Tag: Peter

Categories
Messages

Tozer Talks

“The Kind of Christians we are or Should Be“

PDF DownloadDownload

The Kind of Christians we are or Should Be

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

February 14, 1954

Summary

A.W. Tozer emphasizes the importance of recognizing one’s identity as a Christian, as revealed in 1 Peter 2:9. Tozer warns against letting the world define who Christians are and encourages them to embrace their true identity as God’s chosen people. Tozer also discusses the identity and purpose of the royal priesthood as revealed in the Bible, highlighting that Christians are not just individuals but a new order of humans with a dual nature as both priests and a holy nation. Understanding one’s identity and purpose as a believer is crucial for resisting the devil and the world’s interest in self-discovery.

Message

In 1 Peter, second chapter, verses eight, nine and ten, Peter had been talking about certain ones to whom Jesus Christ was a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, who stumbled at the Word in their disobedience. Then he used that small but highly meaningful word, but, ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation, a peculiar people, that ye should show forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God, which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.

One of the ancient moral teachers of the past, one who was very dear to the Christians of the first centuries owing to the fact that truth is all one piece, and if a thing is true, it is true anyway, so that, as the brother once told me, a bee can gather honey, not only from a flower but from a weed. So, the early Christian church by a kind of affinity, accepted one of those moral teachers not on the level of inspired truth, but sort of as a helpful side message. I refer to Epictetus.

And one of his doctrines was this. I give it to you as an illustration of what I’m to say to follow. And I give you only a running translation of it rather than an exact verbatim declaration. He said that the first thing about a man was that he was a human being, that that was first, that he was a man. And he said that you could discover what a man ought to be by discovering what the nature of the man is.

Just as you can pick up a hammer and, if you’re reasonably intelligent, and all my audience is, you could deduct what the hammer was for by holding it in your hand. You would know that that thing wasn’t shaped to saw a board off with or open a can of salmon. You would deduce from that that it was to be used to pound in nails. Or if you pick up a saw, and you would deduce from the shape of the saw that the nature of the saw, that it was not made to pound in nails, but to saw lumber.

So said the old man, we deduce from the nature of man, what kind of person or what kind of being he ought to be. And to be a man is the first responsibility of a human being. Then he said, having settled that, then we can know our duties. Now, that’s as far as he went. The Bible has little to say about duties, privileges in the Bible, but he said duty. And he said, we can know our duties by figuring what we are and what facets of our humanhood, our manhood, which way they turn. For instance, he said now, settling that you’re a human being, a man, and that your highest privilege and responsibility is to develop yourself as a human being.

Now again, following that, you can know what that development is by figuring your relationships. He said, first, you’re a son or a daughter. And the fact of sonship implies certain obligations and duties and responsibilities toward your parents. Then he said again, you’re a husband or a wife. And the fact of wifehood or husbandhood implies certain responsibility toward them. And the fact then that you’re a citizen implies certain responsibility toward the state; that you’re a father, certain responsibility toward your children and so on.

Now, that is not highly inspired. You can find that out if you just churn up a little of the gray matter that’s in your head. And somehow or other the church liked that and use to read that. Now, not I say on the level with inspired truth, but as a helpful thing as we read Benjamin Franklin or something. They liked it. Now with that as a little backdrop of illustration, let me point out to you here what Peter said. He said, you’re a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people.

Now, just as Epictetus says that the first thing is, you’re a man, and after that you figure out your responsibilities as a man. Peter says the first thing about you is you’re a Christian. He takes the manhood for granted, he begins where Epictetus ended and says, being born again, that we are born again or begotten again, he calls it, unto a living hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. That’s in the opening part of the chapter. And in the latter part of the first chapter, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the Word of God which liveth and abideth forever.

He begins not with our basic humanhood. He begins with our basic Christianity, that we are born another time; that we’re now Christians. And he says now, we’ll take that for granted. Then he goes on to show that as Christians there are at least four, he certainly doesn’t give us all here, but he says, there are at least four facets to your nature and four relationships. There are four things that you are, just as Epictetus is man, is a husband, or a citizen, or both, or a father. Just as he has these various relationships, so as a Christian, you have various relationships; you are as a Christian, a number of things. And you can figure out your duty and your privileges by seeing what you are.

Let’s notice here, he said, now, as a Christian, you belong to a company which God calls a chosen generation. He applied all the terms of the Old Testament Israel to the New Testament Church, only he raised them up onto another level, and made them spiritual. Israel was called a chosen seed, and we even sing now, you chosen seed of Israel’s race, ye ransom from the fall. And Peter says, now you Christians have various facets to your nature. There are various things you are and one of them is you’re a chosen generation.

Now, that word generation there doesn’t mean descent in the sense that we mean it nor does it mean a time such as we say, this generation. But it means a breed, if you’ll allow that rather ugly word for such a wonderful thing as being born of God. It means a breed, a species. He says that you Christians are a chosen species. You are a new breed of human. We start with your humanity, but we go on to your new birth. And that constitutes you a new breed of humans, as completely different from the fallen race of Adam, as though you belonged on another world.

You are a chosen breed, a chosen generation of people. Now that’s what we are. And just as Epictetus’ man could figure out his responsibilities to the state by remembering that he’s a citizen, so we Christians can figure out our responsibilities somewhat, and privileges by remembering that we are a new breed of human. I know the world will laugh at that and they have good reason to laugh the way some of us act. We act very much like the old barnyard scrubs that we used to be. But God says that we are nevertheless a new, a chosen generation, a select generation.

Just as men select breeds and produce the finest, God has, not by building on Adam, but by rebirth from above, created a new generation of humans. And He said, now there’s your responsibility and there’s your privilege. That’s how you can figure out how you are to be; and what kind of person you are to be by remembering who you are. If God’s people only could remember who they were. We let the world tell us what we are. We let our government tell us what we are. To the world, we’re simply religious people. To our government, we’re taxpayers and voters. But God says that we’re more than that. We’re that, certainly, certainly we are.

We’re citizens. And as citizens, we vote. We pay taxes. We pay taxes anyway, whether we vote or not. But we are more than that we are a chosen generation; the real born-again Christian is. He belongs to a new school of humanity, a new level of humanity, a new breed of humanity, having been born from above and still being human. A twice-born human generation is what the Christians are. That ought to give us pause and ought to give us, as they say, food for thought, what kind of people we ought to be.

The priests of the Old Testament were not royal priests. The royal line was the Judah line, and the priestly line was the Levitical line. But the New Testament Christian is neither of Judah or Levi or Dan or any of the rest. He is of a new order of human, twice-born human, and one of his functions is to act as a priest. And because he’s born of royal seed, he’s a royal priest.

So now, if you will think of yourself like that and not let the world tell you what you are; not let the books on psychology tell you what you are but go to God’s word and find out what you are as a believing man and a Christian, a follower of Christ. You belong to a royal priesthood. And the priesthood now lies in the hands of the individual Christians. It is not an order of people apart. The church is the priesthood, and every Christian is his own priest. That’s very hard for some people to understand, that every Christian is a priest and not only a priest, but a royal priest. But he says more. He says, you’re also a royal priesthood.

Now, that was familiar to the Old Testament. They had a priesthood. Those who could, approached God, officially approached God for the people. They were the priests, and they came out of only one line. Not all could be priests, so even Jesus could not have been an Old Testament priest because He belonged to the line of Judah. And not only that, but they knew what a priesthood was. It consisted of certain orders of men, or an order of men, who offered sacrifices and made prayers and stood between God and the people as a priesthood.

But now he says, you are a priesthood; you Christians now are a priesthood. That’s the other facet of your nature. The other direction your life moves, you are priests, and not only priests, but you are royal priests. For that reason, we do not need the priests of the Old Testament temple. We do not need the priests of Buddhism nor the priests of the Catholic Church. We need no priests because we are ourselves priests. Priests don’t go to priests for help. We are our own priests. And we are constituted so by virtue of the fact that we belong to a new order of humans, a new breed of the human race. The old humans we are, but new humans we are also.

And the day will be when the old humanity shall pass away as the cocoon from the butterfly. And all that you are and that you spend so much money and time on and boast so about, all your old Adamic generation will pass off from you as a cocoon, and you will spring up into a new life with only the new part of you alive forevermore. And the old shall die and pass away. So, we are a new generation and a chosen one, but we are also a royal priesthood.

And then says the Scripture you’re a holy nation. The church is here thought of as a nation. That Jesus Christ as our Lord and King, and as Israel was a holy nation in the midst of the nations but not part of the nation. So, the church, the true Church of Christ is a holy nation, dwelling in the midst of the nations, but not part of the nation.

Now, if we think of ourselves like that, I recommend that you sit down sometime and think about what you are, just think about it. You say you don’t want to get interested in yourself. You’d better, because the devil is and the world is, so you’d better. And if you’re a believer in Christ, you’d better sit down and in the presence of God quietly think with the Scriptures open before you what you are. As a born-again man, what the different relationships are that you hold and what facets of your nature there are.

One of them is that you belong to a separated nation. Holy here has to do with ceremonially separated as well as morally pure. Just as Israel dwelt in the middle of the nations, part of the world, but not a part of the nations, so we now as a new priesthood, a royal priesthood, compose a nation, a new nation, a spiritual nation within the world.

They say that if you take a globe of the world and turn it so the most land area is visible, and the least water area so as the most land visible to you from where you sit. Right in the geographic center of that vast land area will be Palestine. God said in the midst of the earth, and He meant what He said.

And Israel was a nation apart, cut off to the south and to the north and to the east and to the west by carefully defined boundaries. And she lived a people apart in the midst of the nation; and her curse came when she forgot her holy, national status and began to intermarry and intermingle with the world around about her. Then God turned that same world loose on her, and her armies came in and destroyed her, so that Jerusalem alone, they say, was destroyed 70 times in history.

Now my friend, if you will think of, as a Christian, what you are, you belong to a holy nation. And you can’t afford to fuss with any of the nationals in this new race, this new priesthood, this new nation, you can’t afford to have anything at odds if you can get out of it with anybody. But love everybody and live in harmony so far as you’re able to do it with everybody, because we’re part of the nation and a holy nation, separated from the world. Christianity in our day doesn’t see this. We try to dovetail in and gear in and blend in; the sharp outlines are gone and there’s a cowardly blending.

God has stood the light on one side and said, let be light and on the other He said, let there be darkness. And he called the one day and the other night, and God has meant that division to be down the years. But we’re living now in an unholy twilight where there can be discovered very little from that wholly light and not too much that’s wholly dark. For even sin has taken some of the shining robes of Christianity and disguised its filthiness. But God’s people ought to see to it that they are what God says they are. We are what He says we are, a holy nation, a separated nation, living in the midst of the world, but absolutely apart from it.

And the fourth thing, Peter said was, a peculiar people. And of course, a peculiar people was the–peculiar was the old word 350 some years ago that was translated; peculiar meant queer. It means queer now, but then it meant a people for a position; they bought people, a purchased people. And that’s what it meant then. It doesn’t mean that now. Peculiar now, if a fellow does strange things they say he is peculiar. If he has, idiosyncrasies, I think is the word they use now, personality problems.

A queer man is a man with a personality problem. But that’s not what the Bible means. The Bible means by peculiar, a purchased people, and it was the term God used of Israel back in Deuteronomy 7. They were purchased by the blood of the sacrificial lamb and brought out a peculiar people taken unto God Himself. And that’s what Christians are.

The world says you bigoted people full of pride. Who do you think you are that you should claim to be the people of God in any particular sense? Isn’t God the Father of all men? The answer is no. Don’t try to apologize. Just say no. Don’t quote four or five authorities and soften it down. Just say no, because you know that God is not the Father of all people. He’s the Father of such as believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. And He takes this new breed of people, this born from above breed that constitutes a royal priesthood and a chosen generation and a peculiar people; He takes them unto Himself in a way that the peoples of the world are never taken.

You have a perfect right to stand on God’s truth on that. And if they say, who do you think you are? Why you say, I know who I am by the mercy of God, because He says, that which in time past were not a people, but now are the people of God, which had not obtained mercy but now have attained mercy. Verse ten, you can write in the back of your wallet or engrave it on the tablets of your heart, because this is yours if you’re a true Christian. In time past you were not a royal, a chosen, a holy people, but now are the people of God, which had not attained mercy, but now have attained mercy.

So, we Christians, this Communion Sunday morning, ought to think of ourselves as being what God says we are. We ought not to let false modesty or doubts, or unbelief prevent us from accepting God’s appraisal of us and putting ourselves in faith and humility where God puts us. And if we’re not there we can get there. For the door of mercy stands wide open for all that will come.

A people for His own possession, a peculiar, a marked-off people, constituting a nation apart of priests, royal priests, rising out of this new thing which is born in the midst of the earth, the church. Father, we pray Thy blessing upon this Word.

Categories
Messages

Tozer Talks

“How to Think as a Christian“

PDF Formatted TranscriptDownloaD

“How to Think as a Christian”

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 17, 1957

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories
Messages

Tozer Talks

“Peter and the Lord“

PDF Formatted TranscriptDownloaD

“Peter and the Lord”

Author and Pastor A.W. Tozer

March 10, 1957

In the 16th chapter of Matthew’s gospel, the Gospel as written by Matthew under the inspiration of the Spirit, beginning with verse 13. When Jesus came into the coast of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, whom do men say that I the Son of Man am? And they said, some say that Thou art John the Baptist, some Elias, others, Jeremias or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, but whom say ye that I am? Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. And charged He that his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ. From that time forth, began Jesus to show unto His disciples how He must go up unto Jerusalem and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed and be raised again the third day. Then Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him saying, be it far from thee Lord. This shall not be unto thee. But Jesus turned and said unto Peter, get thee behind me, satan. Thou art an offense unto me for thou savoreth not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

Now, I want you to notice the illogic that is here. First, Jesus blesses Peter because Peter is illuminated and has a testimony that our Lord approves. And then following immediately upon that, Jesus, because there’s more light there, gives still more light and says, I must go up and suffer and be killed and rise again. And the same Peter, whose name had been changed and who was said to be the rock, and thou art Peter, and the same Peter that had had the words blessed art thou for the Father has revealed this to thee, takes Jesus aside. Took Him I assume, took Him aside and rebuked Him and said, be this far from thee Lord. This shall not be unto thee. What you’ve said, isn’t so. It can’t happen to you. But He turned and said under Peter, get thee behind me satan. The same one that He had said, blessed art thou, Simon Barjona. Get thee behind Me satan. Thou art a stumbling block to me, for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

Now, if these two stories, or the two situations that are revealed here, had been backwards to each other, I could have understood it. In verse 21-22, and three where Jesus says that He has to be crucified, and Peter rebukes him for it, and Peter says, get behind Me, Satan, if that had come earlier. And then the great confession had come later, I’d have done what everybody is forced to do. I’d have concluded that there had been a conversion take place in between. But it was a backward conversion. Jesus had predicted that He should be taken and arrested and crucified, and finally He should rise again from the dead. And Peter had protested this. And Christ then rebuked Peter. Now that’s the situation. And the fact that Peter had been illuminated by the Heavenly Father, according to Jesus own words previously, that he had faith in Christ Jesus and nobody else had, and that he was willing to give that as a testimony. This, though it brought the approval of the Savior, and the pronouncement of blessing upon Peters head, it didn’t guarantee Peter against mistakes.

Now, with that thought as a background, I want to go on and point to you simply, that human sympathy can impair spiritual judgment. Peter loved the Lord Jesus. And when Jesus said, I’m going up to Jerusalem now; and you’re thinking of me as the great Jesus that can heal the sick and raise the dead and still the waves and do wonders. But I’m going up to Jerusalem and in a measure, I’m going to disappoint you. I am going to be taken by the Gentiles. And at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, I’m going to be killed. And then He added, I’ll rise again the third day.

Now, if it had been today, they’d have suggested a vacation to our Lord. They’d have said, now the pressure is too heavy, Master. And we love you and we believe in you, but the pressure is too heavy. Evidently, you’re not in a very good mental state. And therefore, we suggest, we will pay your way to Florida. And we will give you a month just to loll around in the sun. But there was nothing wrong with our Lord’s mind. Nothing at all, no exhaustion here, no need of a vacation. He rested when he needed to and told them to do the same. But that wasn’t the trouble here. The trouble was, as He said to Peter, thou savorist not the things that be of God, but the things that be of man. Peter’s mistake was natural enough, and that was just why it was a mistake. It was a natural conclusion.

And Jesus said, you think not, though I’ve looked up about a dozen versions and read about a dozen versions, the most scholarly and accurate, to see what He really said, and they vary. And what Jesus said seemed to be about this. He said, your point of view is earthly instead of heavenly. Your viewpoint is man’s and not God’s. You’re thinking like man, instead of thinking like God. That’s what he said, in effect, thou savorist not is rather old English and we don’t say that anymore. You don’t walk up to a man and say thou savorist wrong. You go up to him and say, I think you’ve got a wrong opinion. It’s just a different way of talking. But that’s what Peter said. And it was Peter’s sympathy. That’s what Jesus said, and He said it because Peter’s sympathy had led him to deny truth, rebuke the Lord and called down self-pity on the Savior. The margin says, pity thyself, Lord. Another version says, why, God have mercy on you Master. This can’t happen to you.

Now, human sympathy then can impair spiritual judgment. Now, we can hardly exaggerate the injurious effect of the fall. When the devil began to deny the fall, about the time of higher criticism and what we now call modernism; when he began to deny the fall and say that humanity has not fallen from a better place, but climbed up to its present position from a worse one. One of the major tenets, one of the keys to unlock all Christian understanding was taken away from us. But we can hardly exaggerate the injurious effects of the fall. And we are made to see, by the words of our Lord and by the Bible generally, that even our good is bad. Or if that’s too strong to say that even our good is bad, then we may say that if it is not bad, it is at least, it at least may blind us and mislead us.

Now, it’s pretty hard to walk up to Peter and say, Peter, your human sympathy is bad. And yet our Lord seemed to do it, for He said, you’re satan; that’s satan talking through you. And this viewpoint of yours, that I’m to be protected and not allowed to suffer, it’s not right. It’s a human thing and a fallen thing, and it’s not God thinking in you. It’s you thinking yourself, or the devil thinking through you. Get behind me satan. So that human affection, one of the most beautiful and tender things left in the world, yet places us on the other side from God, for that’s exactly what happened here. Peter was placed on the other side from God because his affection for the Lord Jesus forbade that Jesus should go and suffer, and said, God, have mercy on you. Don’t you pity yourself Master? Don’t you see, this can’t be. We won’t allow this. And his human sympathies were talking, and his affection was eloquent. And it was this beautiful thing as we say. Human sympathy untouched by Divine Love that placed Peter over on the other side, even though I hesitate to say it, on the side of the devil temporarily and away from Jesus Christ.

Now, the human reason is fallen. And being fallen, it’s not trustworthy. It is like a false compass that is just a little bit off, not much, but enough off so that if a ship or a plane trusts it, there’ll be tragedy and break. It is like a watch that varies, first running ahead and then falling behind. And it may do for a farmer maybe who doesn’t care whether it’s seven or nine to him. It doesn’t make too much difference, but to someone who depends upon a watch, such as a railroad man, it can mean wreck and death. If it’s a varying watch, the human reason is like a colorblind eye in traffic that doesn’t know when the lights have changed.

Now, that’s human reason. And that’s what Jesus meant when he said, Thou thinkest as man thinkest and that’s why you’re so mistaken. And because the human reason is fallen, the religious judgments are warped. They’re warped by passion and by fear and by desire and by prejudice and by pride, all these warped human judgments, just as a watch may have something wrong with it, and its hands may thus be deceiving the owner. Or, just as a compass may deceive the sailor, so human judgments are deceiving to the human who has to trust them, because they’re twisted by the magnetic attraction of passion. They are driven by the dynamic force of fear, desire and prejudice and pride and many other things, twist our judgments. And yet, we are dependent upon our religious judgments to a great degree, because we’re bound to approve and disapprove every day, we’re alive. The Bible says, test the spirits and see whether they be of God.

And the Bible also says, prove all things and hold fast that which is good. And the Bible says, by your fruits, you shall know them. And it says that in one place where it’s possible to be where our senses are sharpened, and our inner life able to tell what is good and what is bad. Hebrews and Paul talks about that now, yet be even though we have a warped, religious judgment, and even though some of those things that are best to us, our sympathies and our affections, will help to warp our judgments. Yet we are forced to use those judgments I say and make decisions that involve life and death and heaven and hell. A carpenter or a farmer or a coal miner or a man who deals in great rough chunks of things, a little mistake might not be so harmful to him, but let us surgeon make a mistake. Let a surgeon make a mistake and how tragic it is. Let a pilot in the air there make a serious mistake, and how tragic it may be and sometimes is for everybody on board.

And you and I are compelled to make decisions, not great chunks of decisions that don’t matter; don’t matter whether it’s seven or nine o’clock, whether we’re on this latitude or longitude or another one or what, but that involves life and death and heaven and hell and peace, a woe forever. And yet, the Lord said to this man, Peter, your thoughts are not God’s thoughts, but the thoughts of man and you think like a worldling.

Now my brethren, up to now it might be discouraging, but I have this to tell you, that the Bible, the Christian dynamic, engages to redeem and save the human mind. The Christian dynamic engages to purify the emotions and to deliver us from the things that warp our judgment: fear and hate and prejudice and pride in these things, and warp our judgment. And the Christian message and the dynamic engage to save us from the carnal human sympathies and from inordinate, carnal affections.

Do you want me to give you an example of what a carnal, human sympathy will do? Here is a pastor, and while he may be himself a saved man and believe in the new birth and the gospel, his human sympathies, such as Peter showed here, often lead him to do, to say this. He goes to visit a man who has been and is known to be a sinful man, a very sinful man. And he’s always been sinful and he’s never lived any other kind of life but a sinful life. And they tell him at the door of the hospital room, the nurse whispers this man has only a few hours. And he checks with the doctor, yes, he has only a few hours. And the weeping wife outside trying to keep back her tears and says, John’s gone in only a few hours. And then she says, but Pastor, I want to ask you one thing. He’s a very sensitive man. He has been all his life, easily hurt, and he’s an affectionate, warm-hearted man and his ideas of religion have all been very broad, and please don’t talk to him about Jesus. Please don’t talk to him about the Savior at all. Because if you do, you will stir him up and he may even have fewer hours to be with us. So when you go in, console him and comfort him.

Well, this pastor stands there in the door, looking at the sad, eager face of the wife, and then looking in at the set face of his old sinner friend whom he knew, and he’s caught in the middle. Is he going to think like God, or is he going to think like a man? Is he going to have divine love or human sympathy? Is it going to be God’s way or man’s; but he’s too weak. He has his children think of, a nice job, and he’s too weak. So, he allows sympathy to get the better of him.

So, he goes in and chats a bit about the weather and he saw a robin this morning, and you’ll be ought of here soon, John. You’ll be back on the golf links and I’ll see you again. He knows he’s lying. And so, after a little perfunctory prayer in which nothing is mentioned about sin or repentance, or the new birth, or hell or death, he goes. He’s made his pastoral call. Three days later, he has the funeral. Again, human sympathy comes and dictates, and human affection says you don’t dare tell the truth about this man. So, he gets up and reminds the public what an outstanding citizen John was. And the shadow falls over everything. The coffin is screwed shut. The man is put down in the grave to await the judgment of the wicked dead. And there has been a falsification of divine truths. Human sympathy has conquered over God’s love. And human affection and pity have taken the place of the tender mercies of the Holy Ghost. Truth dictated that he go in and say to the man, friend, please don’t feel bad, but I must tell you that you’ve been a sinner and except you be born again, you shall surely perish. You may not have long and I’m here as your best friend you ever had. You don’t know it, but I am the best friend you ever had, because I’m telling you, you don’t dare face judgment the way you are. That would be the kindest thing, but it wouldn’t be the most sympathetic thing. It would be the truest thing, but it wouldn’t be the most affectionate thing. And that happens all the time. Afraid to talk to them when they’re dying, for it will hurt their feelings and then preach them into heaven after they’re in hell.

Jesus turned on his old friend Peter and said, and I can hear sadness in that voice, but I can also hear sharpness there. He said, Peter, satan has taken control of your thinking. Get behind me. You are an offense unto me. That is, you’re stumbling block in my road. Get behind me. He was trying to get Jesus to pity himself and miss Calvary.

I think there has not been a time since I’ve been a preacher and been connected with the Missionary Alliance, which has been most of my all, of my adult life that I ever felt this until the Maxeys. Somehow or other I fell in love with those, Shirley and Ed and their lovely children. And they seem, as my wife and I often say, like our children and grandchildren. And for once, human sympathy rose up in me. And I felt like saying, you can’t take these darlings, to that awful Valley. You can’t, this refined, gracious, smiling little woman, you can take her in there Ed. I didn’t say it. But my human sympathies were at war with my, the divine love in my heart. For if ever there was a rose in a dirty junk heap, it is to send the Maxey’s into the Baliem Valley. Human sympathy would have said, no.

And our Lord would have said, get thee behind me. This isn’t the way my church is run. My church isn’t run on human sympathies. My church is run on sacrifice and giving up and cross-carrying and dying, and it means martyrdom or death or cannibalism. My church is run that way, not run by human sympathy. Well, thank God, the Christian dynamic, the power of God in the human life, I say, engages us to deliver us from carnal human sympathies which may be very dangerous. And other cases of sympathies get in the way.

A couple pray and they believe God and finally, years go by and there’s no children, at last, thank God, they’ve got a little girl. Well, now she’s, their delight. And they offer her to the Lord in dedication and they pray over her, and their faces shine as they tell how God answered their prayer and when they had given up hope of ever having children, had this lovely girl. Now, she’s 20 years old and she’s at a missionary convention somewhere. And she’s a Christian and she hears the call and she goes forward with the rest and says I am putting myself in the hands of God. I’ll go anyplace. And she comes home, delighted to tell her parents, I am going to be a missionary.

And that beautiful thing, human love rises and strikes and says we brought you up, we’ve educated you, we’ve prayed over you. You can’t treat us like this. And many such a young woman or man, young man has been beaten down and defeated and forced to take a path God never called him to take, and the foreign field lost a missionary because human sympathy said, no, you can’t go and waste your culture and your education and your intelligence somewhere in some hole in a foreign land among half naked pagans. Sympathy, won over consecration, and human affection over divine love. That’s happening all the time.

And so, the carnal mind is present. It’s present even after we say, thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And even after Christ repeats, blessed art thou, you’re my child. The Father has revealed who I am in your mind. Even after that, the carnal mind is present, and the world influences, and it has its educational media, tradition, and history and society; in schools and literature and all the rest. And these capture and charm even Christian minds. And so, we say, we’re Christians, but we think like men, we’re going to heaven, but we’re thinking like the earth. We say God has our heart, but our mentality is a carnal thing. How shall we then escape the world influences?

It would be time for another sermon, and I wonder, if right here, I shouldn’t break off, and next week, give you a four-point sermon on how we can escape the carnal mind and the earth and the world’s thinking and think like Christians. I’ve got a little four-point conclusion here. But I think I’m going to hold it. It’s five minutes to twelve and I’ve talked about long enough.

But I’ll conclude anyhow by saying this. That we don’t dare trust our human sympathies, and we don’t dare trust our human affections. And yet, we can’t eliminate our human affection. How can you? Already I’ve loved that little boy that I held in my arms this morning. I’ve never seen him before, but already, he grinned at me with that broad, toothless grin. Already I love him. How can you keep from it? What can you do? Is it wrong to love your babies? Is it wrong for me to grin every time I think of my little grandson Paul? No.

Human sympathy is a valid thing. Human affection is a valid thing. But when we project it upward into the spiritual realm and try to understand the strange, self-contradictory mystery of a cross, by means of it, we always fail. And that’s what’s the matter with liberalism and modernism and half of these so-called churches that have no life in them. They have glorified the tender virtues, sympathy and kindness and friendship and tolerance. They’ve glorified the human virtues, and they’ve pushed them upward into the kingdom of God, or tried to do it. And their religion is simply a composite of human virtues.

My brethren, salvation is not a human thing, though it was done for human beings. It’s a divine thing. And My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are My ways your ways said God. And when we try to understand Christianity with our human heads and evaluated it with our human sympathies, we’ll miss it every time. Now thinkest not as God thinkest. Thou thinkest as man thinkest. Get behind me.

Now, those are pretty stern words. And I’m sure, Christ would have been called unChristlike for doing it. But he did it and boldly put Peter behind him. In one version says He turned His back on Peter it’s told, dramatically saying, get out, I can’t listen to that kind of talk. And just three to four verses above, He’d said, blessed art thou. No, my friend, the fact that you’ve been converted, won’t save you from thinking like a worldling unless you do something about it; unless you let God save you from it.

Next week, I want to talk about four escapes: revelation, inspiration, illumination and the power of the Holy Ghost. That’ll be next Sunday morning’s sermon. In the meantime, let us thank God we don’t have to be carnal men and think like carnal men. That God has given us His book and He’s given us His Spirit. And if we dare to be cross-caring Christians, we can get deliverance from the sentimentality of the world and rise into the love of God and see clearly. Amen.