

Now, I’m almost finished. He says that these praises and songs and spiritual sacrifices are acceptable to God. He accepted the Cornerstone. He accepted the living stones which are gathered to the Cornerstone to make a temple for the Holy Ghost. And He accepts the service that is wrought in that temple and performed in that shrine.

So, you haven’t wasted the morning, brethren. You haven’t simply followed a custom, like mistletoe and wreaths at Christmas. You’ve done an act. You’ve performed an act that God accepts through Jesus Christ. If you’ve really prayed this morning. If you really sung a true song this morning. If you have made your gifts out of the love of God this morning, you’ll go away and you have nothing to show for it, certainly. And the world laughs and says you have nothing to show for it.

But remember, not every precious thing shows the same time it’s received. Remember, there is a time when the invisible things will be the only real things. And the visible world shall dissolve in smoke and pass away and God will roll them up as a garment, and as vestures, they shall be changed. But the invisible things of God from the creation which we have in Christ Jesus, will continue as real as heaven itself, forever and forever. Now, if this is true for you, he says, if so be that you have tasted, if so be that you have experienced that the Lord is gracious. I repeat, a thing may be true but not true of me.

So the most vital thing to settle, you religious-minded people, the most vital thing to settle, is not the trues of the Scriptures, for these have been established beyond peradventure, world without end. The Scriptures are already established by two immutable things, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and the down-coming of the Holy Ghost.

Everything hinges on Jesus Christ. The truth of the whole Word of God rests on the shoulders of Mary’s holy Son. And if he failed us, the whole thing collapses round our ears. If He’s who He said He was and rises from the dead, then He supports all the rest of the Bible itself. That’s why I’m not afraid of modernists and critics and higher critics and fault finders and cynics. That’s why I’m not worried about Jonah and the whale. I never spent five minutes in my life trying to decide whether a whale could swallow Jonah or not. God Almighty could make a whale that would swallow not only Jonah but the whole ship and Nineveh thrown in.

The point isn’t whether Jonah was swallowed by a whale. The point is, what did Jesus Christ say about it? And he said, as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so shall the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of the earth. He tied Himself up with the truth of the Jonah story. Therefore, the Jonah story is true because the Truth said it was.

So, your business is not to determine whether the Bible is true or not. The resurrection of Jesus Christ and His ascension to the right hand of God, and the down coming Holy Ghost, forever takes apologetics out of the hands of men and puts it in the hands of the Spirit. And we know the Bible is true, not by long, painful reasonings. We know it is true by a flash of inspiration from the Throne and from the Holy Ghost who brings the flash. So, your big problem isn’t whether the Bible is true, brother. Your big problem is whether it’s true in you. It isn’t whether the Bible is true, but it’s whether these things are true in me.

The old German poet said, though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, if He’s not born again in thee, thy heart is still forlorn. If I were a poet, I’d add some more stanzas and I think he did. Scheffler, I think he added some more. I think Scheffer added some more which I can’t quote verbatim, but they run something like this, that if Christ die a 1000 times on a cross, if we do not accept and receive, He died in vain as far as we are concerned. And though the Bible be the very rock of God’s Gibraltar, if it isn’t true in us, it’s vain as far as we’re concerned.

So, what do we need to do today, brethren, is not to go home and overeat and sit around and look at television. What we need to do today would be to go home and eat modestly, and then some of us at least ought to go to our rooms, open our Bible, get down on our knees and say, O God, are these things true of me? You know, you can be an awfully nice person and still not be a true Christian.

I told my Swedish friends last night, my good Baptist friends; there were only four of us foreigners there that we knew of. Myself, a Scotsman, an Irishman, and another man, unidentified, I think, English. Outside of that they were all natives. But I told them that I like Swedes. They’re all nice people. But you can be an awfully nice person and not be born again. You can be an awfully nice religious person and never have tasted that the Lord is gracious.

Oh, my friends. Let’s not waste this holy day. Let’s search our own hearts. Let’s see for ourselves if these things be so in us. We don’t need to see if they be so. I repeat, a resurrected Savior and a down-coming Holy Ghost confirm forever the fact the Bible is true, but is it true in us? That’s the big question. And I want you to take it home with you. Search yourself and ask, in the light of God’s revealed truth, O God, I believe this, but is it true in me? If it isn’t, it can be. Faith and repentance can make it real in your heart.

Tags Encounter, Experience, Jesus Christ

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 15, 2023

“How We Can Have a Personal Revival”

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How We Can Have a Personal Revival

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 11, 1955

Now, I want to do, and relax because we’ll not be late. I want to do what I promised I would do. I’ve been speaking on revival though I hesitate to use the word. It’s fallen into bad use and has been wounded in the house of its friends. But I want to talk about how we can have a personal revival. You know that I have already said that revival can occur on one of three levels. It can occur on a personal level when the individual is revived. It can occur on a church level where a whole church comes under the new spiritual impulse. It can occur on a community level where the church overflows and the impulse within the church goes out to the community.

Now, a solitary person can enter in and have a revivification of his spiritual life and have an upsurge of power and a down-coming of grace and can enter into an experience that’s as wonderful, so wonderful that his words won’t be able to describe it, and yet not affect the church very much where he is. That has happened. Individuals within pretty cold churches, have been greatly revived. And yet that did not extend to the church because the church resisted or opposed or neglected or considered this person a fanatic or an extremist. And rather, it throws him out.

Now, a church may experience an awakening. On the other hand, other members of the church may catch fire from this individual or increasing numbers of individuals. And the whole church is lifted up and refreshed and the frost gets out of the stream, and the ice breaks, and the waters begin to flow. And yet, that can fail to reach the community. Often, it does fail to extend beyond the local church. Many, many local churches have wakenings and refreshings and times of great grace. But it does not get beyond the church to the community.

But then, there’s such as a community revival where it does get out into the community and goes from one church to another, and the whole city, the whole neighborhood is revived. Now, it can occur in that order, the individual, extending to the church, and the church extending out to the community. But it can never reverse itself. It can never come to a community unless there has been a church that has been revived. And no church has ever been revived until individuals in that church have been revived.

Now, by personal revival, what do I mean? Well, it’s best taught by analogy I suppose. It’s like a sick man returning to abounding health. It is like a man whose blood count is low and who is hardly able to get out of bed; can sit up only an hour at a time, and getting to a place where he’s now able to go out and play on the tee and do a hard day’s work and do anything he has to do–abounding in health. For it is like a low battery that will barely turn the engine over, being taken in for a recharge, and get to a place where it’s simply sizzling with power, and where a flash of power will fly out from it on the least occasion. Now, that’s what it is to be a Christian that has been revived, that has had a new uprush of power from God. We had some around here, and I run into them occasionally here and again, and you know what I mean.

Now this can only happen to the individual. This can’t happen to a church. It can’t happen to a mass. It can only happen to the individual. My brethren, there are some things that can only happen to an individual. For instance, birth can only happen alone to each single individual as if there had been no other individual in the world. The statistics may say, well, 150 babies were born in this town, this little town last year. But remember, that you cannot and dare not fall a victim to statistics and think of 150 babies being born en masse as though it were one act. No, no, there were 150 of them. Each birth was as unique and single and peculiar and alone as if there never had been anybody born before or ever would be again. And even though there are multiple births, twins or triplets, it is still the same. Each individual comes into the world himself alone, an individual cut out from all the universe, alone.

And so, it is with death. You can only die by yourself. A train wreck comes and fifty people are killed in a train wreck, fifty people are killed in a train wreck and all of it happens at once. And yet while they die at once, they die, alone. And while they’re all written off on the newspapers as having occurred within one minute’s time. They did not die together, they died apart separately, each individual went out alone to meet his God.

And so, at Pentecost, there were 120 in the upper room, and suddenly the place was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost. That sounds as if it was a mass thing, but the Scripture says that there appeared unto them cloven tongues as of fire and it sat upon each of them. They could only be filled with the Holy Ghost separately. Ten men can’t be filled with the Holy Ghost as one act of God. They can be filled simultaneously. As there might be ten babies born while I’ve been talking here, but each birth was alone, there might have been 100 People die while I’m talking to you, but each death was alone. And so, the Holy Spirit falls upon 75 people as it did in Dusseldorf in 1727 for the Moravians, yet each one received by himself.

Now, I want to make this very clear, because it’s important we think right about this, that there is no abstract church. We pray, O Lord, fall on Thy church. And we imagine there’s an abstract church somewhere, the kind of woozy extract of the church, and the Spirit can come on that without individuals being helped. No, no, my brother. The Holy Spirit can only fall on individuals, on people, that’s all. There is no such thing as a mystic church that can be blessed, with the members of the church not touched. No, no. We pray, Lord, bless Thy mystic church and we imagine, we project a church out of, among the individuals, an ideal church for which Christ died. And nobody gets help and we say, well, God is pouring His spirit out on His church. God can’t pour His Spirit out on His church, except as He pours it on individuals within the church.

The Holy Ghost sat upon each of them. And so, He’ll sit upon each of us, if He ever comes to the church. This church is only what the individual members are, not one bit better. If God had some IQ tests or spiritual tests, whereby He could test us, or He had some way of taking our spiritual pulse, then we might add up all and divide by our membership and get the average. But the church would be what the average is. Always remember, the average of the many individuals will make what the church is, for the church is composed of the individual.

Now the lone soul can be revived. I’m so glad to be able to tell you that. God can send waves of glory and power and life, a new quickening to the lone individual, that solitary individual as one man wrote, whether anyone else does, receives or not. Don’t you wait around and say, I’d like to see our church blessed, and then hope that when the church is blessed, you will be blessed. My friend, the church can never be blessed until you or other individuals are blessed. And whether the church ever gets any further on or not out, whether we peter out and backslide and turn liberal, you can be blessed as an individual. And not all the rest of us put together can prevent you from being blessed. And you can be blessed whether or not. A man can be blessed alone, whether or not his pastor or his church approves. I personally know that.

When I was a young fellow about 18 years of age, God came on me in a wonderful way and did wonderful things for me and my church did not approve it. It was not an Alliance church, but another, and they did not approve it. In fact, they as good as told me that they thought I was a bit extreme and maybe that my room was better than my company. I wasn’t thrown out, but I was invited not to be around so frequently. And I left and went into the Alliance and I’ve never been thrown out of the Alliance yet, though that could happen.

But the point is, my brethren, that no matter whether your church believes or not, you can have all that God has for you as an individual. And whether your wife will go along with you or not, or whether your husband or father or mother or friend, whether they will agree or not, it doesn’t make a bit of difference. God always is ready to help the lone individual. And the story of the Old Testament was the story of lone individuals meeting God, lone men, lone women meeting God. The story of revival down the years has been the story of lone men meeting God; going out and finding God all alone. Sometimes they went to their bedrooms, sometimes to the church basements, sometimes to the caves, sometimes out under trees, and sometimes in haystacks. But one or two or three, or one alone, met God, and then it went on from there.

I say you can be blessed and yet not have revival in your church if the rest resist. But you can be blessed nevertheless. Don’t you ever give up to the general, dead level of spirituality in any church, whether it’s this one or any other church. You say, by the grace of God, I’m going to be what I should be regardless.

Now, how, that’s the big question, how. How can I have a personal revival. Well, you want to take some notes on this, any of you? Let me, let me give you, I’ll try to make it brief, but I’ll give it as much time as I feel I must.

First of all, set your face like a flint that you might have a transformation of your whole life. Weak experimenters are already tagged with defeat. They already have the label of defeat upon them, the taster, the experimenter, the weak fellow that tries it out, like Mr. Pliable who says, I’ll go, and then the first trouble he runs into says, I won’t go. You set your face like a flint. A plowshare that is going to cut the sod has to have a sharp nose. And a Christian, if he is to go against all the streams and drifts of the world, he has to have our hard nose too. He’s got to set his face like a flint and say, regardless of what others do, by the grace of God, I want all the New Testament has for me.

Then second, set your heart on Jesus Christ, and go to Him wherever it takes you. Go to Jesus wherever it takes you. Wherever it takes you, go to Jesus. Wherever it takes you away from, go straight, go to Jesus, not up in heaven but down here on earth. Go to Jesus. And whoever you must ignore and whatever the cost may be, set your face like a flint to be all God wants you to, and then go straight to Jesus. And whoever gets in your way, pay no attention of them. I will always thank God that he put that passage in the Bible where the blind man said, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And His proper disciples in their longtail deacon’s coats, they went and said, shoosh, this is not done in churches. Keep still, shoosh, be quiet. And the Scripture says, he cried all the more because of this. Instead of this discouraging him, it fired him up to yell louder. And the Lord heard him and turned around said, what do you want? He said, I want to be healed. He said okay, here, you get it. And he went out a healed man with his eyesight because he had the boldness to pay no attention to the timekeepers and referees that kept people away from Jesus Christ the Lord.

I opened again and read a page or two, just more or less for the style than anything else, but you can’t read Bunyan long just for the style. It was the story of Christian and how he read that book that got him in trouble, you know. He said, oh, I find by this book that I am living in the city of Destruction and that fire is going to fall on us, and that there’s a heavenly home. And he started out. And he was in such terrible distress before he started, that he finally broke the news to his wife and children. And he said, oh, my dear wife and thou the children of my bowels, the old-fashioned English way of putting it, he said, I’m in an awful condition, awful. Well, they said Papa, we know what’s wrong with you. You’re just tired out. So, they put him to bed, there, there in Bunyan. They put him to bed and the next morning he got up and they said, how are you feeling Papa? Oh, he said, worse than ever. I never slept a wink. He said, I couldn’t forget that we live in the city of Destruction. Well then, Bunyan says that when they found they couldn’t just get him quiet and console him, you know, and pat his back and say, now go to bed and sleep it off. Why they started being harsh toward him and surly. When that wouldn’t work, they started to deride him. And then when he wouldn’t give up to their scorn, they ignored him.

I thought as I read it, I wrote this down. That’s the way they do. First, they sooth you, pat your back and tell you you’re excited. And then after that they use harsh words to you and tell you you think you’re better than other people. And then, when that won’t work, they deride you and start making fun. And when that won’t work, they ignore you. That’s exactly how it happens, Brother. And if you decide in your heart that you’re going to go through with God and meet Him and yourself alone, and have a new and refreshing from God, and get rid of the old barnacles and the old weights and hindrances and get back new spiritual health you’ve never had before, you will find some people that will say, well, you’re excited. You allowed that man Tozer to stir you up. Then when you won’t stop, they will start being harsh toward you. Then when that won’t do, they’ll make fun of you. And when that won’t do, they’ll ignore you. Bunyan said, when they treated the Christian like that, he went off by himself and had long season of prayer. You know, that’s the way to handle it, Brother.

Well, third now, take this third. Expose your life to His examination. The trouble with us is, we keep ourselves all covered up. We cover our hearts. He that covereth his sins shall not prosper. He that covereth his leprosy, shall not have it healed. He then covereth his diseases shall not be delivered. But we habitually cover ourselves. I say, expose your whole life to Jesus Christ. Expose in prayer. Expose yourself in Scriptures. Expose your heart in obedience. Expose it by confession. Expose it by restitution. Restitution, a forgotten word, a word that nobody uses anymore. It’s gone the way of all the earth. Why can’t we think of another? But it’s in the Bible still, restitution. Get straightened out with people, brothers and sisters, and it’ll be amazing how it will work out with you.

And then, fourth, take some holy vows. Let me give them. I preached some sermons on this some years ago, but let me just catch them. Take some holy vows before God today. Vow never to own anything. That is, vow to get rid of that infernal bunch of trash you call, your goods. That infernal bunch of trash. Why, there are pack rats out in the West, so I learned, and they gather everything. They go out and bring in everything, little shiny bits. And now, you read in English literature about the magpie, doing the same thing. They find a magpie’s nest, they’ll find a mirror and a coat hanger and a shoe buttoner, in the days when they used them, and a shoe horn and a piece of glass and a dime. They can’t use them, they just collect them. It’s just trash they’ve collected. And people have that same thing. It’s the covetous spirit.

So, they collect around them all of this like the magpie, all of this useless material. I don’t mean you’re to get rid of it if you can use it. It wouldn’t be useless if you could use it, would it? Remember this, that if you feel you own it, it’s dragging you down. Get free from the ownership of it, and then God will let you have it. Get cut loose from it inside and God let you have it outside. I’ve said it’s all right for you to get in your automobile, and the Lord will bless you. But if the automobiles get in you, you’re ruined. And so with your property and so with everything you have. Take a vow to never own anything. See that God has it, not only a skinny tenth. Don’t you imagine for a minute that you keep books with God that way. You’ve got ninety percent and God’s got ten. God’s got 100% and he lets you keep a certain percent to look after your family. But, it’s all God’s and God has a right to command it the moment he wants it.

And if there’s anything you own that God can’t have, you never can have a revival, sir. If there’s anything that you own that God can’t have, you can’t have God. But the moment that God knows that He can have anything you have, and you, anytime he wants it, then the Lord will let you keep it probably, but it’ll be blessed now instead of cursed. It will be a balloon to lift you instead of an anchor to weigh you down.

Then, take a vow never to defend yourself. That’s a tough one for us Americans, but if you don’t do it, oh, I’ve taken more people to the 23rd chapter of Exodus and taught them how to trust God and never worry about your enemies, nor worry about the opposers nor the enemies. If you try to fight people, you will be bloody and bruised and miserable and you’ll stay little and you’ll never have a revival. But if you will let God do your fighting for you, you pray, you’ll be alright.

And then, vow never to defame a fellow Christian. Never defame a fellow Christian. Never defame him by believing evil about him. Never defame him by spreading an evil report about him. And never defame him in any way, remembering your own past and remembering your own proneness to temptation. So, let’s not defame our fellow Christians. I think that sometimes the Spirit of God shuts Himself uptight and cannot fall upon us, because we’ve defamed our brethren, we’ve defamed some Christians.

Now, as a pastor, as a member of an executive committee, I am forced under God. If I know that a man has serious charges against his life, I am forced to protect the church of God from that man. But I am not to defame that man or any other man by believing gossip or spreading it.

And then, vow never to seek or accept any glory. Oh, how we love the glory. If we could take just a little of it for ourselves. May God deliver us from it brethren. He shall have all the glory, we sing. Thou shalt have all the glory for He sets me free. And when that comes to us, that all the glory is God’s, it will be a new flow of power in our lives.

And then, vow, we will not wait for tragedy to drive us to God. You know, tragedy may never come. There are some maybe listening to me now that started to get cold in your heart and then some tragedy struck you though your family. And out of that terrible tragedy and the stony grief, you raised your Bethel and said, forgive me God and started over. But must it always be like that? Must we always wait for God to chastise us? Must we always come to God with bleeding back? Vow that you won’t wait for tragedy to drive you to God, indeed if ever comes. Take your cross voluntarily. Let me give this simple illustration and I’m through.

Many years ago when I was very young preacher, I preached in a town named Despard, West Virginia. Despard, West Virginia was commonly called “tinplate” because the great tinplate factories were there. It was also a coal mining area. We went into a little old wooden structure and had our meetings. And it was quite a meeting, although it wasn’t what some people thought it should have been. So some people got burdened. And in that meeting, there was a coal miner. A great, tall, handsome blonde, good looking, smiling young fellow as I recall him now after these thirty years, he was. And after it was all over, I learned what had happened. He went home after a meeting one night and said to his wife, he said, you know, our people need God. They need God. This thing isn’t going well and we need God. We need His help. And he said, Honey, if it’s alright with you, I’m going to take tomorrow off and wait on God and pray all day long, and I think “fast,” though I would put that in with only a question mark. But he said, I want to pray all day long and wait on God for revival for this town. So, it’s all right. So, instead of going to work, that great big fellow got down on his knees and waited on God with his open Bible all the day long.

The next morning, he went to his work. He worked on the tipple. Now, the tipple is a word not many know. He worked on the tipple where little cars brought the coal down. The heaviest pulled the light empties up you know. And he was working on that tipple, and suddenly something went wrong and a car, a number of cars jumped the track and crashed and splintered. They were wooden cars, old fashioned wooden cars and they splintered. And a great, ragged chunk of splinters, sharp as a dagger on the end, ripped through his thigh and cut one of the great veins there. And there he lay on the slag and coal and dirt, this great big, gorgeous fellow, about twenty-seven years old, and bled to death.

The day before, he had spent all day with God. And that struck me as a message from heaven above. And I thought ever since, dear God, how wonderful it would be, to spend your last day with Thee alone in prayer. Now he couldn’t continue. He had to work and support his family of course. But wasn’t it wonderful that he was near enough to God that he could carry a burden? And the day before he died, he spent all day with God. You can’t spend all day with God, brother, and not be ready to go to heaven the next day. He was all ready to go. Now don’t ask me why God took this dear man away. I don’t know that. God has never allowed me to look over his shoulder at his secret plan. I only know that in the course of things, easily, he could have died anyway. But suppose that that day, say Wednesday, suppose when the Spirit of God urged him to spend a day in prayer for his own soul and for His church, suppose he had been too greedy for money to listen. Suppose he’d been too cold to hear or too far away. Suppose he had been like some of us, running on routine and couldn’t hear from God. He’d have died on the tipple the next day alright, but, oh, what a difference.

Maybe God’s calling some of you to do something extraordinary, something that’s out of the usual, something that doesn’t appear on a calendar or a clock, something to revive your own soul. God may be calling you to do something radical and extreme for your own soul. I hope you’re not so far away that you don’t hear Him. I hope that the love of money and that the pleasures of the world are not so great that you don’t hear Him.

Oh, brother, the biggest thing in the world isn’t whether you die tomorrow or live a hundred years. The biggest thing in the world is, can I hear God speaking to me now? That’s what counts. Do you hear God saying anything to you, my friends. You can have a revival, whether the rest of us ever get it or not, whether you accept it or not, in this or any other church. There’s no reason why you can’t set your face like a flint and start toward Jesus Christ wherever it takes you. And when you find Him, you’ll find floodgates of mercy. You’ll find oil poured from the throne above. You will find a wonderfully new revived life for yourself, just yourself. And after that, it’s up to God and you what you shall do with what you have, but wonderfully, it can be yours now. I hope you can hear Him speak.

Let’s pray. O God, O God, Thou knowest, the world is spinning on. Time is getting less and running out. Children are becoming youth, and youth becoming middle-aged, and middle-aged are getting old and dying. And Thou hast said redeem the time for the days are evil. Lord, please don’t let us fail here. Lord, Thou dost want us to be revived again. Thou dost want to revive Thy people, Lord, individual people. And then, if numbers of individual people can band together, then the church has been revived. God, revive Thy people. Grant, Lord, to help.

Now, as we have our heads bowed, dear people, just for a minute more of prayer. Who will say, Mr. Tozer, please pray for me, that I might have in my lonely soul, alone, apart for my relation to others, if I might have a new inflow of God’s power and purity and grace that I might be a revived soul. Pray for me. Would you raise your hand? God bless you. God bless you.

Tags Church, Jesus Christ, Personal, Revival

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Tozer Talks

“Revival-The Glory is Gone”

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Revival, the Glory is Gone

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 4, 1955

This is the first of two talks. The one this morning and one next Sunday morning, following and completing it, though each talk will be complete in itself. If you miss one you would still have received the advantages or benefits of a complete sermon. The 85th Psalm, the prayer of the man of God for revival among his people. Now, and tonight incidentally, I want to give the second of two sermons on how to cultivate the Spirit’s companionship. And we’re expecting a fine crowd. We hope that you can be present. The 85th Psalm describes conditions, verses one, two, and three. Lord, Thou hast been favorable unto our land. Thou hast brought back the captivity of Jacob. Thou hast forgiven the iniquity of Thy people. Thou hast covered all their sin. Thou hast taken away all Thy wrath and Thou hast turned Thyself from the fierceness of thine anger.

Now, that apparently is a description of a time which has been, when God has been favorable and the people had been removed because of God’s displeasure, but brought back again because of His mercy. And some historic period gone by, under Judges or Ezra or Nehemiah is described here, when God was favorable to his people. But verse four says quite bluntly that the need has arrived again. Turn us, O God of our salvation, and cause thine anger toward us to cease. It seems that they had gotten into a place where they needed again this same resurgence of spiritual life which they had had under Moses or the judges or under Nehemiah. And they knew that God was going to have to use strong measures to bring them where they should be.

And the next verse draws hope. Verse four draws hope from the past. And that is the habit, the way the mind works, that we draw hope from the past. Actually, we ought to draw hope from the Word. That is, if God made a promise, we ought to believe the promise if we had no historic proof that He had ever fulfilled it in the past. That would be faith in God without any confirmatory historic proofs, but apparently, we don’t work like that. And our minds need the collateral help that historic proof brings. So, we remember the past; Thou hast been favorable in times gone by to Thy people. Thou hast turned our captivity. Thou hast blessed Thy people in Thy land. And now Lord, we need help again. And we draw mercies from the fact, or draw hope from the fact of Thy mercies of the past and believe that Thou who didst turn our people in days gone by, will turn Thy people again. That seems to be the logic of the prayer. And in verse five, they’re living under a shadow. Wilt Thou be angry with us forever? Wilt Thou draw out thine anger to all generations? So, there seems to be an admission that there has been a long displeasure of God upon the people. And then in verse seven, or verse six he says, wilt Thou not revive us again?

You know, I’ve been hearing everywhere I go that word “revival.” I just got a letter yesterday saying we’re going to have a meeting at such and such a lunch hour and we want to discuss how we can have revival in the city of Chicago. And wherever you go, you’ll run into men who are talking about revival. There is a feeling I believe that revival is a sort of a fragrant wind that blows in over us and marvelously quickens us and helps us like an oxygen tent to a sick man, and leaves us about where it found us. There is no moral change. There is no cross-bearing and no separation from the world and no death to our evil natures and no restitution and no straightening out with people with whom we’ve quarreled. No getting right with God anywhere, but simply a revival. And we want that benign, fragrant breeze to blow so bad that we’re willing to spend hours on our knees in gatherings praying for revival.

Well, I don’t know whether I can go along with this at all or not. I can’t see how it can possibly be scriptural because I remember a man who once lay on his face, because the armies of Israel were being defeated. And he was praying, O God, what’s happened that we have been sent in headlong flight and our people have been defeated. And God said, don’t lie there on your face Joshua and pray for revival. Get up, there’s a cursed thing in the camp. And if you will get up and find that cursed thing and get rid of it, why I’ll go before your armies as I did before, and there will be no difficulty. And you can cut down your time in prayer, if you will get up and get rid of the accursed thing. So they got up, brought the tribes before them and they found Achan and his golden wedge and goodish Babylonish garment. And they grabbed up some stones under Mose’s direction and they wrought capital punishment upon Achan and his tribe. And then the next day they went out to the battle and won. God is not to be coaxed into doing that which is in violation of His laws. And when we are in accord with His laws, we can get on with a great deal less coaxing and spend a lot more time thanking and praising.

Well, there’s a lot of revival praying that isn’t going to do any good, and I, for my part, don’t like to waste anything. I’ve wasted so much money and I’ve wasted so many years, and I’ve wasted so much nerve energy in my day. And I’ve wasted so much time and so much of everything that I don’t want to waste anything more. I don’t even want to waste a prayer. So there is no new reason in the world, no use, for us to get on our knees and pray for God to send or blow a divine breath over us and quickened us when it’s obvious that we’re not going to go along with God in the thing. We’re living so that His shadow lies upon us and there’s a coldness upon our hearts. So therefore, we think to break that down and literally storm heaven by violence and get God to do which God has sworn He would never do, and avoid doing the thing that we have been commanded to do.

Well, the man says, show us Thy mercy, O God, show us Thy mercy. And my brethren, if ever there was a time when we needed to be constantly saying, O God, be merciful unto us, be merciful unto us. In these modern times we’re taught to, we believe in Christ and that settles it, and after that we’re not to pray for mercy at all. I think that the old Catholic Church and some of the old brethren of days gone by may have carried it too far in other direction, but we’re certainly going too far in our direction. They were always begging for mercy, but apparently never quite sure whether they got it or not. But nowadays, they say ask for mercy and then believe you have it and get up and go on from there. Well, that’s good and it’s true, but it isn’t true enough and it doesn’t go far enough. The fact is, I need the mercy of God on me every day I live.

When I get up in the morning and begin to say in my heart, Let Jesus Christ be praised, I need the mercy of God to make that prayer acceptable. And when I get on my knees to ask God for anything, I need to be bathed in mercy and supported with mercy and upheld with mercy and, and, and that I need to roll and turn in mercy like a gear in oil. I need to have mercy underneath me as the hard earth upon which I can walk and is the atmosphere that I can breathe and the sun to shine on me to give me light and warmth, and all the help I need. I need the mercy of God. Show us Thy mercy is verse seven, O Lord, and grant us thy salvation. And every church ought to be thus praying, God, show us Thy mercy. Have mercy upon us, O God. David said in one place, have mercy upon me and hear my prayer. Why even his prayers had to be bathed in mercy. And the holiest thing a man can do has to have the mercy of God underneath it or it will amount to nothing at all.

And he said in verse nine, that glory may dwell in our land. Now, woe and alas for you and me, for we have not seen the glory in our land. We know only one kind of glory, the vulgar glory of the world, its coarse tastes and its low amusements and its sights and its noises. And God’s people always ignore it and tolerate it. The glory is not in our land.

And I heard the other day on an interview or somewhere that, or read it that there are a thousand juvenile gangs in Brooklyn alone. One thousand gangs that do everything from mugging people, that is, grabbing them and beating them up and stealing their money–to murder. And you heard, you read yesterday of the two-hour siege that was laid to the, by young people to the prison, or to the palace at Atlanta where the governor lived? Well, those are only samples. Thank God for all the fine young people there are. Thank God for all these young people that sit along here; will never we’ll never know these things. Thank God for all of them.

But nevertheless, our country knows little of the glory that our fathers knew, the glory that our fathers knew. There is a preacher of the gospel, so I understand, who either has given or is going to give a talk–and what do you suppose the subject of his talk is? The theology of jazz! He is the man who won $32,000 on “Ask Me an Easy Question” for $64,000 here the other day. And he knew more about jazz, I would be willing to wager a plug nickel, than he did about the Holy Ghost, or that he did about his Bible. And he is going to give a talk on the theology of jazz.

Well, sir, I know a good teacher to teach the theology of jazz, Brother. If you would rather have somebody teach the theology of jazz and teach that tough when you got Wednesday night on the teleological and ontological arguments for the existence of God? I’ll tell you where you can get a teacher. There are artists of the past who have painted him with a long tail and horns and spiked feet. The devil is the best teacher for the theology of jazz. And yet there are those who are so intimately stupid and so spiritually blind, that they have accepted all of this and nervous, sexually inspired communists, fostered business that’s going on in our country as being the very way of God itself; as been geared to the times and as being a part of the total picture of the gospel of Christ.

Well, my brethren, the glory is not in our land, of that, I’m sure. The coarse amusements and sights and noises that are heard everywhere; the pipings and peepings and rattlings and gutturals and the grinding and, and jumping that is said to be music. My brethren, the Holy Ghost isn’t in it. Such things as that are not heard in heaven. You will hear them in hell, certainly, a lot of that’ll be heard in hell. And those who go to that place of fire and everlasting remorse, may be able in the midst of self-accusation and self-hatred and everlasting sorrow, to beat to their hot hands together, and grind and roll. They wouldn’t be doing it for Jesus. There’s no jumping for Jesus nor grinding for the gospel. My brethren, that is hell taking over and coming in, smelling of brimstone into the house of God, and saying, now, let us, let us be religious for the time being. And so, we’ll get the support and the applause of these blind saint-lets, half in and half out of the Kingdom, afraid to get all the way in for fear of what it will cost them and afraid to stay out through fear they will perish in hell. And so, hanging halfway in the ropes between yes and no, between the gospel and the world, between heaven and hell? They grin and applaud while Satan claps his bony hands and grinds and rolls the gospel.

Oh, my brother, the glory is not in our land. The glory has departed, and it’s not in our land. O God, in mercy let the glory come back again. The Christians are pushed around and their conveniences are never sought. Always they’re ignored and tolerated, except for their votes, of course, and for what they can do by way of a financial lift. Everybody comes to them that wants a little financial help, because they’re supposed to be a generous people, and God bless them, they are. But they’re helping to support an infinite number of things that were never inspired by God. They’re helping to fumigate trees that were never planted by our Father in heaven. And the axe lies now at the root of those same trees, and there’ll be a mighty crash in the forest when they go down, never to arise again.

Well, the poor church is forced to get along and beg nickels. The people of God, the church of God, will always have to take second best; always, or third or tenth best. What we do is always bound to be amateurism, always, because we can’t do, we don’t have the money. The money goes to the world. And the church of Jesus Christ struggles along the best that it can.

O God, where is the glory? Where is the glory? The glory is absent. Times have been when Christians were so zealous that they changed the life of communities, the whole life of communities. There was a missionary who went into a certain Island or set of islands, and they said about him when he went in, there wasn’t a Christian, and when he left there wasn’t a pagan. It was John Payton, the great Englishman.

My brethren, there have been evangelists in days gone by who have gone into cities, and when they went in, there was hardly a crowd in any church. And when they left there wasn’t a man in any saloon. When the gambling dens closed up, and their chagrined and frustrated leaders left town. And the gospel of Christ came and overflowed and purified like Ezekiel’s river, even the little towns. But that day seems to be over now. Meetings come and sweep over and get the headlines and leave the town right where it found them before. There isn’t one less man in a theater, not one less woman in the saloon, not one less young man in a gambling den, not one fewer person at the racetrack, not one fewer divorce, not one change for the best, or the better. But they’ve had a huge time. My brethren, the glory is not in the land and oh, that God might bring it back to us again, again.

When our habits, when habits and moral standards and the things that we’re amused by are elevated habits when habits and moral standards, and the things that we’re amused by are elevated and changed and some say, there goes Tozer. He’s against amusements and entertainment. I am not. I think that there are some things you can’t always be under strain. The old philosopher said that if you don’t unstring your bow, it’ll soon weaken. They used to pull that bow and bend it. And then of course, tie it. And if they kept it like that all the time, it would slowly change its structure so that it had no more zing in it. But when they weren’t using their bow, they took the cord off of it and let it go straight. So said the philosophers of old. The bow that is always bent will soon lose its power. And we human beings have to have some diversions. We’ve got to have them. You can’t always be thinking on holy thoughts and you can’t always be straining after highest things and you can’t always be carrying upon your heart the thoughts of the glory leaving the land and the woe entering. You can’t always be deadly serious. If you are, you’ll die. There has to be diversion.

One fella said sarcastically about me, he said, Tozer believes in amusements. He’s a marvelous checker player. He meant that to be sarcastic, and I think I’ve played one game in the last year. But my brethren, diversion is one thing. But the whole country has gone wild for diversion. Instead of having 95% serious talks of God and life and death and heaven and hell and our work and our serious obligations and 5% diversion, we’ve changed it until it’s 95% diversion and five stingy percent to think about serious things. I believe that if God revives His people as we’d like to see it, that we’ll have it changed. We’ll have a changed percentage, as they say percentage-wise, an expression I thoroughly detest, but at least know you know what I mean? I believe it’ll change us percentage-wise.

Well, you say, now Brother Tozer, here you go again. What do you want us to be? What do you want us to be? What kind of people do you think we should be? And if this church should be revived again, if there should come a rejuvenation, a resurgence of spiritual life, an upper rushing of spiritual power, what would we be like? What would we be like? Well, I want to describe it. I want to describe this church, if we could have what I’m talking about and praying about and hoping for. I would I would want such an act and work of God among us as would make us a clean people, a people that are pure and holy.

Now, is anybody here going to get up and object to that? Is there anybody here that is ready to say, I can’t go along with the pastor that our people ought to be a holy people, a truer people, so good that nobody can make an accusation stick. Anybody here that will get up and say, Mr. Tozer, I don’t believe in that? That’s fanaticism. That’s extremism. Surely, you don’t expect us to be a people so morally clean and pure and holy and so good that nobody can charge us honestly and make an accusation stick, that we can get up and say about our present and future lives as Jesus did? Which one of you charges me with sin, our past? God knows. We like to talk about that only with hushed voices, because the blood of Christ had to cleanse us from that.

But our present and our future, anybody going to get up and say, I object, sir, Mr. Chairman, I stand to object to this motion, that the people of this church ought to be a clean people, a pure a holy people, capable of good works again. My concept for us is that we’d be a loving, kind, charitable people, forgiving and big-hearted and tight-mouthed about each other’s faults, mine and yours. Anybody going to get up and say, Mr. Chairman, I beg permission to make a speech against that. I don’t want to see our people as forgiving, big-hearted, kind, charitable people ready to overlook people’s faults and tight-mouthed about things they hear. I don’t want a church like that.

Well, there’s no church like that in hell, brother. There is no church like that, I think anywhere but where the blood flows and the Spirit of God has unhindered right of way. That’s my concept of what a church ought to be. Do you think it’s extreme if I say that I want our people to be a glad, joyous people, filled with heavenly joy? Not mere pleasantry, not mere, not mere hand shaking, not mere cordiality. Why, cordiality is something you can learn from books. You can go to any library. These ushers of ours can go to any library and take down a book on how to be an usher. Just how to stand and how to smile and how to comb their hair, if any, and just how to do it.

Why, you can learn that. And they teach that to kids when they’re selling in the stores, and they teach that to girls behind the counters in 10-cent stores. They teach that to Fuller Brush salesman, and radio announcers learn that. Cordiality, congeniality, the magnetic handshake and the flashing smile and the toothy grin; all that my brother can be right along, and go along with a church that has no power and no purity and no presence of God and no worship. The church that is headed not for heaven but for hell, And yet they can be a social crowd, learning to be jovial and friendly. And yet if you want real joviality and real back slapping congeniality, don’t go to any church, go to a lodge, or go to some group, where men meet in smoke-filled rooms and tell off-colored stories. There’s a place to find real congeniality brother. They’ll make you feel that you’re a part of the outfit and you belong.

That isn’t what I’m talking about at all. The man who wrote “How to win friends and influence people died the other day. He left behind him that book, and if that’s what we wanted, why we could afford to put on the campaign and you would pay for it. You’d pay for anything I suggest, I found that out. That’s the reason I wanted to be most prayerful and cautious before I ever commit to anything because you’re so fine and generous. But you’d pay for books so that all might read how we might be jovial, congenial, affable, amiable, and all those long words ending in el. And when you had it, you wouldn’t have anything at all.

But I believe that the people of God are to be a glad people. A joyous people, glad with a heavenly joy. Not mere pleasantries, but glad with a heavenly joy. I think of that man {Paris} Reidhead that preached here for us. Why, maybe most of you, I think very few of you know him personally. You only heard him preach and you enjoyed him a lot; hearing him last Spring. But you ought to know the man in person. You ought to go around with the man. He’s one of the happiest men I ever met my life. He’s joyful to the point of tears; happy and yet he can say a witticism and, and turn a funny remark that will bring you the house down with laughter. And yet he’s no clown, no comedian, no humorist, but a serious-minded man, full of the Holy Ghost, and one of the happiest men I’ve ever met.

The happiness that man has is not the happiness of this world at all. It isn’t the happiness of conviviality nor congeniality. It is the happiness that God brought out of the tomb when He raised His Son from the dead and set Him at His own right hand. It is the joy of the new creation living in a man’s heart who belongs to that new creation, down here in the old creation. That’s what I mean, a happy people, people that you don’t have to grind and roll in order to get them worked up to joy, but whose hearts are alive with the joy of God. Oh, brother, that’s something else altogether.

Are you’re voting against that if we were to take a vote this morning and I were to put the question and say, would we have all those in favor of our people being a glad people, joyous with heavenly joy and radiant with the Holy Ghost? All in favor say aye. Would we get a unanimous vote or would there be some who say that’s fanatism? All right, then I can see this people to be an eager and enthusiastic people. Excuse us for having my conference here. But an eager, enthusiastic people; now that’s what I like. Not a worked-up people, but an eager, enthusiastic people.

Against that, my brother? If you’re against that, I don’t know where to put you. I believe God’s people ought to be enthusiastic. And I believe that if we were as spiritually enthusiastic as we ought to be, that we could send out one, two dollars for every one we’re sending to missions, and we could send out two missionaries for every one we’ve sent out. And we could win two souls forever to one we’re winning. And we could hit the city just twice as hard as we are hitting it.

And then, hungry Bible devouring people. That’s five. Anybody here going to get up and vote against that? Did you read your chapter? You say, all right, very good, sir. But a hungry, Bible-devouring people that delights in the law of the Lord. I might pass on this little word to you and keep it anonymous, so not to embarrass anybody. But I’ve had a lot of conferences over the past weeks with people who come to see me. And I regret to say that almost all of them are persons that are either in very great spiritual trouble, or else are actually mentally and nervously going to pieces, or in danger of it.

But the other day, I had another kind of visitor. A lady asked whether she might come to see me a few minutes before the prayer meeting, and I said, Sure, run upstairs and we’ll have a word together. So, she came up. And she told me a wonderful, heart-engaging story, the story of her spiritual life, being brought up in a home where everybody was strait-laced and careful; and where she ran with only religious and the best people, and never committed wrongs or did anything at all that she shouldn’t be ashamed of. But that all this time, out in the eastern city, even in the Alliance, and all this time did not know what it was to have the Holy Ghost inside her bosom. It was all external, right and good and scriptural and according to the law of Moses and the prophets and the New Testament. But now she said, and the tears ran down her face. Now, the Holy Ghost has come. There’s new light inside. This Bible has become a new book and she held it in her two hands. This Bible has become a new book to me now. It’s wonderful. Now, that woman is modest and she’d hesitate to get up and say it herself, but I’m giving her testimony for her. Now, I want to ask you, can anybody can hug this Bible and say the Holy Ghost has made this for the first time, a new living book to me. Does anybody object to that? Would anybody rise and say, I don’t believe in that. I object, sir, and I vote against it. I don’t believe there is.

Then, I believe that we could become a generous people. Great grace should be upon us all and that we could give freely, more freely than ever, all of our wealth to the Lord. Anybody object to that? I think not. And then a reproducing people, the people who will win people to God, that can win souls. Anybody object? I think not. Now, that’s what I mean. O God, if glory should return to our land?

Well, I don’t know that glory will ever return to America. I don’t know. There are two sinister forces of work tearing America to pieces, two sinister forces. I don’t say much about them in public. I do not want to get a reputation any more than I have for being a radical or extremist. And these are partly political, so I do not discuss them. But there are two sinister forces that are working to tear America to pieces: brainwashing a whole population. Brainwashing, by midst of books and magazine, by the use of books and magazines and television and radio and all this. Brainwashing and conditioning psychologically a generation for the coming of communism, or Catholicism or the Antichrist.

So, I don’t know whether America can ever raise her head again. She’s bleeding to death. And whether she’ll survive as a Christian nation, another generation, I do not know. But revival can come on three levels. It can come on the community level, which would be our land. It can come on the church level, which would be our church. It can come on the individual personal level, which would be you or me or you and me.

So next Sunday, in the morning, I want to forget America, and I even want to forget this church. And I want to talk as one man to another one. How can you have a personal revival? How can you have a resurgence of Pentecostal life surging up within you and show you how you can have, not next year, not next week, but now. I hope you’ll be here and that you’ll pray for me in the meantime.

Tags Church, Jesus Christ, Revival

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 1, 2023

“The Secret Place of the Most High”

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The Secret Place of the Most High

Pastor and author, A.W. Tozer

July 29, 1956

Now, the first verse of Psalm 91. I preached three times last Sunday and twice every other day except one, to what one man called a motley group. They weren’t motley, but they were certainly inter-denominational. And sitting on the front row every blessed meeting was an Episcopalian rector. And he shook hands with me over and over, and expressed his appreciation and sense of oneness with the kind of truth that we were trying to bring.

But now, the 91st Psalm, he that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High, shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. This 91st song is one which, because of its misuse by so many, I have never, I wonder if I could confess this, cared too much for. Probably I shouldn’t say there’s any passage of Scripture I don’t care for. But even you’ll admit there are some passages dearer to you than others and some that you don’t read, except dutifully, when you’re reading through the Bible. And the 91st Psalm was one, among all those golden shining songs, that to me, has been sort of dutiful song, which I read, but didn’t really get too much out of. And I have never preached on it in 28 years that I can recall, though, I probably have referred to texts from it occasionally. But I’ll let me correct my fault this morning. And perhaps for the next Sunday or two, and talk from the 91st Psalm.

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High. Let’s break that down. First, there is the place. Now, place is a location, and it can be and usually is a geographical location. It is also a moral or spiritual or mental location by extension of the word. But let’s not forget that it’s a real place. The secret place of the Most High is not a poetical phrase only. It is a real place, having an exact location, not vague, nor indefinite. It is so real that we can be in it or we can be out of. We can be nearer to it, or far from it. We can be at any time, approaching it or going further away from it. That’s a real place. And yet it is not a physical place.

The secret place of the Most High is not a church. I do not want you ever to become church Christians in the sense that you’re building Christians. I don’t want you to be tabernacle Christians. We have had an epidemic of tabernacle-ism, and I don’t like it. But I’ve said enough on that, I think in the past, but still, I don’t want you to think that you must come to a church in order to be in the secret place of the Most High. This building is not the secret place of the Most High. I was around here when it was built. And anything that I saw being built, couldn’t be the secret place of the Most High because Moses wrote about the secret place of the Most High, assuming Moses is the author, and I think everybody does, of this Psalm. And so, anything that Moses wrote about couldn’t be this building, because 16 years ago, I saw it being built.

So, it is not a church. It is not even a prayer closet. We say sometimes that I’m glad we testify and glad I came to church today. I’m glad to be able to sit in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Oh no, the church is not the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, neither is the meeting the heavenly place in Christ Jesus. That is a spiritual location, not a physical one. So that not even your prayer closet, however precious your secret times of prayer may be. That’s not what the Psalmist meant when he said, he that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High. It’s not a shrine, and it is not a meeting. It’s not a country, not even a holy land. It is not a denomination, and it is not a doctrine.

The secret place of the Most High is the heart of God, the place of faith in God, love for God, confidence in the love of God in Christ, obedient trust in the mercy of God. It is a state of heart, in a state of heart. It is our state of heart in the heart of God. That is the secret place of the Most High. And we may enter it and we may abide in it. And we may be in it or out of it. But the secret place of the Most High is there for us.

Now, it is a secret place. And it is secret, not because it is hard to find, nor because it is hidden or difficult. It is a secret place because there are so few who enter it. It is an open secret, and is secret only because there are so few Christians that ever find or enter into the secret place of the Most High. There are a few hungry, eager people in all the denominations who are seeking the secret place of the Most High and are finding it.

I do not intend to come to you from a week away and tell you about what happened there, though we walked the borderline of revival to the point where they were up into the night hours into four o’clock in the morning, seeking God and getting through to victory. But they were of all denominations, and I find these seekers after God in every denomination. Let me tell you this. I have told two or three here since I’ve come about one young man who was at the Highland conference. This young man was one of the best-looking young fellows that I have ever seen. Eighteen years old, handsome to the point of being a Caller ad and muscular, muscled up great chest, great arms, and simply good and wholesome to look at down to his waist. And from there down, was a polio paralytic, completely, and had to be in a wheelchair.

That young man, in his eagerness to get to this place; he comes from a broken home and had no help there, presumably. But in order to get to this place, this young, eager 18-year-old boy, hopelessly paralyzed from the waist down, his shrunken, flimsy legs dragging behind him like fins. This boy hitchhiked 150 miles in a wheelchair to get to that conference. And one day to their astonishment, wheeled himself into the office and said, I want to work so I can stay here. And they said what can you do? He said, I can trim hedges. I can do things. So, they gave him a job. And he pulled himself around, trimming hedges in order that he might be there at the conference. And he was at every meeting, sitting there, listening eagerly.

When I think of that young man, I’m bothered for some of you who have been brought up in Christian homes and have been surrounded with all the nurture and spiritual culture that could be brought to bear on you. And yet, here’s a young man from an un-Christian, divided home, hitchhiking in a wheelchair 150 miles to get to that place of God, that place of God.

A little girl whose father had tried to kill her mother, whether she saw it or not, I’m not sure and she had escaped and the neighbors had gotten the police to get away this drunken beast. And this little girl hated her father until she was violent. And they were trying, they were soothing her and trying to teach her and one great big young fella with a daughter about her age used to lead her around. She put her arms around his neck and said, oh, I wish I had a daddy like you. But she was only to have him for two weeks, and then back to that.

Brethren, when I think of how without a chance in the wide world, without anything to encourage them, without anybody apparently to help them at all or even pray for them. Some people touched by a divine stroke, find their way through. And others, it’s secret. They don’t know where it is. They haven’t found it and probably never will. It’s as unreal to them as fabled Atlantis, the island that’s supposed to have arisen out of the Atlantic Ocean stayed a while and gone back down again, beautiful, but only temporary.

So, this secret place isn’t Atlantis to the average person. And they that dwell in it tend to be different I have noticed. They who dwell in this secret place are different. They’re peculiar, and they’re a little bit careless of this life. And they tend to flock together, though they’re lonely. And they know each other without an introduction. I’ve said this many times, but it’s been confirmed, it’s good to arrive at a conclusion spiritually, and then, as you move about, find that your conclusion is not being disallowed, but that it’s being confirmed and strengthened. And my conclusion that the people of God today are not the mobs and the crowds, but people, the elect, picked out from all of the religious hubbub and united together in a bond of spiritual union. And they know each other. This Episcopalian rector, why he and I had the sweetest, warmest, longest talks together. And he even wants a list of books that he ought to read so he’ll get to know God better. I’m going to send it to him.

Well, I am not an Episcopalian. I never could fool around with an altar and a robe, but he does. And yet, there is a hungry heart among the Episcopalians and hungry hearts everywhere; and they know each other without an introduction. They say this, Mr. Jones, Mr. Smith, and they shake hands and look at each other. And after the first prayer, they know they’ve known each other in Christ long before that.

Then it says, the secret place of the Most High. Now that adjective “most” is there, but the high, since it’s supposed to be a noun, usually an adjective, it’s God Himself, the Most High. Usually it said, the Most High God, but here He is called the Most High, and so it’s God.

Now, the first occurrence of the term is back in the book of Genesis, so far as we know the first time it was used. And Abraham when he heard that Lot was taken captive, armed and his trained servants born in his house, 318, and he divided himself against the enemy, and sent his servants out and smote them and pursued them unto Hobab. And he brought back all the goods and also brought back Lot and his goods and the woman also and the people. And the king of Sodom went out and Melchizedek king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine, and he was the priest of the Most High God. And He blessed Abraham and said, blessed be Abram of the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth. And blessed be the Most High God which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And Abraham gave Melchizedek tithes of all. And the king of Sodom said unto Abram, give me the persons and take the goods to thyself. And Abraham said to the king of Sodom, I have lifted up my hand unto the Lord, the Most High God, the possessor of heaven and earth, but I will not take from a thread even to a shoe latchet. And I will not take anything that is thine, lest thou should say, I have made Abram rich.

Now, Moses wrote this. And if Moses also wrote the Psalm, you see the spiritual and mental tie in here. The Most High, he was thinking of the Most High God who was Jehovah, possessor of heaven and earth and the meaning of the words to us. We have the disadvantage of knowing too much about it. But there were pagan gods all around Abram and all around Melchizedek and the city of Salem. But here was the one God, the Most High God, the God over all. And here was the Hierarchy of Heaven, the princedom, the powers, the angels, the seraphim, and those watchers and holy ones that Daniel spoke about. But above them all was the Most High God throned in life, the Unbeginning One, immortal and all wise and all powerful. God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is the Most High God.

So, this secret place, this spiritual location, this home, this mansion, this abiding place of the heart, is secret only because so few know it, but it’s in the heart, the Most High God. And they that dwell in the secret place of the Most High, shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. And you and I actually don’t know what this means, because it’s rare that we’re caught out in the sun in such unbearable heat that we have to hurry to a place of shade. But in the Bible lands where this was written, the shadow meant the difference between life and death. Because you see, here, the sunrays slant, and we don’t get them. They’re not as dangerous, but there they’re straight down. And that is the reason that the terror could walk by day and by night, and that there could be sun stroke. And there could be those who were smitten by the stroke and even the moon at night they said. The light and heat were sufficient that it could strike some people, weak persons or old persons. And they just had to have shadow.

Oh, we sing, Jesus is a rock in a weary land, the weary land, the shelter in the time of storm. And in the desert land there, in the waste howling wilderness, the sun during those long days came straight down. Our missionaries in those areas have to wear helmets to keep from having sunstroke because of the rays of the sun. And they need shadow, they need shade. That’s why they talk so much about our God being a shade and a shadow and a place of cool retreat, and a rock and a tree, because they needed shadow there in those days.

Now, we don’t understand it physically as they did, but we understand it or should understand it spiritually. For we need a shadow from the heat as bad as they did. We need a shadow from the heat caused by friction and the heat caused by pressure, those two kinds of heat, and we desperately need them. The friction of moral incompatibility, incompatibility with the world; the incompatibility of the Christian heart with the world.

If you don’t know what I mean, you’re not anywhere near the secret place of the Most High. If I’m speaking a strange language and you know the English words, but you don’t know what I mean, then I would urge you to turn your face toward the secret place and push on at any cost till you enter there, because there is a moral incompatibility with the world. Lot felt it in Sodom. The Scripture said he vexed, he chased, he irritated his righteous soul, for though he went to Sodom and failed tragically. He was a good man in a terribly bad city, and he couldn’t do anything about it. He had no power to make them obey Him. So, he had to watch their wickedness. He had to see their evil. He had to. And thus, he vexed and irritated his soul.

There was a friction set up by the moral incompatibility between Sodom and the world. And there was Israel in Egypt, all the day in Egypt. Israel had to see that which shocked and wounded their Hebrew hearts. And Christ and apostate Israel, when our Lord came to apostate Israel, he walked up and down among them, and everywhere. Their religion of His day set up an irritation on His holy soul. And He was pressed between the upper and the nether millstone, ground, and the friction of His times. He said, the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up. His zeal for God, in a temple where there were cattle and money-changers and worldlings and hypocrites and lawyers and rabbis that knew not God. When He heard the name of His Father spoken by lips that never had known His Father, it set up a friction on the personality of Jesus and hurt Him and wounded Him. And Paul, in his epistles, tells about how he wrote even weeping. And the Reformers in their day were men of wounds.

Somebody told me about Rolland Pierce, who was one of the Keswick brethren from Philadelphia, and they say a great man of God there, though I have not met him personally, I’ve had correspondence with him. But somebody told me that Rolland Pierce had been at Highland Lake the year before. And one day on a walk, he said, Brother, I’m a wounded man. I’m a wounded man. He said, I’m happy in Christ all right, but I’m wounded because of the church. I’m wounded because of religion in America today. I’m wounded for what’s going on. I’m glad he’s a wounded man. I wouldn’t solve his wounds. I wouldn’t in any wise try to heal or to comfort. It’s the wounded hearts that are going to win the world, or going to win Christianity back to Christ again in these last days. Only the wounded hearts ever know the true fellowship with God. And Paul, you remember, said he wanted to know the fellowship of His suffering in order that he might know Him.

Well, that suffering is necessary. And if you don’t know what I mean by moral incompatibility. If where you work you manage somehow by being up on baseball and everything else, and the latest current Reader’s Digest joke. If you manage to keep up on all that in order that you might live peacefully with the people you work with, then you don’t know what I mean. If you don’t know the loneliness and the heartache of being forced to work next desk to a man who smokes like Vesuvius and curses and embarrasses, if indeed it does embarrass the young ladies in the office by his off-color jokes. If you don’t feel morally incompatibility there, and the vexation and the irritation of being good in a bad world, then you won’t know what I mean. There will be no heat.

But to the Reformers, there was heat. And to the missionaries, there is heat. The missionary that must go out. Ed’s in the Valley today along with the rest of them. Imagine it, nakedness around about them, dirty, smelly, foul, nakedness. And according to all that I can hear, a sexiness which is so terrible and base and obscene, that it’s shocking and horrifying; and they’ve got to live with there. Well now, if that doesn’t set up friction and heat, the heat of incompatibility with the world. Oh, we need the secret place of the Most High.

And always remember, the secret place of the Most High is not a place you leave to do battle with the Lord, because it’s not a physical location. It is the place from which you reach out to do the battle of the Lord against the foe. Nobody needs leave the secret place of the Most High. When I go to preach somewhere, I don’t say goodbye to the secret place, as the soldier does to the barracks and goes out to get shot at. But I take the secret place with me. And every one of you can have the secret place of the Most High right there where the incompatibility is. Right there where the friction is. Right there where the heat is, and you must have it. Then you can hide there. Now all the sons of heaven who are on the earth will know this friction, this heat.

And then there’s a heat caused by pressure. Science and civilization have set up unthinkable pressures, simply unthinkable pressures. The pressure for instance to the human ear drums that come from airplanes. Now, I don’t want to seem to be an old grouch who believes in the horse and buggy. I don’t believe in the horse and buggy. I haven’t ridden in a horse and buggy for many, many years and don’t intend to go back to the horse and buggy. But they tell me that when we convert over to the rocket or jet planes, that it’s going to be ten times noisier than it is now. I don’t know what we’ll do. We’ll have to seal in our churches in order to be able to be heard when a plane goes over.

But science and civilization have set up pressures, the pressures, and that pressure creates heat. Those of you who’ve studied it know that a diamond is simply carbon. It’s the same as the coal you burn in a furnace. But it is coal, carbon that has been put under such unspeakable heat, such tremendous, such terrific heat, that it is set up, pressure I mean, that it is set up a heat which is so high that I wouldn’t even want to tell you for fear I’d miss it by thousands and tens of thousands of degrees. But that’s what makes a diamond. A diamond is simply carbon under pressure, that’s been put under pressure. And back in prehistoric times, perhaps, and such heat has been set up, a diamond has been made. Now, if you know how to do it, the heat and the pressure today can make you a diamond for the King’s crown. But think of the appalling consequences of those who don’t know where the cool place is while the heat’s on. Think of the pressure of civilization.

As I rode along with my friend, Reverend Tracy Miller of Scranton. He came up for a couple of days and took me out for a drive around the hairpin turns and winding ways of the mountains, the Catskill Mountains. And there we saw a building, sitting off a great building, a huge thing, a series of buildings covering what seemed to be acres and acres and acres. And I said, isn’t that a vast institution by the middle of what is it? He said, that’s one of New York’s institutions for the insane. And I said, what a vast thing, isn’t it? Yes, and he said it is being added to continually, continually. New York is paying a price for being the hub of the universe. It’s paying a price in the pressure set up by the high concentration of civilized gadgets and we are paying a pressure for it my friends, don’t forget it. Don’t forget it.

The farmer who chewed the straw with one foot on the lower rail and talked half an hour relaxed and restful over the fence to a neighbor, also chewing a straw, knew nothing of the pressure of the modern farmer who has mechanized his farm. Nothing of the pressure of the farmer who gets into his Piper plane and putts off somewhere to hear a professor lecture on how to get more out of his yield. He’ll get more yield out of his farm. The pressure has been set up. The competition is so fierce, it’s fierce everywhere. The competition in business, automobiles, manufacturers. Now, all cars are good cars now, competition has necessitated that. They’ve got to be. A poor car couldn’t last at all. They’re all good. But they’re all lying about how good they are, in order to get just a little ahead. And if one of them finds one little button and adds it the next year, the other one has that button. And thus, the competition is on, the pressure, the heat, the terror of it. It’s like a foot race. Have you ever seen the pictures or seen in reality, the boys that make those mile dashes and see them when they come in. Their faces are so strained. Their eyes are set in their heads, and it looks as if they might die of heart failure. The pressure is so terrible; just 1/10 of an inch maybe of a second may be the difference between losing and winning that race.

Well, now that’s where we are today. Everywhere, it’s competition, competition. And in certain areas of the evangelical world, it is the same. Everybody’s competing. Maybe you ought to have that kind of a man here. But you know, friends, years ago, I quit it. I don’t care who has a bigger church than mine. I don’t care who’s better known than I am. I don’t care. No competition, no jealousy, no competition. With my high nervous temperament, I would have been dead long ago, if I had not rested in God and found the secret place of the Most High and adopted a blessed, don’t care attitude toward all the religious competition. Let them run their foot races if they want to. It’s in the flesh. Let them tell how many people they have and how many dollars they have and how much they have. I don’t care at all. Last week, I went down, the week before last, I went down and had my doctor give me a check over; took my blood pressure and said you live to be 150 at this rate. No blood pressure, I had some I mean, but I mean, not high. Why? I could have a high blood pressure, I could. I could have hardening of the arteries, but they feel my arteries and say, soft as a young man. Because I will not live under pressure. I will not do it. It doesn’t do God’s work any good. It doesn’t help anybody. I will not live under the curse of pressure.

I have found the secret place, the hiding place of every precious thing. And there in the coolness of the heart of God, I can say, cool me O God and keep me cool while these hot breezes blow. And the magazines come out and everybody’s pushing in, urging in, then the religious press, everybody. I get stuff here all the time for immediate release it says. When I see that, it goes into the wastebasket. For immediate release, somebody wants me to plug him in the Alliance weekly. I plug nobody. Let him earn his spurs. If he’s a missionary and he’s doing a good work, we will report what he’s doing. If there is a good meeting somewhere, we put a little scrib up and tell the people to encourage the others to pray. God’s still working. But we will not plug anybody, because that’s carnal competition and heat. That fellow is running a temperature.

There is a place Brethren, where you don’t have to be under pressure, but you don’t have to run too much of the heat, just enough to make a diamond out of you but not enough to ruin you. A safe, cool, healing, restful life-giving place. It is the secret place of the Most High, and it’s entered by faith in Christ. Not the best people, not the good people, not people specially fitted for it, but just anybody that will enter. Anybody that will enter and there’s a way there, a blood-stained way. I heard Strat Shufelt on the record singing several times. They had records and played them out over the loudspeaker. I found a way through the blood, past the veil to the holy of holies with God. And I recognized Strat’s good old voice and I wanted to shake his hand though he was miles away. And he sang about that holy place, that good, holy place where he’d found, through the blood, past the veil, in the holy place. Brethren, that’s where we need to be today. And then, civilization won’t kill us. It won’t!

Tags God, Jesus Christ, Secret Place, Worship