Tag: Prayer

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date November 3, 2024

“Ye Have Not Because Ye Ask Not“

Ye Have Not Because Ye Ask Not

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

December 30, 1956

In the book of James, James, chapter 4, the latter sentence, Ye have not because ye ask not. That’s the negative. And then over against that, the very fine positive statement in chapter 5, last sentence, in verse 16, The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

Now I think that most of you know that I do not make too much out of holidays or anniversaries. I nod to them and blow them a kiss and pass on to something that lasts. Holidays have a way of passing. But I cannot escape the knowledge that in this Christian era, we have arrived at the, or very within hours of 1957 that we shall call the New Year. And I am not going to go over the past.

We have a way here of keeping reviewed up and keeping our self-examination current, so that I am not going to examine the past, because that’s been pretty well done, but I’m going to talk about the future. And in these texts which I have read, we have a word from the Holy Ghost.

Now, it is to our everlasting profit that we listen to this Word with meekness and with faith and obedience. When man speaks, just man, no matter who the man is, whether he be a king on a throne, or a scientist in his laboratory, or a philosopher in his study, when man speaks, we have a moral duty to question. We have a duty to doubt and examine.

But when God speaks, we dare not question, and there is no need to examine, and it is a sin to doubt. But we Christians, being yet somewhat in the world and having our old natures, tend sometimes to dull the edge of the Lord’s Sword and avoid the point of the Lord’s Word by what we call interpreting. If a text is too much for us, we interpret it, which means usually not that we’re trying to find out what it says, but that we’re trying to find out how we can get out of it.

But here is no place for interpretation whatever. There are two sentences, Ye have not because ye ask not. And the other one, the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Now only exhortation is needed here, not interpretation, and certainly not question or doubt.

Now the Holy Ghost says here that some Christians are self-made paupers. Ye have not because. Some Christians suffer from self-imposed poverty. I have often thought in a half-humorous way, if we lived in the same kind of homes, or if we lived in homes commensurate with our spiritual state, we’d be living in the slums, most of us. And if we dress commensurate with our inner spiritual condition, we’d be taken off the street for vagrancy. Because too many of us are self-imposed paupers.

Now this is not a misfortune to call up sympathy, this is a sin to call for repentance. Ye have not because? Ye have not because you don’t know where to go. Every Christian should know where to go to ease his poverty and become rich. Ye have not because ye know not who to ask? Every Christian should know whom to ask. And ye have not because ye know not how to obtain? If we know not how to obtain, one half hour of the Bible will teach us. No, ye have not because ye ask not. Ye live in poverty even though you know you do not believe, and so you do not ask effectively.

Now this poverty of ours, which can be shrugged off as long as we’re in reasonably good health and have an income, and there’s no war, this poverty of ours brings loss beyond description. It is not only what we get into, but what we don’t get that’s tragic in the Christian life. In our hearts, in our homes, in our labors, in our churches and assemblies where we meet together, to our friends and to the lost and to the world, we are allowing time to go by and days to succeed days and years to pile up on years. It doesn’t seem like any time at all when I began my ministry here in Chicago over in the little old building, and I remember the first thing I said.

It sounds sort of piteously humorous now, although it certainly wasn’t intended to be funny. I got up and I thought I’d make a nice approach to a nice congregation, and I said I was happy to be here and to speak to you people, but I said possibly some people may take me rather lightly because of my youth. But I said if youth is a crime, it is a crime everybody has been guilty of sometime, and if you will give me a little time, I’ll atone for it. No prophecy was ever more fulfilled than that one has been.

But all down these years, I wonder how much we have lost that we could have had and how much that we didn’t get that was rightfully ours under the terms of atonement because we didn’t ask. Or if we asked, we didn’t ask effectively.

Now there is much unbelief about prayer, even secret unbelief among people who pray. There’s probably nothing in the whole field of religion about which there’s more hypocrisy than about prayer, and yet I feel I want to modify that rather harsh word. Hypocrisy because I do not think it’s deliberate, I don’t think it’s intentional at all, and it even springs from a rather high motive.

This unrealism is a better word, I think, a truer word. I don’t avoid the other one because I’m afraid of it or afraid of you, but only because I think unrealism is better. So, I’ll say that there probably is nothing in the whole field of religion about which there’s more unrealism than there is in prayer.

And this is because I think no one wants to grieve God or injure other people by admitting their doubt concerning prayer, even if they have secret doubts concerning it, they don’t want to admit them, because as David said when he was going through the dark valley of doubt, he said, if I speak thus, I offend against the generation of thy children. So, he kept his mouth shut until he got light on the problem. And I think that’s the high and rather pure motive that helps most of us or that leads most of us to live in this never-never land of prayer that doesn’t get answered. We don’t want to grieve God or admit to our own hearts or certainly to injure others by admitting doubt concerning prayer. So, we go on secretly having our doubts, even doubting our own testimony.

Now, this arises from several causes. The doubts people have about prayer arise from several causes. I’m not going to name sin because we take that for granted, but I think some people are benumbed a bit about prayer, hearing thousands of prayers made that are plainly not answered.

Now I like to be realistic up on a Christian level, and I’ll tell you what I’d do this morning if God were to enable me. I’m no Pope, nor am I anything but a simple preacher of the gospel, but if I had any authority to make any bargains with the Almighty, I would settle with God for 10%.

I would say, God, if you will, oh, I’ll do better than that. I will say, God, will you please answer 1% of the prayers that are made in the pulpits today, this Lord’s Day, the last of 1956. Just answer 1% of them, Lord, and shrug off the other 99. Do you know what would happen? There would be a revival that would change the texture of Chicago society from the top to the bottom or the bottom to the top, if just 1 out of 100 prayers were answered in the pulpits these days. But people don’t expect them to be answered, and so we go on piling them up, words, words, words. And we hear thousands of prayers made that are plainly not answered, and the result is, without wanting it, there comes a benumbing of our faith and expectation, and then there is a nibbling at prayer with no success that most people do.

A nibbling at it. We nibble at prayer in the morning and at table and at night, and on certain stated occasions. If they’re going to have a potato race, they want the pastor to be there to start it off with the prayer. And he asks for enough to bring revival to the whole wide world, just there under the tree. But nothing happens, we just nibble at it.

And then the misuse or the wrong use of prayer is also one other reason. We hear prayer used to get our own way and to crowd out a business rival and help us win the track race and all sorts of things. And everybody in his right mind knows God isn’t going to answer prayers like that, but we smile sentimentally and say that God answered my prayer. The fellow that’s lying on his back looking unseeing at the roof of the stadium, God didn’t answer his prayer, but the fellow who has his hand raised high in the air, he had his prayer answered.

Now everybody knows, that has the brains he come into the world with, that God had nothing to do with either one of them. So, we simply say to ourselves, well, don’t let’s be cynics, don’t let’s be like Tozer about this, let’s believe in it anyhow and get along somehow. And then another reason, another cause of doubt in prayer is seeing things attributed to prayer that prayer never caused. We have a way of doing that, but we’ll pass that by.

So, Christians blandly overlook their own failure in prayer. Ye have not because ye ask not, and ye ask not because ye doubt, and ye doubt because you have seen prayers that were not answered and have known praying people that were always in trouble. And a lot of your own nibblings never got you anything, and so you throw the whole thing overboard and say it is a fine, noble thing that nobody can attain to.

Now ye have not because ye ask not, and we’re self-imposed paupers, and the kindest thing I could ask God for today is that you, my dear people before me, should not suddenly have your external garments made to look like your internal life. I would be ashamed, and you would be ashamed, and the old torn jeans that I’d be dressed in and the old battered stained shirt you’d have on, we’d feel pretty bad if we were as poverty-stricken in our wardrobe as we are in our hearts.

But here the Holy Ghost says over against this, The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Now that’s not to be interpreted in the light of the things that I have mentioned here, prayers that haven’t been answered and the unrealism in the field of prayer. This is to be believed, not interpreted.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. I’m not sure that the man James could have got by on that sentence in the average schoolroom. They’d have said that he was tautological. Now tautological, in case you’ve forgotten your old definitions, means to say it twice, like saying a widow woman. Of course, she’d be a woman if she were a widow. That’s tautology, that’s saying it twice unnecessarily.

And I’m not sure that what James might be accused here of being a bit wordy by some when he said the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much because he could have turned it around and said the availing prayer of a righteous man is effectual. And it would have meant exactly the same thing. But the Holy Ghost was trying to get at us through the Apostle James and he was using such language as we have, not as he has, but as we have. So, he tells us in almost extravagant terms that prayer is effectual if it is fervent, and that it avails, and then God says, much.

Now the words, of course, are relative and they’ve got to be understood in their right context, and you’ve got to notice who uses them. If I were to say I heard a man, I often listen on the air to interviews, particularly when notable men are being interviewed in any field at all, I like to do that. I have an FM radio now and when I’m resting, I listen to these interviews in order to get a little education as I go along. And I heard a man some time ago and he was talking about something, what it was going to cost. Well, he said about six million dollars. You had to know who that man was in order to get your meaning.

If you’re going to put anything into it, I’m going to invest heavily, he might have said. Well, that for me would be fifty cents. But for that man it was six million dollars, if I recall. And you hear that often, they’ll say, well, we expect an income of about nine hundred thousand dollars this year, a little short of a million. Brethren, who was talking? Well, it depends altogether on who says much. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much, said the Holy Ghost.

Why, it would have been enough for the Holy Ghost to say little. For when God talks, God talks in cosmic terms. The God who says little or some or a small amount or a limited amount or much or many, that God holds the universe in His hands and the galaxies, and the far distant stars are His playthings. And everything that is belongs to Him. All matter, all mind, all life is His. And when God uses the word much, you and I ought to sit up and listen because we’re up in the six million class.

We’re listening to one talk who is infinitely rich beyond all description. And He says, you’re poor and you’re poverty stricken and your bones show through. That at your own fault. You’re not asking for.

Don’t forget that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man leads God to move in your direction and the result will be much. And when God says much, he battles the imagination. I say I’d settle for the word little there.

If God were to use the word little. If I used the word much, it would mean a few hundred dollars. But when the government uses the word little, they mean two or three million or maybe a billion. It’s got so they’re ashamed to use common thousands anymore in Washington. Nobody would be caught saying thousand around there. They’d feel ashamed. They only talk in terms of millions and billions.

And that’s the way God is. God has everything. And under the proper conditions, prayer is Earth’s mightiest force. There’s no question about it. Wesley is often quoted for saying things he never said. But I understand that he said this, God does nothing but in answer to prayer. And certainly, he would be a man who had a right to make that statement. God does nothing but in answer to prayer.

Meaning, I suppose, that before there were a need to pray, God out of His own heart moved to create His universe. But that now He has so geared the human race to prayer that God will not move but in answer to prayer. And our Lord Jesus Christ said, nothing shall be impossible unto you.

To whom was he speaking there? Nothing shall be impossible unto you, an angel?, as Milton painted, that when he lay down, lay across several hills. And that when he spread his wings, they went across vast landscapes. That kind of being, no. He was talking to people, even fallen people. Look at him there, he had just been born. And there his little red face. And they can’t figure out whether it’s human, but you had a human mother, so they figure it is. And they brand him and band him and take a footprint. And there he lies, all miserable looking. Can’t raise his head, can’t raise his hands or feet yet. And sleeps curled up the way he’s been for the last while. And there he is, so weak that he’d lie right there and die. If a lot of old nurses and people didn’t help him.

And God says to that kind of creature, nothing shall be impossible unto you. You say he grows, sure, see him a year later. Now with shiny eyes he’s learned to walk. And take a few steps over the smooth floor. Can’t make it if it’s rough, but he takes a few experimental steps on a smooth floor. And balances himself like a skier by holding his hands up. And there he is now. Push him and he’s gone. Weak little one year old. And the Lord’s voice is sounding, nothing shall be impossible unto you.

You say wait till he grows up, sure. Wait till he grows up. Here he is driving behind a car with so much out in front that he can’t possibly see who he hits. So, he drives on in a great big hunk of metal with roaring motors that makes up psychologically for the weakness he feels inside of himself. And when he steps down on the accelerator, the immediate response somehow gets into his system, and he feels that’s his response. I am an American. I live in the 20th century. I live in the period when we’ve conquered nature, he says.

And then an invisible substance from somewhere, so small that only the laboratory can discover it, a little thing they call a virus gets into him and he doesn’t even know where he got it. He doesn’t know where he breathed it in or if it was on the edge of a glass when he drank water. He doesn’t know what friend might have said good morning and breathed it on him. He doesn’t know. But all he knows is he says to his wife, I don’t feel good somehow. My head’s low and I’m aching. Pretty soon he’s down on his back, pale white, and so weak he has to be lifted up.

And two or three doctors and a nurse have to try desperately to keep him from dying. And a little invisible thing, so small and weak, that we’d pass it over without noticing it, has done that to that great big he-boy. With his big chest and his muscles, now he lies there whimpering, and his wife sits and puts cold cloths on his noble brow. But the poor fellow, we’ll hope he gets well. I’m just creating one out of whole cloth for the occasion. I haven’t anybody in mind. But I hope he gets well.

But anyway, there he is, and the Holy Ghost is saying to him, nothing shall be impossible unto you. See him a few years from now. See him when his chin meets his nose at night. But in the daytime, he’s quite normal looking, except that he is badly shrunken, and his voice has gone piping. And this strong fellow, now see him limp with the help of a cane down the steps to meet his grandchildren.

There he is, there’s that fellow to whom God said, nothing shall be impossible unto you. Was God playing with him? Was God simply being humorous? Must this be interpreted and understood somehow poetically or metaphorically? No. When the Lord said, Nothing shall be impossible unto you, write across the page in your Bible, you have the interpretation.

Here it is, because nothing is impossible with God. There’s why God can say to that little thing, red-faced and squally there in the bassinet, nothing need be impossible to you. That’s why God can say to the man lying in his bed, nothing need be impossible to you, because nothing is impossible to Me.

And so God invites us to omnipotence. He invites us to share his muscles and to have His riches and to live in His strength. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. If we would set ourselves to prayer, my friends, this year, habits could be broken that have cursed and blasted some of us for years. Temptations could be defeated that we’ve stumbled over for decades. Circumstances that have hindered us could be radically altered, for nothing shall be impossible.

And some of Satan’s captives that are now bound could be set free. And the wanderers could be restored and hard sinners could be converted and minds could be changed completely, and hearts cleansed and filled with the Holy Ghost. If we only dared to believe what our Lord said through the Apostle James, the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Now, let’s face up to it. Ye have not.

Now, let’s not excuse ourselves. That’s the cheapest and easiest way out, but it’s also the way to deeper poverty. And let us not pity ourselves. Self-pity never helped anybody yet. So let us not say, ye have not, and then begin to sniffle. Ye have not, because ye ask not. Now, God can’t remedy this by himself. You and I are going to have to remedy it by remembering and putting into effect these other passages that nothing shall be impossible unto you.

My brethren, we have had two critical years in this Church, two critical years. I don’t know whether it’s the kind discipline of the Holy Ghost, or whether what it is, I’m not sure, I don’t know. But I do know this, that in this Church, more than any other that I’ve ever heard of, except in an Army camp, our personnel changes over. Just when we get going nicely, there’s a blow-up, and I don’t mean trouble, I mean that there will be as many as 8, 10, 12 families moved to parts unknown.

If I could have my congregation together once, brother, we’d have to rent a stadium. But they go, they go. They go to preach, they go to the field, they go marry somebody and become a preacher’s wife, or they move to California or Florida or Wisconsin or Michigan or Nebraska, Nebraska, or New Jersey, and we’ll lose them.

And just this last year we have had 50 of our regular people who would have been here this morning have gone and left us. And it looks as if our business was to sort of set people on fire and then say goodbye to them, sadly, and watch them go. And the only hope I have is that wherever they go, they’ll spread the fire.

But you know, although we have had some pretty heavy sledding, numerically, we haven’t had any heavy sledding financially. In 1955 we were third highest in missionary giving in a thousand churches in the United States and Canada. And I’m happy to tell you that for 1955 we had steadily along the largest prayer meetings that we have ever known in the years that I’ve been here.

Now, my friends, I want to insist in closing that prayer, the right kind of prayer, persistent prayer, sets up an irresistible pressure that nature won’t hold, that circumstances won’t hold, that it sets up an internal pressure. It’ll break through somewhere. Somehow, it’ll break through. Maybe not in the direction you face, but the effectual prayer of a man who’s righteous, that is, living right in the will of God, that prayer sets up an increasing pressure. And it’s going to explode, it’s going to blow, it’s going to get through somewhere. And I don’t know where always.

But I want to prophesy a little this morning. A man is quite a fool who’ll prophesy, but I am willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake and say this to you, that in the religious world, that is, in the evangelical religious world, for the Roman Catholic side of the Church, Christendom, and for the liberal side, I have nothing to say. To them I have nothing to say now.

I’m thinking about the evangelicals, the fundamentalists, the Bible people, the full gospel people. I want to tell you something which may happen within this year or within a few, very few years to come. There’s going to be a realignment of spiritual forces.

We are being taught now that religion is coming into its own because there is increased tolerance. The ecumenical spirit that takes in everybody that says Jesus and that opens his Bible and goes to church once a Sunday, or twice a year even, that religion is on the increase and on the way up. Now, I don’t believe that nor accept it for a moment.

I believe rather that evangelicalism is on its way out, but that as that woman stood— now, this is not the prophetical interpretation. It’s meant to be an illustration. As that woman in the twelfth chapter of Revelation stood and gave birth to a son, and that son immediately became the target for hell’s bullets, and God had to snatch him away to save him.

So evangelicalism is going to hive off, and there’s going to be a realignment of forces. Now you watch it, my brethren. There’s going to be a realignment of forces when God finds a few bold, courageous men who aren’t afraid of their paycheck and don’t care who likes them and dare to pray and then stand up and tell them what God said. And there’s going to be something new born out of this dying thing. And it will not be born around banquet tables. It will not be born around panel discussion tables.

It will not be born in any other way but in the way the man-child was in Revelation 12, the old-fashioned way. I hope I’m still going strong, if you would allow that last word to stand unchallenged, in the day when this realignment takes place. Some of us are going to be asked to stand up and be counted one of these times, whether we are going to follow the New Testament methods and morals and ways and techniques, or whether we’re going to claim evangelical doctrine and then invent our own idols and follow them.

The Holy Ghost will yet triumph, brethren, and I trust it may be in 1957. And I am telling you that if you will give yourself to prayer this year, if you will make prayer your career, and then not watch for little answers here and there, not pray that Peggy might pass her tests and then say, oh, say, God, you didn’t hear my prayer because Peggy got an X. Not that kind of praying, brethren. Not that kind of praying. That kind of praying is the cheap little grocery list praying. I want a package of pep and two bushels of eggs and a quart of milk and send a bill to Dad. Not that. That’s cheap praying.

But there’s another kind of praying, a praying in the Holy Ghost, a yearning that sometimes seems to have no object toward which it’s moving, but a yearning in the Holy Ghost. If you will give yourself to that kind of praying, there will be a pressure built up, and it will break over somewhere, not in the direction that we think, but in God’s direction at last, and the Holy Ghost will triumph. I believe He will triumph. I am not pessimistic. I believe He will triumph.

And this prayer pressure. And what do I mean by prayer pressure? Oh, really, brethren, I’m only using figures of speech because prayer in itself is nothing. Prayer is simply the means by which we bring God’s power into human affairs. That’s all. And it’s the power of God in human affairs that I’m talking about. Prayer in itself has no power. It is the power of God that prayer brings into human affairs. And it’s when God Almighty releases a little trickle of that mighty, mighty, flowing, vast, illimitable stream of energy into human affairs that the Spirit says, much!

So really it isn’t the prayer, it isn’t the length of time you pray, it isn’t how many times you pray every day, it is praying effectively so as to release that power into our Church and into your life and into your home and into your labors and love and business. And if we’ll only dare to believe this, we’ve been so poverty-stricken, so poverty-stricken.

You have not, because you have not asked. But if you’ll ask, the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man will do wonders, and it will build up pressure that it will break over into the work of God and the business of God, and we’ll see a realignment of forces, and we’ll see conversions that mean something, and we’ll see transformations that last.

So, shall we not determine, by the grace of God, that 1957 isn’t going to get by? You know what? It could easily be, and even probably will be, that I or Mr. McAfee, Brother Moore, or somebody else you’ve called in, may stand and talk in a low voice over the still form of some that now listen to me.

Time is wasting, judgment draws nigh, the Lord is coming, religion is festering at its root and rotting in its stems and branches. But there’s life, there’s life left yet, there’s life there, the root of the matter is present. And if God can find his praying people, his intercessors, who aren’t worried about little technical answers to prayer they can make a tract out of, but are ready to throw themselves out onto God like a traveling human and wrestle in the Holy Ghost with the powers of evil, until the pressure of the power of God is such that the forces of Satan are driven back and the pure thing is born, despised maybe and wondered at, but a pure thing will be born out of the writhing and prevailing of Christendom as we know it today.

I want to be, by the grace of God present, and I pray this church may be in on it. Ah, little Samuel, when God was going to do a terrible thing in Israel, called Samuel aside and whispered in Samuel’s ear. He couldn’t tell the old man, He had to tell the boy. And it came to pass just as God said it would. And that’s on the judgment side, but I’m interested in the other side. And I pray that when God wants to do something, he’ll tell me and I’ll tell you, or you’ll hear it and tell me.

And we’ll know that God is moving again as in the days of yore, moving to convert and purify and separate and moving to draw a line of demarcation sharp as a razor blade and wide as the gulf that separated Dives and Lazarus, so the church may be realigned and God’s ancient power may begin to flow again. And the muscle boys and the funny boys will take a back seat and watch the Holy Ghost do the work they futilely tried to do after the manner of man.

Shall we pray this year, brethren and sisters? Shall we call on God as we never have before? Maybe tonight we may have an altar service over this. I want to talk some more tonight. I want to preach tonight a sermon I preached eighteen years ago and got written into a booklet and I’ve been afraid to preach it ever since because I didn’t want to repeat it.

But I feel I must tonight re-preach a sermon I preached nearly about eighteen years ago. And I want you present. And perhaps God will break in on us and we’ll see him move to his own glory and our good.

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Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date April 21, 2024

“Discouragement and What The Christian Can Do About It“

PDF Download with Summary Notes Download

Discouragement and What the Christian Can Do About it

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 5, 1957

Outline

Christian discouragement and its effects.

Tozer warns against discouragement, recognizing it as a valuable tool for the devil in his war against Christians.
Discouragement affects Christians of all ages and backgrounds, including the young and old, the sober-minded and the radiant.

Causes and cures for Christian discouragement.

Tozer: Christians struggle with discouragement despite appearing holy and happy.
Elijah’s loneliness led to discouragement, highlighting the importance of supportive relationships.
Tozer warns of discouragement in spiritual pursuits, emphasizing shared experiences among believers.

Spiritual encouragement in dark times.

Tozer emphasizes God’s promise of never leaving or forsaking believers, even in times of discouragement.
Tozer argues that Christians should not be discouraged by the wickedness of others, as it is a normal part of history, and the darkness makes the light of faith more visible.
Tozer cites Jeremiah as an example of a discouraged prophet who continued to pray and preach despite his feelings and believing men and women have learned how to live and shine in darkness over the past 2600 years.

Feeling trapped and captive despite freedom.

Tozer expresses feeling trapped and captive despite being an American, citing work and financial responsibilities.
Tozer reflects on captivity and spiritual growth, citing Ezekiel’s experience in Babylon.
Tozer advises young students to prioritize prayer and spiritual growth alongside academic work.

Christian biography and discouragement.

Tozer: Discouraged Christians are often gloomy and anticipate negative things, but God’s presence can give them rest and courage.
Tozer: Meeting gloomy brethren can be challenging, but God’s presence can overcome their discouragement and fear.
Tozer argues that many Christian biographers are dishonest by only highlighting the positive aspects of their subjects’ lives while hiding their flaws and failures.
Tozer believes it is the obligation of Christian biographers to tell the whole truth, including both the good and the bad, to their readers.
Tozer warns against discouragement from reading about great saints, sharing personal experiences to illustrate the importance of understanding their full story.

The importance of God’s help in times of darkness.

Tozer emphasizes the importance of living saints, not just those who have passed away, as they are the only ones God has now to continue His work.
Tozer encourages believers to trust God and write biographies about them, highlighting their good deeds and magnifying their impact.
Tozer emphasizes the importance of trusting in God’s help during difficult times, citing Psalm 103:1-6.
Tozer encourages believers to approach the Lord’s Supper with reverence, humility, and meek self-assurance, knowing that God is watching over them.

Message

This is Communion Sunday, but I am not going to talk about redemption; I’m going to assume it. And the text is found in Deuteronomy 1:21. Behold, the Lord thy God has set the land before thee. Go up and possess it. For the Lord God of thy fathers has said unto thee, fear not, neither be discouraged. Go up and possess the land and remember that God has said, fear not, neither be discouraged.

I want to talk a little about discouragement and what the Christian can do about it. This topic comes up in cycles of perhaps 10 or 12 years in this pulpit. Perhaps, it should come more frequently, because I know what a perfect nuisance discouragement is. It is one of the Christians worst enemies. Maybe it is not the greatest, I doubt that it is the greatest. I doubt that discouragement is the greatest enemy the Christian has, but it can easily be the greatest nuisance the Christian has to deal with. And it is a valuable thing to the devil on his war against the saints, because it is seldom recognized for what it is.

When a Christian becomes discouraged, his good, sound, common sense tells him he’s just being realistic. And he’s forgetting that it’s not realism, it is discouragement, and it works when no other temptation will. The Christian that would not be guilty of any sin willingly and who has victory enough that he or she doesn’t fall into temptation unwillingly, may yet be visited by this infernal, dark shadow from the pit, this thing we call discouragement, and greatly hindered in the Christian life.

Now, discouragement, as I’ve pointed out before on other occasions, is a mood. It is an emotion which can easily become a ruling emotion. And it is more than an emotion, it becomes after a while a disposition. It becomes an outlook and an attitude. It becomes a lens through which we see everything; dark glasses through which we behold everything before us. And of course, mood, is mental climate. It isn’t the man, it’s the weather that the man has on the landscape of his life. Just as weather isn’t the field or the farm, but it goes a long way to determine whether the farm shall have a good crop or not.

So, mood is not the man, but it determines whether there shall be a good crop and what kind of plants are going to grow. A joy and power and effective ministry simply can’t grow in the climate of discouragement. But fear and self-pity and self-engrossment are found there.

Now, you’d be surprised, I suppose, if you could know how many Christians at any gathering are bothered by a degree, at least of, discouragement, because it spares no class of Christian. There is the young Christian and there’s the old Christian. And I find that after serving the Lord, more or less raggedly and spotly, but serving him nevertheless for a long half or two thirds of a lifetime, I am nevertheless as prone to discouragement today as I was when I was 17. So that, if I’m any sample, even a poor sample, it is safe to say that this discouragement spares nobody. The sober minded man that you take to be a solid, well set up and self-assured person, may be suffering from a deep discouragement, so deep, that it’s affecting him physically.

And then there’s the radiant Christian, the shining Christian. I meet a few of them, not many, but you meet a few radiant Christians. They’re shining, ebullient Christians. They overflow. And yet, in the deep of their heart, very often, they also get discouraged. they keep the shine on, and they don’t mean to be hypocritical because they’ve learned to smile and muscles are used more than the other, so they still smile. But if you could get at the root of their lives, you’d find they were deeply discouraged over something.

And there are the very lofty Christians that seem to dwell so very high that you could hardly believe it possible that dwelling as they are, as it were among the angels, that they could be discouraged. But they do get discouraged anyhow. Then there are those practical, down to earth Christians that are followers of the Apostle James, the kind that are practical and salty. And you say, well, surely, they never would be discouraged, but they get discouraged, too.

And if you could know how many right here this morning came to church with heavy feet. Dragging what might not be very big feet, but that seemed to you, like as if each one weighed 40 pounds, dragging them off to church, because you felt you ought to. But you had no particular urge because of the discouragement that’s come upon you.

I want to talk a bit about the causes of discouragement and prescribe a cure. You know, the difference between negative preaching and or positive preaching of the Bible kind is, that negative preaching finds out what’s wrong and positive prescribes for the remedy. The doctor that would only diagnose, tell you what’s wrong and set you on your way, would only be half a doctor. And a book that would only tell us what’s wrong with us would only be half a book. But this book tells us what’s wrong and then tells us what to do about it. I want to do that myself.

Well, one of the causes of discouragement is loneliness. There was the man, Elijah. And he is a dramatic example of a great man that became deeply discouraged. He was discouraged because there was nobody around him that understood him and nobody that was going his way. He lacked the support of like-minded souls. It may be that in your home or in your office, or wherever you must spend a major part of your time, that you have no like-minded souls with whom you can have fellowship. Now, that may bring to you, as it did to Elijah, a great sense of loneliness.

And here is a little trick that I want to call to your notice. That the loftier and more dramatic the character is, the farther down he can plunge into discouragement. There never was a man I suppose in his lifetime, or perhaps in 1000 years period in Israel’s history, that could have gone onto the mount and dared to call the prophets of Baal to make a test. Elijah did it. And Elijah went from that mount where a fire fell, and the victory came straight down to the cave and to the juniper tree.

Now, the higher up you’re able to go, the further down you can go. They have a saying in the prize ring that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And that same thing is true in the spiritual world. The farther up we get, the farther down we can come unless we watch ourselves and take the means of grace to save ourselves from discouragement. And the higher the ideals; some Christians are never very discouraged because they have never had very much to aim at. They don’t expect anything and when they don’t get it, they just say, well, I didn’t expect it anyway. But there are Christians with fine high ideals, higher than they’re able to reach. And a month or six months of struggling for ideals that they can’t reach, or haven’t yet reached, may turn them back on themselves in deep discouragement; the loftier the ideals, the spiritual aspirations, the wider we are open to the invasion of discouragement.

Now, what is the cure? The cure is simply to remember that your discouragement is based upon an error. You think you’re alone, when actually you are not. In the first place, there are 1000s of others just like you. There are merry clubs and redheaded clubs and ball-headed clubs. I wonder why we shouldn’t form somewhere, a little club of those who are prone to be discouraged and talk it out with each other. You’d find that there are a lot of people like you.

And if you were to go to heaven and gather around you this morning, a group of the redeemed who have gone there, that there would be 1000 of them, and they’d get up and testify. Let me tell you, that if they told the whole truth, they’d remind you that there were times when they felt pretty blue about this whole business of serving God in a bad world like this.

So, there are 1000s like you, and you’re not alone at all. And your discouragement is based also upon a failure to remember that God is with you, and that you’re never alone. In the old Methodist church, we used to sing a song I haven’t heard it I think since. I’ve seen the lightning flashing. I’ve heard the thunder roll. I’ve felt sin’s breakers dashing trying to conquer my soul. And I’ve heard the voice of Jesus telling me still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never leave me alone. And the chorus was, no never alone, alone. Well, that’s true all right. The song doesn’t rate among the great, but it has a truth in it.

And we’re never alone. If you keep that in mind, friend, you’re never by yourself. Are not the angels sent forth to minister unto them that shall be heirs of salvation? But you say, yes, yes, that’s all right. St. Teresa and Francis and Finney and Spurgeon; the angels no doubt helped them. What kind of a mother would it be that gave all of her attention to her healthy, strong children and let the sick ones lie and rot?

And what kind of God would God be if He sent His angels to bless St. Augustine and Julian and forgot us poor people that need it? No, no, He sends His angelic ministers to minister unto them who shall be heirs of salvation, but for our moment are in a tight spot. And wasn’t it when our Lord was praying in the garden and was sweating blood that the angels came and ministered unto Him. It was not when He was in Joseph’s carpenter’s shop, helping his father here and there and getting in the way and growing up to be a big boy. That wasn’t when he needed the angels. But it was when blood was flowing from His pores, as it were, sweat, or sweat as blood.

So, if you’re discouraged this morning, you’re the very one the Lord has pointed out. In fact, I have Scripture for this because it was when Elijah was in deep discouragement, so deep, that he went to sleep, blue and despondent, that God said to an angel, go down and feed Elijah the prophet, and he went down and baked cakes for Elijah. Not a radiant victorious prophet, but a discouraged, despondent prophet. And an angel had that job to do.

Now, another thing that may discourage us Christians, is the wickedness of the people; and we have Jeremiah for our Bible example. Jeremiah looked around him and every place he looked was wickedness, just every place. He had no newspapers in that day, but if he had, he would have found a whole front page and most of the rest of the paper covered with wickedness, or reports of wicked deeds or wicked plans. And Jeremiah just got plain tired of talking and not having anybody paying any attention to it. He’s called the weeping prophet. But he’s a long way from being a weeping prophet, but he did get discouraged.

What are you going to do about it now? You remember that man who vexed his righteous soul surrounded by iniquity, the stars in yonder heaven don’t shine in the daytime. Why, because there’s already light upon the earth. Why do they shine at night? Because the darkness makes them visible.

And so, in all the periods of history that have been reasonably decent, the great saints have not stood out. They have always stood out when the darkness was upon the earth. When our Lord came, there was darkness upon the earth. The church burst into paganism as into the deepest Stygian darkness. And the Wesleys came not at a time when everybody was praying. They came at a time when nobody was praying, except a little handful they called the Holy Club, or at least nobody we know about was praying.

So, my friends 2600 years have gone by since Jeremiah prayed and preached in discouragement. And for 2600 years, believing men and women have learned how to live and shine in darkness. And they’ve learned it from the very Jeremiah who was so discouraged so much of the time.

Then captivity. Do you ever feel that you were captive? Do you ever shrug cynically, when you heard somebody talk about our free, American way of life, and say to yourself, free? How do you get that way? I haven’t been able to get away from these four or five children for months. And I love them, and God knows I would die for them, but sometimes I want to scream. And you fellows that get up and go to your jobs, go to your works, punch the card, and hear the bell ring and then punch it out again and go home and back. And it’s repeating in and out, up and down, day in and day out, until you’re blue, and the two weeks’ vacation they give you it doesn’t help you at all, because you take your work with it and carry it back with you. Maybe two months might help you, but the two weeks do not. And you say, I’m captive, I feel I’m captive.

And then, if I’ve got anything left, I pay out in income tax. And if I’ve got anything left from income tax, somebody needs an expensive operation or I have to pay that out, and here I am. Call me a free American? Oh, dear friend, you’re the freest person in all the wide world even politically yet. I can stand up here and condemn anybody from the president down to the corner policeman. And not only that, I can have a loudspeaker out in front, condemning the policeman, loudly. He can’t do a thing. The freest nation in the world, still. So, let’s still thank God for the stars and stripes that are white with the prayers of 1000 saints in red with the blood of 10,000 men who died to keep us free, and blue with the baltic of the skies.

As the poet said, let’s thank God. But still, even though you’re free, you don’t feel you’re free. You feel you’re captive. And you know, it’s possible for preachers to get like that too? Just when I say to myself, now, I can shake my head and be free, I get a special delivery letter. And then there’s something to do.

And brethren, this man Ezekiel was captive. He was captive. And he was sitting among the captives by the River Chebar. I don’t want to travel. Some people want to travel all the time. I don’t want to travel. I could have gone to half a dozen or twenty different countries and had my way paid over the last year and wouldn’t go, because I find that almost everything is in Chicago that you will find anywhere else. And if it isn’t, you can always read National Geographic.

But I would like to see the river Chebar. I really would. I’d like to sit down there and dangle my toes in the River Chebar and have the old muddy stream flow by. And try to recapture the emotions that must have visited the breast of that young priest of Israel as he sat there despondent knowing that he was now a captive, a slave in a strange land. And everywhere he looked, he saw harps hanging on willow trees and a silence that you could cut with a knife. And except for the sobbing of some old lady or the petulant cry of a child, not a sound.

Ezekiel sat by the River Chebar. He was discouraged because he was a captive. But you know what Ezekiel saw while he was a captive that he didn’t see before he was a captive? He saw heaven opened and had visions of God. And you know that it’s right from where you are in your captivity. All people want to serve God the hard way. And I never could understand why.

I wrote here some time ago an answer to a question about how a young student going to college can get free so that he can do his college work and can still pray as much as he ought to, and I made several suggestions. And I said among them, why, readjust your life, adjust it so that your praying time fits in with your study time and all the rest. And not only that, sanctify, consecrate your study, so there’s something good too. And people wrote me mournful letters as though I had joined the cult of positive thinking and said, what in the world do you mean, Brother Tozer, you mustn’t tell young people that they’re to readjust their prayer life. Pray whether you make good grades or not. I didn’t tell him not to pray. I only told them that they could get victory over their academic captivity if they knew what to do about it. Nobody wanted them to know, I guess.

Well, anyhow, that was Ezekiel. What a captive he was. Just home and back again. The kitchen and the baby, when it isn’t needing attention, why, there’s something else. Say, I’ll lie down in five minutes. And you lie down five minutes, the telephone rings, and somebody’s banging on the back door. All he’s wanting you to do is to take a package for Mrs. Jones next door. Would you please? And of course, you would please, and you do, but your rest has been broken. So, you feel your captive. If you could only look up, you might see heaven open. And you might have visions of God. For always remember that when we’re too free, we get carnal and have our own way. And the fellow who has his own way is not likely to be looking for God’s way. But it’s when we have our own way taken from us that we get a feeling of discouragement. But out of it all and through it all, the light of heaven may shine.

Then there’s the gloomy brethren. It says just a few verses down from the text that I read. It says that the brethren made our hearts to be discouraged. The brethren made our hearts discouraged. Whether shall we go up they said. Our brethren have discouraged our hearts, saying the people is greater and taller than we. Half my lifetime has been spent, I think, reassuring people that the Anakim aren’t bigger than we are. They’re just not, that’s all. They may rate higher and weigh more, but in God, they’re not as big as we are. Nobody’s as big as a Christian if the Christian walks in the will of God. He’s bigger than anything you can bring against him any time. If God be for us who can be against this, but these discouraging brethren.

I like to meet old Tom Hare because he’s never discouraged. Now, I have no doubt, but that Irishman gets discouraged. I have no doubt. He’s a human being and as long as he’s in the flesh, he’ll have his times. But I have never met him when he was, I think. But I meet so many gloomy brethren. They’re always anticipating something that is going to happen. Usually, it doesn’t happen, but often they think it’s going to.

Well, do you know the answer and the cure for the gloom that is shed upon us by discouraged Christians? It is, My presence show go with thee, and I will give you rest. Now, that’s what God said to Moses. The brethren said, we can’t go up. And God said to Moses, My presence shall go with thee. And if the presence of God is with you, of whom should you be afraid? You know the answer too well and we’ll pass it on.

Then, I want to point out another thing that discourages the people of the Lord if they’re conscientious. Reading Christian biography does it. You say, now wait a minute; I’ve heard you recommend we read Christian biography. I do recommend we read Christian biography, but you have always got to know how to do things. It isn’t the doing of a thing that helps you, it is knowing how to do it and then doing it. If we do the right thing wrong, that’s not so good at all. And so if we read Christian biography wrong, it may harm us instead of help us. Because we read about the great souls that have lived and then we compare ourselves. And we begin to wonder if we’re Christians at all. And we get very blue as a result. Now, I’ll tell you, what causes that and what you can do about it.

Next month, that is in June, I’m to, O Lord, help me. I don’t know why I ever promised to do it. But I’ve got to go to Wheaton and speak at a convention there of editors and writers and journalists’ students. And they had two subjects they want me to handle. Neither one of them of which I am capable of handling. But they put a little pressure on. So I said, Yes. And one of them is, the obligation of the Christian biographer to his public.

Well, I have some convictions on that and I’m going to tell you at least one little thing I’m going to tell them, that most Christian biography is just plain not so, because the biographer feels that if he were to tell the truth about his subject, he would discourage the readers or take away something of the glamour from this great character.

So, he tells about all the high days and never mentions the low days. He tells about all the light shining peaks of his life and never mentions the deep hollows in his life. He tells about the time he was victorious and never mentions the time that he got defeated. He tells about the time that he prayed all night, but never tell us about the time that he went and fell asleep by nine o’clock and didn’t make it. And tells always the good things and hides the bad. Now, that is intellectual dishonesty. And it isn’t fair to the public that reads. And one of the obligations we owe to our public, if we write biography, is to tell the whole truth.

I told almost the whole truth about A.B. Simpson in Wingspread. And some people huffed and puffed and shook their feathers and said, you’ve sold him short. I didn’t sell him nearly as short as I should have. Because though he was a saint, he was a mighty human saint. And there never was a saint yet that didn’t have a human side to him. And that’s why Thomas a Kempis, himself a great saint said, if thou who would have peace of mind, examined not too closely in other men’s matters, and he was talking about Christian men too. Don’t dig around for weak spots, you’ll find them.

Have you noticed that Christian, that is, biblical biography, always helps you. Whereas the other kind of biography tends to discourage often, but Biblical biography tells the whole story. David wrote a hymn. Sure, he did. David slew the enemy. Sure, he did. David stole Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, and murdered Uriah. He did that. But that would have been kept out of the biography the Christians write, but not the one the Holy Ghost wrote. If you can know the whole thing about a person, you won’t be nearly as discouraged as if you only read the very top peak of experience.

Then you will say, well, I never had anything like that. Like the man we heard about, and I’ve often mentioned, who heard a fellow testify how he had been to sea and there was a great storm, and the ship was ready to sink. And he prayed and the Lord delivered them. He went home and cried half the night. He said, O God, you’ve never delivered me from a shipwreck. And God said, have you ever been to sea? He said, no. He had never been to sea, but he wanted to be delivered.

Now, what’s the answer about the discouragement that comes from reading about the great saints? I read about St. Francis and the others, and I say to myself If that man is a Christian, I’m nothing. Well, let me tell you. In the first place, he didn’t see the other side of it. The second place is, they’re dead. They’re dead. If A.B. Simpson were to stand up here, I’d promptly shrink down to the height of his shoe. But he’s dead. He sleeps on the hillside there at Nyack, and I’m still able to walk. And a living dog is better than a dead lion. And so even though you’re not as mighty a soul, as holy; and you’re alive and she’s dead.

We’ve gotten to a place here now after nearly 40 years of history back of this little church. We’ve gotten to a place here now where we get misty-eyed and nostalgic as we talk about the great souls that we once had here in our fellowship. But they’ve gone to heaven. And they can’t win a soul. They can’t teach a class. They can’t do what you’re called on to do. They’re not earning money. They can’t keep a missionary in Borneo. They’re gone. And blessed are they in their reward and their works do follow them. But they’re gone. And if God depended on the saints that are dead, the work would grind to a sudden, terrible jolt and all the churches would fall apart. So, God has to take what he’s got. And what he’s got is you and me; and we’re all God has now. So instead of being discouraged, get your teeth sunk in a little deeper and set your chin a little and trust God and say, Father, I thank Thee that though I’m not as great as the great souls of the past, I think, why I nevertheless, love Thee.

Just think what you could do with a biography. If you were to take just any of us here, McAfee here, or me or Brother Chase up here, any of these my eye happens to fall on. Just think what you could do if you’d write a biography about us and never tell one thought we had. Just tell which souls we were. Tell all the good and magnify that and put it in a perspective in a context where it looked shiny. Why, we’d have saints all over the church here, halos everywhere.

The simple fact is, we know each other too well to believe all that about each other. I know this man. I know how he lies on his face and prays by the hour with me and with Brother Moore and others that come in three times a week. We have our prayers up here. I know his love of God and His worship. I also know his faults and tell him so. And he knows mine and just shakes his head. So, my brethren, thank God you’re you and not somebody else. A little boy was asked, who would you rather be yourself or Lincoln? He said, myself; why, Lincoln’s dead. And there’s sense in that. It was good sense.

So, my friends, remember this and then we’re through for the morning. Now listen to these words from Isaiah 50:7-10, For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore, shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed. He is near that justifieth me; who will contend with me? let us stand together: who is mine adversary? let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord GOD will help me; who is he that shall condemn me? lo, they all shall wax old as a garment; the moth shall eat them up. Who is among you that feareth the LORD, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God.

So, if you’ve been coming through shadows and darkness. And if you’ve been threatened by the devil or your enemies, you have a perfect right to stand up and say, the Lord God will help me. Wherefore should I be confounded? And hear God say, all of you who walk in darkness and have no light. Trust in the name of the Lord and stay yourself upon your God and you’ll be alright. And I believe that’s true of me and of you and of this church. Do you believe it. Amen.

So let us come up of the Lord’s Supper this morning with cheerfulness, with reverence, humility, but with meek self-assurance as well. Knowing that God didn’t call us out to forget us and leave us somewhere along the way, or rust on the highway, but that the Lord is looking after every one of us. He takes care of every one of us. He knows our names, all about us. And we’re safe in His keeping though storms around us are sweeping. For He’s the Pilot of Galilee.

Now, we will have the communion service to follow. And it is for every child of God. You don’t have to be a member of this church. We recognize that this church is an organization, whereas the church of God is an organism. It is composed of all who are members of His body by the new birth. So, from wherever you come and whoever you are, if everything’s right between you and God, you join us this morning as we go on into the service to follow.

Tags Discouragement, Prayer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 29, 2023

“Prayer for the Glory of God II“

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Prayer for the Glory of God II

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

November 17, 1957 Evening Service

I have again tonight three texts. This one: the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. And this one: ye have not because ye ask not. Ye ask and receive not because ye ask amiss that ye may consume it upon your lusts. Then this one: He spake a parable unto them teaching this, that men ought always to pray and not to faint.

Those are the three texts, and they say that prayer has a tremendous potency: it availeth much. They say that sometimes, we don’t have because we have failed to ask–that’s prayerlessness. Or, again, we have not failed to ask. We have asked, but we have asked amiss, secretly and maybe even unconsciously, we want to consume it upon our own selves. But that nevertheless, we ought always to pray, and not let any difficulties get in the way. Now, that’s what our Lord says in these three texts.

And I said this morning that our prayers and our desires and our work and our expectation should go along with each other and should go hand in hand. And I said that they should aim toward two things. And after I have said this, then I’ll go over under new ground. That those two things should be the return of the glory of God again: the elevating of the concept of God in His church. And the restoration of that church from her Babylonian captivity, back to New Testament pattern again. But you know, we can have those two requests and those two aims, but still ask amiss because we haven’t, we were not asking it for His glory so much as for our own. I’ll explain as I go along.

Now, there is a serpent in the garden still. He wasn’t killed. After Adam and Eve fell, nobody came with a hoe and slew him. The serpent is still in the garden, and it twines itself around the loveliest trees thereof and destroys the fruit. And self is the serpent that destroys our prayers so that we may pray and pray and pray and continue to pray. We may even fast and pray, rise in the night and pray, and still, they are not pure prayers, for we’re using religion to get something else. Whenever religion becomes a means to something else and not an end in itself, it is not pure. Whenever the worship of God becomes a means toward something else, it is no longer the worship of God. Whenever prayer and our relationship to God is held and had for an ulterior reason, it is no longer pure.

Now I say that there is much prayer going on today and people are forming prayer bands and groups everywhere and trying to get people to pray. But my friends, I am afraid that if it cannot be said, ye have not because ye asked not, it can be said, ye have not because ye ask amiss that you might consume it upon your own desire.

Now I want to point out to you how self entwines itself in our desires; crawls its sinuous way through the garden of prayer and spoils even our prayers for us. For instance, we want the glory of God revealed again to this generation. And cheerfully we say, yes, God. We want men once more to know how great Thou art. And we want Thy sovereign perfections to be displayed throughout all the world; true, the sun and the moon and the stars. And when the evening shades prevail, the moon takes up the wondrous tale, forever singing and forever shining and forever crying along with the stars and the planets the hand that made it is divine. But how many people look at the stars. More people have looked up to the heavens to see the Sputnik in the last month than they ever had looked at stars in the last 1000 years, the average man and woman. We take God’s stars for granted.

So the stars are singing to the heart of the Christian, but they’re saying nothing much to the fellow who’s either unsaved or is a carnal Christian. We want the glory of God revealed to His church again. But here’s the catch, we want to be the one He uses to reveal it. And there is where the serpent crawls and entwines itself through the rose bushes and fruit trees of the garden. We want the glory of God revealed, but we want to be the one to reveal it. We want the veil taken away from the face of God, but we want to be the one that can dramatically go up and pull the veil aside.

Now, I don’t say that all of us do at all. I don’t say that all of you do. But I have pointed out here what’s wrong with our prayers and why God hasn’t been able to answer them up to now. Some of us who see it may secretly want to be the one that pulls the veil away and shows the glory of God. Well, whose glory are we wanting to be revealed then? We’re wanting God to reveal His glory and ours. And God says, no man shall ever share my glory. God will not give His glory to any other. And therefore, we ask and receive not because we want to consume it upon our lusts. And we want the church to return to the New Testament standard as I said this morning.

You remember, I said that there were two things that the glory of God should be revealed, and the church should be restored. It’s my conviction now. I won’t have mobs hearing me say this, but there are key and strategic people all over the world that are hearing me say it, and surely, surely God will be finally bringing us together. But remember this, that that church is in Babylonish captivity, and even the evangelical church is. And the result, we pray, O God, deliver Thy church, but we want to be the one to deliver it.

Now, that’s how self destroys our prayers. Our motives are carnal, and God has no respect to them because they are carnal. And we can call a prayer meeting for all night or all day and pray an hour at a time all day and still only want to do get a bit of glory in order that we may share it or that God may share it with us. We want the church to be brought back but we want to be the one to lead it back.

But dear friends, we’re going to have to learn this and I’m going to have to learn it. And I speak of the two-edged sword tonight, and the one edge slashes, you remember, the other edge slashes me. And I want to have an understanding.

I thought the other day that I would write God a letter. You know, I can pray and talk to the Lord, but sometimes our in prayers, we’re talking to ourselves. But if you put it down in print and say now, God take this, this is what I mean. However, I might chatter, this is what I mean. Take this God, is what I mean to say. And I’d like to write God a letter and tell him this. Now God, I want Thee to understand something here, that I want Thy glory to be revealed. And I don’t insist that I be the one to reveal it. That if Thou wilt send who now was sent; if Thou wilt raise up whom Thou wilt raise up. If Thou wilt send a chariot and take one away and raise up another to reveal Thy glory. If Thou wilt push one man aside as He pushed aside Evan Robertson and He pushed aside certain others and we’ll not name because they’re still living and not using them much. Not because they backslide, but because God had done His work with them.

All right, I want God to know that, that I want the glory of God to be revealed again to the world, but I don’t insist upon being the one to reveal it. I want the church to be brought back from her Babylonian captivity, but I don’t insist upon being the one to bring her back.

Well then, we want the walls of Jericho, or the walls are Jerusalem. The walls of Jericho fell, but the walls of Jerusalem rotted away and tumbled down and the foxes ran on those walls. And we’d like to see the walls of Jerusalem again brought back. I’d like to see a church so purified all over, not this church only. That would be a small thing.

But I’d like to see the church of Christ so purified, so visited again with the gifts of the Spirit, so filled with the Spirit, so lofty in her spiritual standards, so pure and so spiritually cultured, that she would recognize a racketeer when she saw him. And she wouldn’t listen to the “come on,” what did somebody say to somebody. There wouldn’t be any of that stuff possible. There wouldn’t be any of this stuff possible. The saying of putting in the newspaper, this man is a wonderful man of God and preaches in power and come and hear so and so. There wouldn’t be any of that possible, for the church would instantly boycott the whole thing. The church of Christ was as pure and as open-eyed and is full of vision, they should boycott all that instantly. And as the Methodists used to do; the man who wasn’t spiritual couldn’t get a hearing.

But you know, I’ve got to be willing that God should build the walls of Jerusalem and not use me for a Nehemiah. I’ve got to be perfectly willing that God should take somebody else and let him be the one to build the walls. We study the book of Nehemiah and say, wouldn’t it be wonderful to build the walls of Jerusalem again? Yes, but suppose that God said, Nehemiah, I’m going to build the walls of Jerusalem in answer to your prayer, but I’m not going to use you. You stay back of the things and pray. I don’t know what Nehemiah would have said, but I suspect that Nehemiah would have said, be it unto Thy servant even as Thou wilt. And if he hadn’t, his prayer would have gone for nothing. God will not answer the prayer of any man, not even to build the walls of Jerusalem, if he insists on building them.

And then I think that also that we want the prophets of Baal defeated. Jehovah’s Witnesses are just around the corner here now. They’ve got a Kingdom Hall which is a storefront church though they won’t call it that. And we’ve got them all up and down the country, this boom of religion which is incidentally, let me open my mouth and say something wise to you Brother. Just let me say something to you that’s wise. Here it is. Religion is running on financial inflation.

And the reason we’re booming is we have the money to boom. And when financially we bust religion, we’ll bust along with it. You bet you boy, if it doesn’t bring in shekels, and the legal tender doesn’t come in so easy when you’re working for $26 a week, or 16 as they were in the Depression. It killed a whole of depression in 1929, killed as by a pistol shot. I could name evangelists that it killed dead, and they couldn’t turn a wheel because the legal tender wasn’t forthcoming and the do-ray-me in the E Pluribus Unum wasn’t available. And the result was that they died overnight. And it’ll be the same, you watch it.

We’re booming. We’re not only booming In Christianity, were booming in all the cults and booming in all the religions that deny the truth our fathers died to promote. And it’s possible because there’s money, lots of money, lots of money. You can wipe your shoes off with $10 bills now all over our country. I mean it we’ve got more money than is good for us and religion is booming, and the devil is using the fact that there’s an inflation on.

Well, I don’t know how I got over on that, but I thought I wanted to say that to you. It wasn’t a part of my outline. I say we want the prophets of Baal defeated, these prophets of Baal. And God knows how many there are. Every once in a while, in our religious news service, in the Alliance Weekly we take the RNS, the Religious News Service, and they keep feeding news constantly in from all parts of the world to us. And we got it into our office here. And it’s strained out and a bit of it put in the Alliance Weekly. But remember that the cults are claiming millions now.

And this cult, they’ll suddenly announce, we’re now, we have 1 million memberships. Another cult will announce, we have $27 million this last year to promote our work. And the cults, the prophets of Baal are still moving up and down under the sponsorship of that evil woman Jezebel. And we’d like to see the prophets of Baal set back on their haunches and the altar of Jehovah blaze again with the glory of God that would make these theological rodents run back into the ash cans and hide.

But you know, the trouble is when we pray, we’ve got to sneak and hope the Lord will use us to chase them out. We want to be the one to get the stick and start driving out the theological rodents. We want everybody to say, ah hah, that man. Isn’t he wonderful? He’s God’s Elijah. We would like to be Elijah. And there’s just the sad thing my brother. If you insist on being Elijah, you will never call down fire from heaven. Elijah did that because God told him to. But if Elijah had wanted to do it and had insisted upon doing it so that he might look around and bring up his publicity rating, he’d never have done it. They would have pull him apart and tore him limb for limb and thrown him off the top of Mount Carmel. They wouldn’t have found a piece to bury. But Elijah was God’s servant, devoted to the glory of God alone, and he didn’t care about Elijah. And the result was, God did use the man.

And we want Israel brought back from Babylon all right. And this is my cry. I tell you; this is my cry. We want Israel brought back from Babylon. But we want to be Israel and say now, I’d like to be the one Israel. We want to be like Israel.

Well, my brother and sister, it just won’t do. The only kind of praying God will hear will be, O God, bring Israel back from Babylon by whom Thou wilt bring Israel back from Babylon. And we humble ourselves and take the lowly place and say, Father, use me if you will. I’m before Thee. I’m like a sword lying here on the table, Lord. Pick me up or let me lie there and rust. Use me or ignore me. But for Thy glory, Father, bring back Israel from Babylon. Build again the walls of Jerusalem. Bring Israel out of Egypt and let somebody else be Moses.

And we want a reformation without a doubt. We want a reformation. God knows how desperately bad we need a reformation. You know what they’re doing now in evangelical churches, and we’ve slid into it? And they wouldn’t listen. They won’t listen to you. We have become kitchen orientated. Do you know what I mean by that? I mean that instead of the cross of Jesus being at the center and all of us gathered around the cross of Jesus and it’s said of us, we’ve ministered unto the Lord and prayed and fasted. Instead of that, we minister unto the stomachs of the multitudes.

I have come almost to the place where I don’t know whether I’ll ever attend another banquet or not. We occasionally have one in this church, one or two years, because we don’t need them; we get along without them. And if we never had one, we wouldn’t lose one soul. And the having of them has never yet won one soul. And we’ve never had two more people that I’ve ever discovered ever attend our Sunday school or church as a result of any of our gatherings. So that we haven’t, because we don’t need them. But if we needed them, it would be a sin to have them. Whenever you have to gather around the smorgasbord in order to keep spiritual, you’re not spiritual any longer, your God is your belly and you glory is your shame.

Israel returns from Babylon, and I pray that she may. And God knows how far, far we are and how desperately we’re in need of a reformation to orientate the church around the person of Jesus instead of around the kitchen and around the table. We’re sliding into that more and more. We’re sliding into days and seasons and weeks and Mother’s days and Father’s days and Kiddies days, Poppy days and all the rest of the days. And we’re listening to the world. And Martin Luther almost lost his life, and many people did, to bring back again the pure Christianity to the world. And we’ve took that holy legacy stained with sacred blood, and now we’re letting it get away from us. And back we are going again to days and seasons and years; back to the celebration of this and that and the other and forgetting that a true church is a group of people separated from the world to Jesus Christ.

Well, there’s a dozen or whether there is 1200, it’s all the same. And we need a reformation, and we need it desperately bad. But when we pray for it, let’s watch out for that serpent. For the serpent will crawl in and hiss in our ears, wouldn’t it be wonderful if God would send that reformation and let you be Luther? Ah, Brother Martin Luther is gone, and I don’t know. I still think that the great reformations and the great openings up of areas weren’t done by the men who we thought did it. I still believe that Martin Luther wasn’t the important figure that the world thought he was.

When we get to glory, we’re very likely to find some anonymous saint who prayed Martin Luther through. He was the warhead in the nose of the missile. And God Almighty used that tough German to do what the weak pastor couldn’t do. The weak pastor, he couldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t have had the fortitude. He had no nose on him, but Luther had. So, God used the man with a hard nose and brought about the Reformation. But I still believe that if there hadn’t been some people, unknown and unheralded and unknown to this hour praying him through, there wouldn’t have been any Reformation.

So, I believe with Dr. Jaffrey. Dr. Jaffrey opened sections of South China. He opened Indochina and he opened Borneo and what they used to call the Netherland East Indies. But Dr. Jaffrey was a busy man and a man hurrying about. Somebody was back of him, or some persons, for there might have been easily more than one. And I believe that that tough customer, that Canadian who didn’t know how to retire and couldn’t retire. And when they offered to retire him, he said, sure, I’ll retire. Retire means to put on a new set of tires. So, he said, I’ll do it. And he went right on and opened another country for Christ and then died in a prison camp.

But who was backing him? We have his name, and I wrote his life and it’s all very well. But who was backing him? Somewhere, there was somebody that didn’t insist on being Elijah. Somewhere there were humble men and women praying who were willing that somebody else could take the spotlight. They worked back of the stage and operated the machinery. And when the solo was sung and the multitudes cried bravo, they weren’t even known to be back there, hiding away, sitting on the barrelhead, somewhere waiting for it to get over with, doing their part backstage.

But as old Meister Eckhart said in a burst of grief and anger; he said, who is there that’s found that will even open the house door of the house of God for nothing? Well, there were some and he overstated it, but there weren’t many. And we want the army of the Lord to win, and I do. I belong to the army of Lord.

Brethren, I’ll tell you something. But if the army of the Lord doesn’t win, I’m going to be one, the first one the enemy hunts up to liquidate. I’ll tell you that now. God had better win if I’m going to escape liquidation because I’ve made myself an unholy pest to the devil. And I intend to continue to do it till I die. And if there’s any place in heaven, where God hears prayers. I don’t know whether we can pray up there or not as we can down here, but if it’s permitted, I still want to pray against what our dear old brother William Nicholson called that dirty pig, the devil. I still want to pray against him.

Well, we want the army of the Lord to win, but you know when we dream about the host of Israel rushing out and holding their banners high and driving out the Philistines and coming back conquering, we’d like to think we’re riding up ahead in an open car like Mac Arthur and the mobs lined the streets to see us.

Well, battles aren’t won by Mac Arthurs. They’re won by dog faces and navy boys and marines and kids that only have to shave two or three times a week. They’re won by kids that lie out there; now some of them buried row on row like the seats here in this church that ought to be filled. Row on row. There lies Junior. There lies Bobby. There lies young Chuck. There lies John. Their lies Ed. There lies the boys that used to drive the old junk cars around and work on all Saturday afternoon, come in dirty and grimy to suffer. They won the wars. And when the next war comes, if it comes, they’ll win it. They’re not heard of. And when they come back crippled and disabled, hard to find a job, they’re forgotten. And a half dozen generals get the credit.

And a general, not a one of them ever smelled powder. They’ve got to be there. I believe in them. And if it hadn’t been for them to head it up, there would have been no winning. I admit that. But not one of them ever smelled powder. The boys had walked out there and took it. They get enough. Get a Purple Heart if they cut themselves shaving somebody said, they give you a Purple Heart. They can tear you to pieces, and if you don’t bleed, you don’t get it. Kids come back home; they’ve lost three, four years out of their lives. They’ve been disillusioned and embittered. And their faith in God shocked by what they’ve seen. And they go back to a job someplace, America’s unheralded heroes. And the generals ride in the big car.

We all want to be the generals. But the battles of God are not won by the generals. They are won by the privates and corporals. They’re won by those who don’t expect anything but hard work and mud holes and bullet pierced planes, a wing and a prayer if they ever do get back.

So, in the kingdom of God, my brother, we want the army of the Lord to win, but we want to ride up front. And we want our church to triumph over its enemies here. I’m searching my heart these days about our church. We want our church to triumph over its enemies. But the temptation is to pray and work toward that end but do it with a selfish motive. Do it to prove that we’re right. Do it to show that we’re a better-class Christian than those others. Just as soon as that enters, prayer dies. You can pray all night and fast and miss two meals a week, your prayer is dead. It never rises above the ceiling.

Prayer, said old Molina, let me give it to you again. Prayer is an ascent or elevation of the mind to God. That that prayer never ascends or elevates itself to the presence of God if there’s a desire that isn’t pure, selfish motives. We want our church to grow, but then we want it to grow because we’ve got a vested interest in it. Do we pray just as much?

Some years ago, I was in a campaign with some other preachers and God was blessing us quite tremendously. And God made me pray for the others as much as for myself. And He made me have an understanding with Him, that if the Lord wanted to bless these other preachers in that campaign more than me and just let me come along and be ignored, I would agree to it. I wanted God to know that. And I think God knows I mean it.

Now, I know all about our hearts being desperately wicked and all the rest, but I also know that there are times when you know where you stand, Brother. There are sometimes when you could write God a letter and sign it and say, now God, however I feel, however my emotions may float around like clouds, remember, this is what I want. And I want Thee to bless this campaign. And if You can, bless me and bless the other brethren. And whenever you want any other part of the church that you’re not particularly in, whenever you want that blessed as much as the part you’re pushing, then your prayers are likely to be pure. But if you’ve got anything that centers around you and your prayers are for the success of that, it’s not likely to be pure.

Now, we must elevate our hearts and pray. And here’s the kind of praying we’ve got to do. We’ve got to pray, O God, honor Thyself in this fellowship during this week ahead and all the days ahead and months and years. But particularly God, honor Thyself in this fellowship. Honor Thyself through me, or ignore me, and honor Thyself through others. Honor Thyself apart from me if it please Thee, O God, but honor Thyself. Restore Thy glory to the church but do it in Thine own way. And if that means passing me by, Lord, all right.

I wonder tonight how many young men there are in Bible schools and Christian seminaries burning the midnight oil, working to pay expenses, losing weight, and getting jumpy in their nervous eagerness to get through. And secretly in back of it all is a hope that someday they can be as popular as Billy Graham; that someday they can be leaders of great Christian movements. No, it won’t work, Junior. It won’t work. God will never elevate you until you humble yourself.

But we’ve got to pray, O God, do it, but do it through me or apart from me. Ignore me or use me. It makes little difference, God, but just so you do it. O God, reform this church. Reform this church but use Thine own way of doing it. For there might be another that God delights to honor. You remember Haman who wanted the honor, and you remember how they twisted it around and finally the Jew got the honor and Haman got the noose. And there may be another that God delights to honor, and He may ignore you and overlook you. If you had to take a lowly place among the shadows and your name, not be bandied about at all or heard, would you pray just as earnestly for these two things I’ve set before you, that God’s name might be glorified once more among men and that the church of Christ might be restored again from her Babylonian captivity?

Well, if you can pray like that, O God, at any cost, let it cost me. Let it cost me, Father. Not give me something, but let it take something out of me, Lord. Then your prayer is pure. But you can pray all night and not be heard if there’s any sneaking idea that you’re going to share in the glory?

Now, can you pray, O God, we want Thy glory to be revealed by whomsoever Thou revealest? We want the church to be restored to New Testament pattern by whomsoever Thou wilt restore it. We want the walls of Jerusalem rebuilt by whomsoever Thou wilt rebuild it. We want the prophets of Baal, the cultists to be defeated, and we want them defeated by whomsoever Thou wilt defeat them. We do not insist upon being Elijah. We want Israel brought back from Babylon, but we’ll go along as a red cap to carry his suitcase. We want a Reformation, O God, but we will not insist upon being Luther, Lord. But let it cost us something and let us be not heard of.

We want an army of the Lord to win, but we’ll stay on the ground and, and re-service the planes and let the generals have the credit. And Lord we’ll live our humble lives, but you’ll hear from us God. And our prayer is going to be that you’ll do these things. But we don’t insist upon having any glory out of it nor any credit and nor getting known. You know, the awful thing about it is, my friends, that when you take this place before God, you do get known. And just as soon as you take this place before God, the chances are very strong, the percentage is very high, that you will be. And if nothing else, you’ll become known as a prayer warrior. And when you get to be known as a prayer warrior, then you pray in order to stay in character with your saga, with the story they tell about you.

And you get a myth grows up around you, being a great praying soul, and that’s dangerous too. And yet, the Bible says men ought always to pray. And it says that the prayer of a righteous man availeth much. And then it gives us illustrations by the dozen from the Bible of prayer that brought down hailstones that closed the heavens, that made it rain, that made the sun and moon stand still. God answered the prayers of the people and you and I have got to pray. And the difficulties in prayer that I’ve placed before you tonight are not difficulties. They should challenge you. They should not stop you but challenge you. You should purify your praying.

And we should purify our praying as a company of people. And I want to lead a good company of people starting Tuesday night, every night at seven o’clock in prayer. But I want a people who are unselfish, who want two things above all, that we should have again the name of God brought up before the world and before the church so that men might tremble at His presence and that the church might be restored again from her captivity. And as this church as a part of that church we might triumph in holiness. We want this, but we don’t want anybody to get any credit except our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, can you pray like that? And do you want God to do anything bad enough to insist that He do it at whatever costs, even if it costs you something? Jesus wanted the world redeemed. He wanted the world redeemed. The Father said, I’ll answer your prayer and redeem the world. But you know what it’ll cost you? And He replied, I lay down My life of Myself. He was willing. He redeemed the world and answered His own prayer by giving His life for others. Do you want to be a useful Christian? Are you willing to let your usefulness cost you anything that He chooses in order that His glory should be revealed.

My dear friends, I think I might have a reputation of being a bit critical, and that’s an understatement. But I’ll tell you this much. When I see the glory of God moving, I want in it. I want to be there. I want to go along with that. And even though I’m just an office boy and go along and help and file cards, anything that would bring the church of God back again to the Holy Land and build up the walls of Jerusalem. And my criticism is not of those who are seeking to glorify God and restore his church. But I recognize merchants when I see them in the temple. I want to pick them up by the scruff of the neck and throw them out. I have good precedence for that. Great God, hear us and enable us to pray.

I wonder how many tonight there are here who would say, I agree with you, Brother Tozer. I believe these two things that are so desperately needed, that the name of God might be exalted and that hallowed, His name should be hallowed above all else, and that a new concept of God might be brought back to the church again, the concept our Baptist and Presbyterian and Methodist fathers had. The concept of God, the opinions, the notion concerning God, the idea of God in the hearts of the reformers.

We want this back again to a church whose God is too small. And we want the church restored again to New Testament pattern. And we want it so bad that we will pray and work and labor, even if it means loss to us. And even if it means that we are overlooked and neglected, and God gets all the glory and all we get is the blame. Are you ready for that? Are you ready? Is there anybody here that can write God a letter tonight and sign it and fold it and put it where you can get to it and say, now, God, here’s what I want to say to Thee. I want to say that I want Thy church restored and I want Thy name hallowed and I want this fellowship blessed for Thy glory only. And I don’t ask a thing but the privilege of seeing it happen.

Could you do that? Come down here to the place of prayer–right now. Is that real with you, Brother? Sister? When you get down here start to pray. Don’t let’s wait on each other. Let’s call on God tonight. Kneel in the seats. Kneel along the platform here as an altar. Lead right out. Somebody lead us right out.

I want you to pray that God will bless our fellowship and give us success here in a mighty tough situation, for this changing population and people moving away over the last two years. We’ve suffered, but we’re a long way from this. The God of our fathers is with us. But we don’t want anybody to get any credit out of this. Don’t anybody say, Tozer won. Tozer never won anything but sin. Will you pray? Somebody, lead us out. Who else wants to come. Anybody else want to come and join us? Come on. Come and join us. I think there ought to be others here. You want to get down on your knees. Have you ever had anybody go after you and penetrate through to you the Holy Ghost maybe has done. Come on down and join us we pray. Amen. Amen. Now somebody lead us out. I see you here, you lead, and we’ll join you then, one after the other.

Tags Church, Glory, Prayer

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Tozer Talks

“Prayer for the Glory of God I“

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Prayer for the Glory of God I

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

November 17, 1957

Without any doubt, I have spoken on the text I will be using this morning. Not once, but I suppose 100 times, more or less. But on Tuesday, or perhaps it was Wednesday, I was with the Lord in prayer and it came so very clearly to me, not from heaven direct. I don’t claim inspiration in that sense, but through the Word, that I was to talk to you twice today. And I grabbed a pencil and took down some notes. It’s almost as though I were taking dictation. I don’t mean to make the Lord responsible for all my mistakes, but only say that at least the gist of what I’m going to say, certainly, came from the Scriptures and from God.

So, I want to read a very familiar verse, part of a verse from James 5, the latter part of verse 16. It really starts another verse, another paragraph: The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Now, there is a positive statement, positive. Then 4:2,3 of the same book: Ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss that ye may consume it on your lusts. There’s a negative statement. Fortunately, James hadn’t read any books about presenting the truth positively only. He presented the other side. Then our Lord in Luke 18:1: and He spake a parable unto them to this end, that men are always to pray and not to faint.

Now, there are the three texts. And we’re to talk about prayer. And I want to give you a definition of prayer which I got from Molina, the great Spanish saint, who said this: that prayer is an ascent, or elevation of the mind to God. Very simple, isn’t it? Prayer is an ascent of the mind to God. It is an elevation of the mind. Saying that it is an ascent, simply means that it ascends to God, but saying that it is an elevation of the mind indicates that there’s something you’ve got to do to elevate it. God is above all creatures. And the soul cannot see Him nor converse with Him unless she raise herself above all creatures. Now, that’s what Molina said, that prayer is the elevation of the soul, the flight of the soul of the mind to God.

Now, that’s a definition of prayer, but the texts we have before us say some specific things about prayer. The first one says that prayer is a potent thing; that it availeth much. And I would cite those words “availeth much” as constituting a terrific understatement. For the Old Testament and the New Testament combine to teach and demonstrate how much prayer availeth. And the Holy Ghost Himself, labors in this same James, the fifth chapter to show us by example how much prayer available by citing Elijah’s ability to turn to heaven off and on; the clouds to make them rain or not rain as he please. Now, that’s the one statement: prayer availeth much. The second statement says that sometimes we do not have the advantage of prayer for one of two reasons: either we have failed to ask or we have asked selfishly. And therefore, we do not have the benefits that prayer could bring. That’s the negative side. Prayer availeth much, but you’re not getting much availed. Therefore, it could be because we have failed to ask or having asked, we’ve done so selfishly. That’s what James says.

Then our Lord says that, nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties and the problems that are before us, we ought always to pray. And in this 18th of Luke, as far as I know, the only parable that starts out by telling what it’s going to teach. This is one parable that none of the commentators ever quarrel over. Mostly, they quarrel in a good natured, nice way, but they disagree over what the parable teaches. But this one they can’t disagree over because we are told, He spake a parable unto them to this end. In other words, before He told us the parable, He told us what the parable would teach. He made His statement and illustrated it with a story, a short one, but a story. And He said, the reason I tell you this story is, that men ought always to pray and not to faint, and I want to make that point. So, there we have those three texts.

Now, my friends, there’s a lot of prayer going on these days, a lot of prayer being sent up currently. In fact, I don’t think it would be irreverent to say that God seems to be on everybody’s mailing lists. Because you know, mailing lists are made up of persons who have something that the mailee can get or that he wants from the mailer. The mailer is the man who sends it out and the mailee is the man who receives it. And so, if you’re on the list, you’re a mailee. And the mailer knows that you have some thing that he wants, and therefore he writes you. And we have now a God who is on everybody’s mailing list all over the country and all over the world, asking for things. But I think that mostly the motive is not any higher than the motive of the man who sent the mail that we referred to.

Some years ago, I read a very amusing and also a very enlightening article about rich men. Somebody had gone around, investigated and interviewed rich men of the Edsel Ford and Rockefeller stripe, and had gotten enough anecdotes and information that he wrote a very fine article about it in one of the national magazines. And you wouldn’t believe it if you didn’t know that it’s been documented and was true. What these rich men suffer are from the people who want to get something out of them. They’re being bombarded continually by people who want something of what they had.

One I remember, this sticks in my mind. It might have been the most ridiculous, but I do remember this one, that a man wrote into one of the two great, rich men Ford or Rockefeller, and said, Dear Mr. so and so, I have a little proposition that I want to make. You are a rich man, and you also are familiar with finance. And you know where money can be best invested to multiply itself. Therefore, my request is that you lend me $500, and then invest it for me. And then send me the proceeds. Now, can you imagine anything as foolish as that, and yet they say things like that happen. Not only lend me the money but invest it for me and then send me the proceeds. Well, that’s philanthropy was a double “F”.

And now there is danger, my friends, that God shall simply be the great rich man, the composite of all rich men. That He shall be the buyer, the consumer, with His big pocket book at which we aim all our advertising, and whom we try to win to our side in order that we can get something from Him. There’s a great danger, because you see, every sort of personal and selfish interest these days is being baptized with the waters of prayer. And though they may be unscriptural or unspiritual and even downright injurious, and they may have no higher motive than to relieve the receivee from the necessity of earning an honest living, or, to provide him an opportunity to travel at other people’s expense. There are a lot of people that are doing that. They don’t want to earn an honest living and they want to travel. They like to do the two things, and wouldn’t you like to travel? And wouldn’t you like to do it at other people’s expense and have no obligation and audit your own books and be responsible to yourself?

Well, a lot of people are praying and boasting of how they’re succeeding because they’re praying; asking everybody everywhere to pray, forgetting that after you’ve persuaded a man to pray with you for a sum of money, he is psychologically persuaded to give you that amount of money. Well, we even call prayer meetings and continue all night in prayer in order that a project might succeed, and that project, I say, may be nothing, but to save a fellow from going to work and getting the 8:17 and sitting at a desk and doing an honest job or driving a truck or running a grocery store. And the fellow wants to run around.

Well now, let’s not imagine that you can’t take personal things to God. In fact, there is nothing so personal that you can’t go to God about it. Brother McAfee and I have often quoted together and talk together about a little saying of Julian, the lady Julian, that Saint of Norwich, England who lived 600 years ago. He calls her my girlfriend. And when I go, he says are you taking your girlfriend along? Well, my girlfriend is a little book that you could put the average woman. Oh, well, that’s no illustration. You could put a dictionary in your pocket book. But it’s just a little book you could slip down here and not notice it. And she wrote on the revelations of divine love.

And she tells about how utterly amazed and filled with joy she was to think that her Lord, so high and lofty, yet not considered Himself too high to humble Himself to be concerned about the commonest, little things that belong to our earthly lives and to our bodies, she said. The Lord looks after everything, and the Lord is more concerned about your temperature than your nurse is. And He’s more concerned about your health than your doctor. He’s more concerned about your business than you are. He’s more concerned about your family than you are.

So, all the little details we dare take to God, let nobody preach that out of you. That’s in the Bible. We can talk to God about the little, simple things. But always remember that these things should be talked over with God. There are things you men don’t talk over even with the family. You talk them over with your wife. Well, there are things then that you can’t even talk over with your wife. There are things that you talk over only with God. God is the final One who understands and who will hear us for all the personal, intimate things. These things need not be and mostly should not be brought to prayer meetings.

I think we kill most prayer meetings. And most prayer meetings I’ve ever been in are dead. Some people don’t like the way I conduct a prayer meeting, but I’ve never been to one conducted any better. They just meet and then we go over the same things. These things are brought up and we take our friends into our confidence and tell us things that we only ought to tell God. When we pray in private, we ought to pray about private things. And when we pray corporate prayers, we ought to pray about things that pertain to the corporate body and to the glory of God. Often, it’s embarrassing and a waste of other people’s time.

For me, I have a cousin in Oil City, Pennsylvania. I don’t, but suppose I had, and his son is getting into bad company. And the teacher wrote and said, would you want to do something about Elmer. And so, I get that letter from my cousin in Oil City, PA. So, I take that to a prayer meeting.

Now, my brethren, that’s too intimate a thing to take to a prayer meeting, and that concerned me and my cousin and his boy Elmer. And that does not concern the corporate body. There’s a lot of waste of prayer, and I believe the Holy Ghost is displeased because of our so-called prayer requests which turn out to be personal, private, and sometimes I’m afraid, selfish things. So, the Holy Ghost says you don’t get your prayers answered often because either you don’t ask. You get discouraged and quit asking, or if you do ask, your motives aren’t right.

Now I want to talk about the corporate prayer in the time I have left. That is, the body praying, the people praying, we, praying together Wednesday night, the women praying on Wednesdays and Tuesday nights, and the men praying as it did here last night, and we praying as we do and will be praying.

Now what should be the aim of our prayers? Well, the aim of our prayers should be also the aim of our lives, so that our prayers and our lives parallel each other. That we don’t live one way and pray another, but that we should want something and then we should live for that thing. We must pray in harmony with our work. I say that a great many people are carrying on work, and numerically they’re successful, and financially they’re successful because they happen to have strong personalities at the head of it, and they know skillfully how to take advantage of the known habits of the public.

You see my friends; you know how Christian people are going to behave. I know about how you will behave. You may fool me on details, but you won’t over the long haul. We know the expectation created by the known conduct of God’s people. And we know that God’s people have a generous streak. Newspapers know how to play that up. They know that a beautiful woman not too well-dressed, always get the interest of the public. They know that a little animal, a little pet will always get the interest of the public and they know that a baby always will.

So these are the three things the newspapers play up continually. And we see it every day. We see it almost every time there’s a pretty baby’s picture appears for any reason, I hand it and say, look at this, to my wife. Well, I’m a sucker for pretty babies and I’m a sucker for pets. I confess that I don’t go for the other, as avidly as some might. But there are a number of readers that it must, because the newspapers know the habits of the public. And all they have to do is know their habits and play to them and they succeed.

Well, it’s possible for religious leaders to know the habits of the religious public and then play to their habits. And when they take bold steps of faith after praying all night, they’re always careful to move in the direction that they know the public has proved they’ll be there to support them.

Well, you and I don’t want anything to do with that at all. I began preaching on the street corner and I suppose I can go back to it. But we’ve got to pray in harmony with high purposes, and we’ve got to work in harmony with high purposes and give in harmony with high purposes.

Now what are these purposes? Don’t brace yourself for a dozen, for there are only two that I am going to bring to you now, just two. And out from them, they may grow others, but these are two. And I stand to say to you, my friends, that these two requests, or desires, should be primary. They should be critically prior. They should be first. They should take priority over all other prayer requests, including even the intimate and little prayer requests that I might want to make about myself and family.

One of them is the restoration of the vision of the Most High God to the world again. When our Brother Fuller comes, I don’t know whether he will preach on any such sermon as that. But that’s the one thing his cry has been as he’s talked with me and as I’ve heard him pray and exhort in his Bible conferences. It is, that once more, this world should see a vision of the God who would strike them down. A God who wouldn’t hesitate to drive them dumb as he drove Daniel dumb, or cause John to fall flat on his face as John fell. This kind of God is gone from the church. He’s gone not only from liberalism, but he’s gone from the evangelical churches almost entirely. The honor of God has been lost to men. And the God of today’s Christianity is a very rich weakling that can be manipulated by certain psychological laws.

Now that the glory should return is imperative, my brethren. The glory should return, and that the glory of God should return and be seen among men. You know, we read it in the Psalms and don’t know what we’re reading. Let thy glory be above all the earth. Manifest Thy glory among the nations, cried the Psalmsist. And all the way through the Old Testament it says, the glory of Jehovah should be known among the nations. And we come to the New Testament it is, do this said Jesus to His Father, that men may know, and that I have manifested Thy name unto the men Thou has gave to me, always given me. Always it was the wish and desire of Jesus Christ. He died for it in fact, that God’s glory might be manifested to the world.

And the coming of Jesus to the world in the first place was, that a world that had lost the vision of God should regain it again. And when the Holy Ghost came at Pentecost, it was that He should give to the heart, as well as to the intellect, a vision of the glory of God.

Now, this is the first of the desires, and I have no hesitation to say to you, that God’s glory should be rediscovered, and the world should see what kind of God God is, and that the church should once more worship a God whom they could respect, the God of the Bible, the God who is the only God. That is more important to God than the salvation of sinners.

Now, that may sound terrible, but the Baptists and Presbyterians in other days boldly preached that and didn’t care what people thought. But we have gotten into this soft humanism in our time that will weep over rebels and weep over rebels and imagine that that’s the divine order. My brethren, the divine order is that God should be glorified among the nations and His honor revealed to His people. And that’s more valuable and more to be desired in heaven among the holy angels and seraphim and among all the elders and creatures around the throne than that people should be saved.

But here’s the wonderful story. It is this, that the glory of God and the salvation of men have so been harmonized in the loving heart of God, that God’s glory can be revealed as men are converted, so that it’s not an either or, I must choose one or the other. But it is that both can happen, one at the same time as the other. God will both glorify Himself by saving men, but He also glorifies Himself otherwise. And so I say, if we have to take a choice between the salvation of men or the glory of God, every being in heaven would say, Thine be the glory. Before they would say, man should be saved.

Now, the first corporate prayer of this New Testament begins: Our Father. And by the word “our,” it makes it a corporate prayer. That is, a prayer of a body of people. And the first request of that corporate body is what. Hallowed be Thy name. Have you noticed this, my friend, that when Jesus said, when you pray, you, as a body, pray and say “our,” the Lord’s prayer as we call it, is not for individuals, it’s for corporate praying. It’s for all of us to pray. It’s when the body of Christians unite to want something, to do something, to desire something, then we pray, our Father. And the first request, the first, our Father, is a salutation. It’s not a request. Then comes the request, hallowed be Thy name.

And before any other request, is that God’s name should be hallowed. That His holy, sacred name should be hallowed before mankind. And if we are to follow the teachings of Jesus, then we are to follow this procedure. Hallowed be Thy name, this is first, and not second and not third, but first. That the glory of God should be restored and that the vision of the Most High God should once more appear to men. And I want to tell you that if this vision should ever appear to men in churches and should be preached again; if the ministers of the sanctuary should go back to preaching on the perfections and attributes and character and being of God and keep at it and keep at it, it would soon have an effect of bringing sinners to their knees in confession. It would have an effect of making Christians separate from the world and hate themselves and their carnal ways. Even as Isaiah, when he saw the vision cried, I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips.

So, the glory of God is first and John 14:13 says, Jesus speaking, whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do that the Father may be glorified in the Son. So, notice here, will you, that the reason Jesus said I do it, is that He should glorify the Father in the doing of it. And anything that is done that is simply to help people but doesn’t glorify God, God will not answer. The humanist will. The tender, weeper will, but God won’t. For God says that the Father may be glorified is the reason I answer prayer. If he shall ask it that the Father may be glorified.

So, you see that no project, no organization, no need, no anything, is valid till the glory of God is restored. And in all that we do in all of our prayers, we ought to pray. Don’t take preachers for granted, dear people. They are the weakest of all the people. Don’t take preachers for granted. They’ll go along with anything.

I was a great, big boy when I learned that doctors went along with the advertisers. You go to Doctor Pill, and you say, Doctor, I’ve got a pain. And he remembers what he read in the medical journal, the advertiser. I looked at their advertising, their ads, and he prescribed something that he seen advertised. I was a big boy before I found that out. And I don’t say that universally. I don’t say that’s all they do. Certainly, they earn an honest living. But I do say that they yield to it.

And preachers are like that. If we were all holy prophets who walked down out of the presence of God with the dew of holiness on our brows, then I would say you better listen. And I would say that you dare to take us for granted. But when I know that preachers are subject to all the subtle persuasion of the religious advertiser that you are, then we better begin to pray for God’s ministers of the sanctuary, that they might get their eyes open to the fact that better than that their church should prosper, is that the name of God should once more be a hallowed among men.

Let me prophesy to you. Now I’m going to give you a prophecy. None of you will believe it probably, now. But the nice thing about true prophecy is, that it proves itself. Here’s my prophesy: we are now riding the wave of religion, and Christianity is more popular than it’s ever been since Jesus Christ died on the cross. And even though over on the Bible-believing side, it’s more popular. The very fact that this editorial of mine could get into newspaper proves it. They’re ready for anything religious now–anything. All right.

Now, let me tell you something, friends, and here’s my prophesy. The time is coming unless God should just upset the whole prophecy by a revival. If He did that, a genuine revival, then, of course, I’d be happy, happy if I’m around to say, Lord, I was mistaken. But I wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t come to our help. If the Lord doesn’t help us and the glory of God isn’t revealed and man’s mouth isn’t shut and God’s glory isn’t elevated, here’s what’s going to happen. We are going to have a reaction from modern popular Christianity that will be on a scale unprecedented in Christian history. We are going to have a bitterness, a disillusionment, and we are going to breed a cynical contempt for God and religion and the church that will turn this country of ours almost completely apart from believing Christians into a camp of religion haters. We’re going back where we were in the 20s or further down than that yet. And you will find cynicism and disillusionment and disappointment and bitterness and hostility, because people are thinking this way, that what we’ve got is Christianity when it is not. And the reason I know it is not, is hallowed be Thy name isn’t at the front of it, but it’s something else. But if God ever hears the prayer of a few of us and hallows His name.

I talked about this to R.R. Brown, Stacy Woods, Paris Reidhead and James Stewart of the European mission. The five of us stood around and discussed it and said, what are we going to do? What are we going to do that the glory of God should be manifested again and that we might be able to stave off this awesome, awful backwash? Well, it’s coming. I may not live to see it, but it’s coming. And the day will be when the people who are now singing over the radio and on the barn dance about God, how good He is, wouldn’t be caught dead singing about God, a disillusioned, embittered, hostile, angry, cynical crowd, the people that tasted Christianity that wasn’t Christianity. We’re going to have him on our hands. Well, that’s the first, the glory of God.

The second, I’ll be brief. It’s 12 o’clock. The second great desire is that the church should be delivered, and maybe I’ve already said that. That the church, not this church only, but the church of God should be delivered from her Babylonish captivity. Remember that the Scripture talked about the great harlot and her daughters. Well, when the great harlot spread herself all over Europe, there arose a thick-necked man by the name of Dr. Martin Luther. And he brought a reformation that set that lady back on her honches and gave us the Reformation and Protestantism and the present evangelicalism.

Let me say to you, my friends, that her daughters have now gotten almost as bad as she was, only in a different way. We don’t have a pope, but we have other things as bad. We don’t have holy water, but we have water not so holy. We don’t have holy bones, but we have other things. If you don’t believe this, come up to my office and I’ll let you run through some of the religious magazines that come to my desk. You’ll see holy bones there all right. The daughters have become as bad as their mother. The great harlot has had children. And the Scripture says, I’ll judge that great harlot and her children and her daughters.

Now, those daughters are in Babylonian captivity just as the church was in Luther’s day. And Luther brought a part of that church out of Babylonian captivity. And the disgraceful fornication with the world now going on among the churches–this you must pray about my brothers and sisters. This you must pray about. This is what we ought to pray about. This should be our corporate prayer. This is the reason we have meetings such as the ones we’ve announced. And until this is accomplished and until the church has been delivered from her mental bondage and from her way of living and her Babylonian captivity, then I say that nothing else is of first importance.

You say, evangelism? What does evangelism do but cause the church to bring forth in Babylon? The church’s children are brought forth, but they’re brought forth under Babylonish captivity when they ought to be brought forth in the land. You say missions, but what do missions do but transplant a socially corrupt and scrub Christianity on foreign soil? And you say books and schools and magazines and all the rest–very well– but my brother, many Christian activities are about the working of the bacteria in a decaying church, that’s all. You go if you want to do it and can stand it to a barrel of swill. But barrel of swill, look at it and watch it and see what it does. It bubbles and hisses and whispers, but it’s always active, always active. It is decaying and fermenting and rotting. And it shows itself by a constant activity.

And an awful lot of activity now is little more than the activity of bacteria in the decaying church. And we must pray and work that the church may be freed. We must pray and work that she may come back to separation and devotion and purity and sanctification. That she may come back again to the glory of God, and that she may devote herself not to being known, publicizing herself, but to the glory of God.

Now brethren, these are the two things that every church is under binding, terrible obligation to get done–to pray enough and labor enough and live in line with their prayers, that God’s glory should one time more appear among men. Oh, that God might appear again as He did for the Moravians, when God bestowed upon them a loving newness of the Savior instantaneously. And they went out hardly knowing whether they were on earth or in heaven.

This can only come to a church that takes itself seriously. This can only come to a church that accepts truth and will yield itself and settle itself to do two things. To pray for the glory of God to be restored and the church to be purified. Another generation of decay and rot in our churches, and what will we be sending to the mission field? We’ll be sending a decaying and burned-out brand of Christianity that will do the heathen very little good. To prove that this is true, you only have to go to some places now where liberal preachers have been and sociologists instead of preachers have been with their gospel of sociology and the toothbrush. Go where they’ve been. You’ll find Christians that are not Christians at all.

A transplantation of a humanistic, sociological Christianity into the foreign field is not fulfilling the text which says, go ye into all around and preach the gospel to every creature. And the transplantation of a publicity-mad, entertainment-rotten evangelicalism into Borneo or somewhere else, is not fulfilling it either. We must go, taking the glory of God and the blood of the Lamb, and calling the people to separate and come together in two minority groups, hated by the world, but loved of God; to be different and changed and transformed by the glory and the power of God. We must take that kind of gospel.

And we continue to go downhill; and our religious colleges and missionary colleges and Bible institutes continue to go downhill and rot and decay and tear apart and pull away at the seams, the next generation of missionaries won’t be worth sending to the field.

Oh, that we might have revival that would purge us, me, as a minister of the sanctuary and you and all of us, so that there may go out from us, not only evangelists and missionaries–and you can’t be a Bible church and not have both-but that they may go out with those two great things in mind, particularly the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And take to the heathen world and take to the dying world, not the story only that God loves them, but the story of a great God, high and lifted up Who made heaven and earth, and before whose face the heaven and the earth will someday flee away. Who, in His Majesty, rides across the heavens, but Who also, in His love, gave His only begotten Son. That’s the only kind of gospel worth taking and the only kind of preaching worth hearing.

Father, we pray Thy blessing upon the Word this morning. Meet us and meet us tonight we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

Tags Church, Glory, Prayer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 8, 2023

“How to Grow in Grace”

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How to Grow in Grace

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

April 29, 1957

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags Grace, Growth, Prayer

Messages

Tozer Talks

“All Things are Possible With God”

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All Things Are Possible With God
Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
September 2, 1956

There are two verses, two parts of verses, just words, the words of Jesus. One is found in Mark 10:27, these words, six of them. With God, all things are possible. With God, all things are possible. And then in the ninth chapter, the 23rd verse, all things are possible to him that believeth.

Now, there is the same thing said about God and about the believing man: all things are possible. I see no poetry here, no figure here. This is not figurative language. It is blunt statement of truth. The whole passage is without figure or metaphor. We need not discount this in any wise. It stands just as it is bluntly, all things are possible to him that believeth, and all things are possible with God.

Now, the text, all things are possible with God, is one that we can take standing up and without a problem, as I have pointed out on a previous occasion some, I think, years back now, that nobody ever feels when he hears the text, with God all things are possible, that he’s been jarred in it. He does not stagger at that statement through unbelief. With God all things are possible. The eternal God, the omnipotent God, the God who is plenipotent, who has all the potency that there is, all the power that exists is in God. And nobody feels jarred or disturbed. Nobody runs to a pastor and says, what does this mean? Nobody writes to an editor and says, will you please give your opinion of verse so and so, all things are possible with God? Everybody knows that’s true, and nobody questions it. That is, anybody who’s ever read the Bible at all or been brought up in the Christian tradition.

But the other verse, all things are possible to him that hath faith. Now, we might just as well say that we’re in trouble here. There isn’t any use to look pious and impassive and pretend that this also is easy for us and it’s old stuff. It’s nothing of the sort. It is very difficult for the human mind to grasp, even the Christian, human mind, because it says the same thing about a believing man that it says about God. It states that the God of heaven can do everything. And then it states that the man who believes can do everything.

Now, God declares His total ability to do, His total ability to do. I’ve been praying over and wondering what I should be talking to the people in Canada about as they’re gathered, will be gathered there from all over. And there will be men there, very greatly my superior in every possible way that I know. Such men as Dr. Jones and this Hashi, a very famous theologian from Switzerland. And I can’t go there and hope to be able to stand up along with those very great and learned and gifted men. And I have wondered whether maybe I shouldn’t just go there and talk about God. I wonder if that might not be, just go there and talk about God. Because they usually don’t do that. They find God in everything, but they don’t talk about God too much. Maybe that will be my contribution, just go there and talk about the Triune God. And among the things that I want to say, will be that God declares His total ability to do. God can do every thing. That is, He can do everything that He desires to do.

Believing in the omnipotence of Deity does not require us to believe that God can do what He does not will to do. God cannot, for instance, tell a lie. God cannot, for instance, break a promise. But anything God wills to do, God has total ability to do. And no thing and no matter and no body and no circumstance or no law and no enemy and no opposition from anywhere can stop God from doing exactly what He wills to do. Now, we want to get that settled. The great God whose we are and whom we call Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, can do whatever He wills to do and all that He wills to do.

But now the same thing is true of him that believeth. God shares His omnipotence with that person He calls, him that believeth. With whom does God share His omnipotence with? About whom does God say, he’s equal to me, in a relative way and by My grace and permission and promise, he can do what I can do. Or because I do what I do through him, about whom does He thus speak? Is it a genius? Is it some religious genius more brilliant? No, he could be a genius, but it’s not with geniuses that God shares his total ability to do. Not with some powerful personality.

I’ve said I suppose too often already here, that the cult of personality has become a deadly and dangerous thing in our time. That this cult of personality that magnifies Apollos and puts a leay around his neck, of the fragrant flowers and offers sacrifice to him, this has become a dangerous thing. And God did not say that man of powerful personality can do whatsoever he wills. He said, that the man who believeth has the power to do whatsoever he will.

Now, this person may not be a superior one. And he may be no wiser and no more influential and no more powerful than the rank and file, because the power is not his. The power belongs to God. You see, if I know that the power belongs to God, this takes all the strain off so there isn’t any effort A man walks in with a subconscious feeling, partly conscious that he’s got to do it, he attempts to do it either by forcing his voice or by gesticulations or by some other method. He tries to do, by his own power, that which only God can do.

Now, gestures and gesticulations are normal. You and I have that much Jew in us that when we make a point we like to do it with our hands. And we talk with our hands and that’s perfectly normal and all right. But there is such a thing as going into a pulpit or before a class or wherever, and trying by putting what they call, body english into it. Do you know what body english is? It’s to hit it and then turn and hope and help the thing to go where it ought to go by sheer physical, by overpowering the thing. But after it’s left the club, you can’t do a thing with it then. But people try that, as I try on an airplane to keep the thing balanced. I always lean the other way from the way it turns. If they bank to the left, I lean hard to the right so it won’t turn over. But that’s strictly and purely a fallacy of the mind.

And we can try in our prayers to strain and wrestle with God and get things done by our power. My brethren, the Bible didn’t say, all things are possible with God, and all things are possible with the man or woman who can wrestle enough. He said, All things are possible to him that believeth. We ought again to release wonderful, marvelous faith into the church of Christ and see what faith can do. That is, not the faith you hear about over the radio: somebody upstairs likes me. Not that kind of pagan faith, but the faith in God. Now, this takes, I say, all the strain off so that you’re not trying to do it. And it takes all the glory away from you. I wonder how many people there are who serve God sheerly for God Almighty’s own glory without wanting a little cut on their own. Now, I seriously do.

I wonder how many men write a Christian book and commit it to God so completely that they’re willing for it to fail? I wonder how many people teach and commit it to God so completing that they’re willing to fail if God orders it. Mostly we want to serve God by winning and keeping up a good front ourselves. But it should not be because the power belongs to God and to Him alone, and all the glory must be taken away from you or me. Remember this, I am Jehovah and there is no other and My glory will I not share with another. And the work that is being done in the world, the truly eternal work that is being done, is being done only by those who don’t want any share in God’s glory, but give all the glory to the Godhead, to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Now, our Lord Jesus Christ is absolute Master. I wish you’d read your Bible with that in mind. I wish you’d read your New Testament more. Read Acts and read Colossians and learn how God has elevated His Son to the right hand of power. And even while He walked on the earth, He manifested His absolute mastery over everything. Over the realm of nature, the wind and the sea obeyed Him. And over human flesh, He healed the sick. And over the soul, He forgave sins. And over the spirit, He cast out devils. And in the realm of the dead, for He spoke and the dead walked out of their graves alive. So, our Lord had all power. He manifested it while he walked on Earth. And when He went to the right hand of God, if there was such a thing as any realm where God had for the moment in His plan, restrained Him, He took those restraints off. Then Jesus said, all authority is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. And then He said, as my Father sent me, so send I you. And in Mark 16:20, these disciples believed this and they went forth, says the Scripture, and preached everywhere. And the Lord went with them, confirming the word with signs following.

Now, it says that in the Book of Mark, but somebody would want to tell us that that was for the Apostles and belonged to another day. Isn’t it strange? I pointed out one time, just at the conclusion of a sermon, how unbelief works. Unbelief says somewhere else, but not here. Some other time, but not now. Some other people but not us. And I had the pleasure of hearing that sermon preached back to me by a young preacher who’d heard that and develop them into a beautiful sermon. I heard it. He had to point. And it was a good sermon, all right, because that’s the way unbelief does. Unbelief is willing to believe anything provided it isn’t now. Anything, provided it isn’t here. Anything, provided it isn’t us.

And there are those of you listening to me right now that pray for the Danis and the unpronounceables up there in the Philippines. And you wouldn’t be even a little surprised if the message came that God had done wonders there. But you can’t bring yourself to believe God will do wonders here. Do you know that? If it’s far enough away, you’ll believe it. But if it comes close enough, you begin to stagger. No doubt if Abraham had heard a story back in antediluvian days, an old man, 100, with a wife, 90, had had a child. He’d have taken it in stride. But it was something else when God said to the old man, your wife, Sarah shall have a son.

Now brethren, let’s get away from this thing. And let’s remember that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God of the Reformers and the God of the Revivalists and the God of the great pioneer missionaries. That is our God. He is our God. But you say, yes, but they deserve it. You see, brethren, we still have the Roman Catholic idea that the saints are much more beloved than we are. That if you were virtuous enough to be a saint, God loved you more and would do more for you. But that is a subtle suggestion that God gives us things because we’re saintly.

But the Bible doesn’t teach that. The Bible teaches that God gives us things because God is good and we’re in need and grace operates. And Saint Augustine, could not get a thing that you can get from God. St. Augustine never had one-inch closer entrée to God Almighty than you have right now. The well need not a physician. The healthy man doesn’t need a doctor. It’s the sick man. And I believe we have a right, and I have written it into my little prayer book, and I take it before God. I believe we have a right to believe that God will bless us in inverse proportion to how bad we’ve been. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

What do I mean by that strange expression, in inverse proportion? I mean that I have a right to go to God and say, O God, You boasted about your grace and your mercy and your willingness out of your own good heart to bless people that didn’t deserve it. Well, I’m a candidate. I’m the worst and therefore God give me the most. I believe we have a right to go, and I think God would smile and listen if we went to Him and say I’m bringing Thee no soft odors. I’m bringing Thee no garments redolent of sainthood. I am bringing Thee no past that can be written in a book. I am bringing Thee a past that I don’t want written in a book. And I am bringing Thee not the smell of heaven but the savor of earth. I’m bringing Thee raggedness and scattered, staggered and unworthiness. And now God, make good on your promise and bless me most because I’m worse. And give me greater help because I need it the most.

I believe that God smiles at that kind of praying to go slithering into the presence of God with a waxy smile and say, God, I’m not as other men. This harlot over here, this publican over there, that politician over yonder, I’ve always been a good boy and stayed in church. And I have five Bibles at home that I earned in Sunday school. And you know, Father, that I never did anything worse than drink a bottle of Coke. And I’m a pretty good boy, Lord, I think God will turn His back on that kind of self-righteousness, but knowing what I am and knowing what we are. But because Jesus Christ’s blood is of infinite capacity to purchase merits for us, we go straight into the presence of God paying no attention to the merits of the saints.

Don’t allow yourself to be hooked by that old error that the saints piled up merits. If the saints got their merits, they would all be in hell now, every last one of them. If they got only what they deserved from Augustine and St. Teresa, and all down to this present hour, they’d all be in hell and they all knew it and all said so. And they were the first ones to say so. I’ve got their lives and devotional works and I read them. I know what they believed. And this idea that there is a what they call it, a superarrogationist idea that you pile up merits.

But I and Brother Thomas and Brother Chase and Brother McAfee were four good boys and when we die, we’ll leave behind us a little merit. Which if you can get it, it will help you. Paganism, my brethren. There’s not a line in the Scripture about it. Its paganism. I will not leave any merits behind me. I’ll leave demerits, 100% solid. But I have all the merits of a risen Jesus, all the merits of a risen Jesus. Not superarrogation, but vicarious death and resurrection. It gives me everything that I need, everything, everything.

Jesus Christ is made to me all I need. All I need, He alone is all my plea. Here’s all I need, wisdom, righteousness and power, holiness forevermore. My redemption, full and sure, He is all I need. And the only plea we have and the only one we need before our Father’s face, because I was a guilty sinner, but Jesus died for me. And the Father hears my prayer and answers it as if I had been an unfallen angel in heaven above and had never known the pollution of iniquity. He restores moral innocency through His forgiving love and establishes us so that we can talk to Him. And we can get things from Him if you want to put it on that low level.

Well, he says, they went everywhere and the Lord went with them. And the Lord confirmed everything and proved to them that He meant what He said when He said that everything they needed they could have just as He could do anything He wanted to do. Now where may we expect that power in the next seven minutes? Where may we expect it in personal salvation and life? No sin, no habit, no weakness, nothing, can stop the Lord Jesus Christ. Nothing can stop the Lord Jesus Christ.

Can you imagine a gnat flying around trying to escape a nighthawk? A nighthawk sails and bank and turn and curve and make their beeping sound all over Chicago. You’re not naturalist enough to know when a nighthawk is flying. He’s hunting gnats. He eats them, lives off of them. That’s where he gets his food. He doesn’t sit down on the dirty earth and pecks. He goes up there and flies around takes it on the wing.

Well suppose that this gnat has escaped a night hawk and he sees a DC-7 roaring in and says I’m going to bring that one down and he flies into the propeller. You know what happens to him. He’s history from that moment on. And when anything says, well God Almighty, He can’t do it. You say, God can’t do it brother. God in His pity may close His eyes and wait so as not to crush you, but God can do anything He wants to do. Don’t think he can’t. And there isn’t an enemy anywhere that can stop Him.

Have you notice the communists have begun to talk like the Nazis now, boastfully, boasting. Hitler used to say I’m about run out of patience now. You, your country over there, I’m about run out of patience. He ran out of patience and then he ran out of time. And the day that he said, we know how to deal with you Bible-carrying Christians. I said, God thank you. He said it. He said it God. I knew he was finished. I knew he was done the day that he said, we know how to deal with you Bible-carrying Christians. And they’re still carrying Bibles in Germany. Hitler has been in hell, oh, these twelve years, eleven.

Brethren, there isn’t anything that can stop God. And don’t you ever for a moment think a thing is too big for God to do–nothing. All things are possible to him that believeth. And in our common needs, do you believe God is willing to help you in your common needs? I don’t want to stir you up to start praying about your little household affairs all the time. Put those in the hands of God and trust His providence. That’s the best way to handle that. But when the crisis comes, God is just as willing to help you with your household work as He is to help a missionary on the field or an angel at His right hand. I believe that God is perfectly willing to help.

We had a red-headed treasurer in this church in Indianapolis many years ago. I don’t know whether brother Thomas would know him. What was his name? I could think of it, Mr. Keller. And he was a Christian, a happy Christian brother. And you know how he got converted? He went to an Alliance meeting. And there was testimony meeting, and a dear old housewife, dear old lady got up and gave a testimony. And she said, I’d like to say to the glory of God, that I put my wash on my front porch for the laundry man and somebody stole it. And she said, I got on my knees and I said, God, I can’t afford to lose that. Please return it to me. And she said it was returned and placed back on my porch. Thank God, and she sat down. And this redhead sat there saying to himself, what infinite crust this is that God Almighty, the great God Almighty should be interested in a bag of wet wash. What does God care about that? But it got ahold of his hide nevertheless and it wasn’t very long until he gave himself to the Lord and was converted. I believe in these things, brethren, with all of my heart.

Why, don’t you remember that passage in the 12th of Acts when the Lord said to the angel, my boy Peter is in prison. Go down. And the angel started off, and just a minute He said, take a cloak with you. He said, take a cloak. So he took a cloak down. And he waked Peter and said, here, put this cloak on you. And then let him out through the gates. Who thought about the cloak? The angel? No. God thought about it.

And then think of that poor old prophet out there. Forty days journey from nowhere, in the woods. He had said he had run out of food and ran so far there wasn’t no food, and he’d been driven to dig for roots. But God said to an angel, here, go down and bake some pancakes for my boy Elijah. And down came the angel on broad white wings. And what did it do? Play a pipe organ or paint a picture or write a poem? No, it baked cakes for a prophet. There isn’t anything too small for God to be concerned with.

Dear old little old Julian; Ray calls her, my girlfriend. She’s been dead 600 years and I carry her little book around with me and read what she said about the Lord. She said, O Lord, Thou wilt never refuse to humble Thyself and serve in the least particular of our humble nature. And there isn’t anything in our poor nature, that the Lord won’t serve us in. She said, though He be so high, yet does He meek Himself to be so homely with poor sinners like us. Homely of course means familiar at home life. Well, she’s right. And there isn’t a thing, there isn’t a thing that God isn’t interested in, your common needs.

Now, I don’t mean that I want you to get your eyes on this world’s goods and begin to belabor God with requests for all things. The time was when a man came to Jesus and said, will you tell my brother that he divide? And the Lord knew He had a bad man on His hands. So, He said, who made me a divider over you and he turned His back and walked away, perfectly willing to help a woman find her wet wash. Perfectly willing to humble Himself to the lowest needs of our human nature, but unwilling to divide with a covetous man, and unwilling to become a lawyer to try to get a man, a wicked man who wanted money. No, God isn’t interested in that.

So don’t take advantage of what I’ve said and start any of this asking God to get your hair back. I know there’s one cult that promises that if you write them, I mean it. They say, write in and send us something and we’ll send you something and then you can get your hair back. And thank God, he counts every hair when it falls. He knows where they are, doesn’t he? I’m not worried about that. And I don’t want my hair back. I’ll go redhead one of these days.

And then in our services, our services. I think I ought to repent of something. Brother McAfee ribs me about it, and kids me. When I have a very important, what I consider to be a very important engagement coming up like the one in Canada soon, I sweat under it. And I say, oh, why did I promised to go. Brother McAfee said, now it’s starting. He knows that I have a little worrying to do. But I think that’s sinful. I think I ought to ask God to forgive me and I have for that matter. And I think I ought to quit it, because why should I worry when the Lord is going with me? And if I’ve got to do it, I’ll buy a ticket to San Francisco. But if I don’t have to do it, why should I worry? It just goes to prove Adam isn’t as dead as I wish he was. But I pray that God will give me faith to know that in my God-appointed work, I don’t have to do it. God does it. And when God does it why should I worry?

I preached before a bishop one time. That is, I thought I was going to preach before him, but he couldn’t make it. And I tell you, I sweat under that. And I have preached a few times in my life before some people so important that I felt that I couldn’t make it. But all that’s flesh. Who are they anyhow? No matter how many miters they have on their heads, they have still got breath in their nostrils. And no matter how many grandiose titles they’ve earned for themselves, they still have breath in their nostrils. And why should one man with breath in his nostrils be afraid of another man with breath in his nostril?

So, when your God-appointed task, remember with me, nothing is impossible to him that believeth. Nothing is impossible. But why do so few take advantage of it? In our church, God, let me live as I trust you will. I have no plans otherwise for the next while. When I come back, I want to preach some sermons. And I believe we’ve got a future. And I believe we’re going to see a great Fall and Winter. But if we do, it won’t be because anybody winds himself up tight. It’ll be because we learned that with God all things are possible and all things are possible to them that believe. Whether we’re known abroad or whether we’re not known round the corner of our own street, God isn’t worrying about popularity or fame. Any of His children can go to Him for anything and He will answer in his will.

So, we serve God, and while God owes us nothing yet God in His kind grace puts Himself under obligation to us where he has to listen. He in His infinite grace puts Himself under obligation so that He must hear us. Shall we not then pray these days just ahead of us? And let’s believe God all up and down these streets. They’ve come in over the last year, hundreds and hundreds of them. Children half-grown, little ones, hundreds, and they swarmed the streets. And there’s nobody reaching them and nobody helping them.

Why can this church take it on ourselves instead of our looking like a bird about to fly and say, we’ve got to go south. Why can’t we rather say, God sent them for us to evangelize? I believe, if we’ll believe, we’d see God do wonders yet in this church. I have that confidence that God will do wonders. I do not expect God, I do not expect God, ever expect that this shall be a popular church where the multitudes will flock. I’m no Johnny Ray nor Elvis Presley. Neither is McAfee. And so they’re not going to come in and faint and scream. We don’t carry on like that. I’m not thinking about size. I’m thinking about depth and intensity and permanence of service at home and unto the ends of the world. And all things are possible to God. And everything is possible to what? Him that believeth. Let’s do some believing and release the infinite powers of God into our life and into our church.

Now, Father, we pray thy blessing upon us. Oh, we scatter from this little building to so many places, so many responsibilities, obligations, and callings. Back to school for many. Oh, we pray that we’ll go with confidence that we’re not orphans of the storm. That we’re not bits of matter animated for a period, floating in space. That we’re sons and daughters of a God who has got His eye on every one of us and knows our name and number and face. And our High Priest carries our name on His shoulder and on His breast and on His forehead before the presence of God. Before the face of the Father stands our great High Priest, and we need no merit of saints. We need nothing but the merit of the great High Priest.

We thank Thee we can enter boldly into the throne of grace and receive mercy and grace to help in time of need. For He knoweth our infirmities, feels all the pinch and pressure of our weaknesses, for He is Himself, man and walked among us. Send us out with great hope and encouragement. Send these young people back to school, chins up and knees bent and eyes bright, knowing that the Lord is on their side and grace, infinite matchless grace, is greater than all their sins. And send us back to service and out to our labors confidently expecting we shall see the gifts of the Spirit restored to this church and that we shall see the mighty power of a risen Christ operating in this church. We ask these things in His name. Let us stand please.

Tags Power, Prayer, Strength

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date February 13, 2022

“God is Wisdom“

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“God is Wisdom”

January 12, 1958

In the book of 1 Corinthians first chapter verses 22 to 24, Paul says, The Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified. Unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks, foolishness. But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. And then Colossians 2:2 and 3, Paul prays, or indicates his desire that their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God and of the Father and of Christ, in whom are hid all treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Now, as some of you know, this is the second in a series of Sunday evening messages to be called “The Voice of Eternal Wisdom and I don’t mind telling you that this should be given by a fire-baptized scholar. We need an Anselm or an Augustine. We don’t have it. A large book should be written about this voice of Eternal Wisdom; none has been written. I know of none in the last 100 years.

And Christians should be exposed to this truth. Not over a period of a half dozen Sunday nights, but for a long, long time. We should sing about it, pray about it, preach about it, understand it from the Scriptures until it becomes a part of our lives. And I have nobody to guide me much, because nobody’s written on the subject much. But my heart has stirred me up to talk about it. And I shall do the best I can. Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, we pray that thou wilt Illuminate us and enlighten our mind. For they are dark, and we pray with thy servant, Thy blind servant, what in us is low, raise and support. What is dark, illuminate, that to the height of this great argument we may assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to man. We pray that Thou wilt help us as believers this evening to throw our hearts open to the Voice of Eternal Truth. And we pray for the unsaved man who’s out of the fold living for the flesh. We beseech Thee that thou talk to him too and may he decide that he ought to be a follower of Christ. We ask this in Jesus’ name.

Now, last Sunday night I said that there is in the Old Testament and in old Hebrew literature, a doctrine called, well I’ve called it the doctrine of Eternal Wisdom, but it is the doctrine of wisdom. And it is a Hebrew concept. It is this, that somewhere, out there, in God and with God and beside God and yet being God, there is an afflatus, a fullness of wisdom of word and idea and concept and expression of that wisdom and word and idea. And we find it of course in the New Testament in John the first chapter, particularly. And up until not too long ago, I had to somehow, to try to twist myself out of a bit of a dilemma. I had been told that the doctrine of the Logos, the Logos, the Word, where John says, in the beginning was the Word, that that was a Hebrew concept borrowed from the Greeks. And I didn’t know why John would borrow a concept from the Greeks. But if he did, and the Holy Ghost wanted to borrow from the Greeks, I wasn’t going to complain, or at least, I kept my heart right about it.

But you know, a further study of all this shows me that that’s liberalism that teaches that. It is not, simply not true. The doctrine of the Word, the Eternal Idea, the Eternal Thought, is a Hebrew concept. Look at David’s Psalm 33:6. Now look, what David said here, by the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. Now, that’s quite different from the idea that God made everything by hand. Here it says, He made it by mouth. He made it by the breath of His mouth, by the Word of the Lord were the heavens made. That’s 33:6 of the Psalms written by the man David. And that was written 1000 years before Christ, around 1000, maybe a little over.

And then, in the book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, we find the same idea of that Eternal Wisdom which gave birth to everything. We find it in the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, particularly. And that was about 1000 years before Christ. And then in the book of Job, which was written at the very least 900 years before Christ, and most people think it’s the oldest book of the Bible, which would put it of course, way beyond that, so that Job believed the doctrine of the Eternal Word, the Eternal Wisdom, at least 900 years before Christ. And Solomon believed it and wove it into his proverbs and into the Book of Ecclesiastes, 1000 years before Christ. And David taught it not only in the text I have quoted, but all through his Psalms at least 1000 or more years before Christ, but now it was introduced into Greek thought, only 600 years before Christ by an old chap named Heraclitus.

So, Heraclitus was at least 400 years later than Job was or Solomon or David, so that the Christian doctrine of the Eternal Logos, the Eternal Word is not the Greek concept borrowed by the Holy Ghost. It is a Hebrew concept which dates way back, long before the Greeks ever began to think about such a matter at all. So therefore, shake your head and see if you can shake some of the fog out. And the next smart fellow you meet that tells you that you’re a follower of Plato and Platonism and that the ideas of the New Testament particularly the book of John, were borrowing from the Greeks, you tell them that you happen to know that before old Heraclitus was ever born, who in the mature life introduced into Greek thought the idea of the Word, that it had been believed and taught by David and Solomon and Job and the prophets long, long before there was any Greek idea about it.

Now my Brethren, the teaching of the Old Testament on this is that there was a creative impulse, that God had an idea, that God had a thought. And you know, when you get to thinking about it, Scriptures come to your mind. I know the thoughts that I think about you, saith the Lord. And My thoughts are not as your thoughts. As the heavens are higher above the earth so are My thoughts high above your thoughts.

Well then, John and Paul were illuminated to see this. In the Gospel of John, in the beginning was the Word, which was just what the man David had said. The Word of the Lord, by that Word were the heavens made and all the hosts then by the breath of His mouth. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And I said and repeat that the idea of this Eternal Wisdom which was with the Father, and looked at another way, He was the Son. And looked at another way, was the Fountain, the Creative Fountain out of which everything came. That was the teaching of the Old Testament Hebrews, the old fathers, the rabbis, and the old men of God who lived and studied the Scriptures. And John simply picked it up, not from the Greeks, I repeat, but from the Hebrews.

And then Paul was illuminated in Colossians 1:15 and 17 to see the same thing. He said, Jesus Christ, who is the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature. For by Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers. All things were created by Him and for Him.

Now, that’s what Paul said about it. And this was the flowering of the Old Testament teaching. It flowered over into the New Testament. And so, Jesus Christ came, who was Himself that Eternal Wisdom. And He took upon Him the form of a man and He was incarnated in mortal flesh, and he walked among men. And they said, how hast this man learning, having never been to school? And He needed not that any man come and snitch on anybody else, because He Himself knew everything that was in man. And at twelve years old, He put the doctors to flight and asked them questions which they couldn’t answer, and answered questions which they asked Him. And Paul says that the Jews were after signs, and the Greeks were after wisdom, but Jesus Christ is both the power of God and the wisdom of God. And in Him, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden away.

So, my brethren, don’t you see that this doctrine, this beautiful doctrine of the Presence of something the old mystics called her. They said was a woman and I’ll show you in the Old Testament that, they’re almost the same thing. And they’re called her Sophia, which of course is to make her equal with wisdom. So, if your name happens to be Sophie, well, that’s where you got it Sister. And we hope that you’re touched with some of that divine wisdom. But I asked you to notice here now what the the prophets taught, what the men of God back there taught. They said, the Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth. That’s Proverbs 3:19. By understanding, He hath established the heavens. Jeremiah 10:12, He hath established the world by His wisdom and has stretched out the heavens by His discretion.

Now here are three triads. There’s the earth, the heavens and the world, founded and established and stretched out, done by wisdom and understanding and discretion. Now, I wouldn’t stand here and say it, but I have a perfect right to believe it. And I do believe that this is a hint at the Trinity. This is the Old Testament doctrine. Here is the earth, which was founded by wisdom; the heavens, which were established by understanding, and the world, was stretched out by discretion. And if you read Job, Ecclesiastes, the Book of Proverbs, you will find that this wisdom and understanding and discretion was a person, that this was a person; that it was somebody that you wooed and won. It was something, an afflatus, a holy oil that God poured out on people. You find that there. And all, that same thing David said when he said, by the Word of the Lord, and by the breath of His mouth.

Now, I read out, a little out of an old book called, “The Wisdom of Solomon” last week, and I was very careful to show you that the wisdom of Solomon is not an inspired book in the sense that the Proverbs is an inspired book, but it represents the good word. Nobody would complain if I were to quote from Spurgeon. Nobody would complain if I were to give you a paragraph from D.L. Moody. Nobody would care at all if I were to stand up here and say, this is what Augustine said. Here’s what Luther said. Nobody would complain about that. They were the fathers. We would skip Moody on that. But they were they were the fathers. And we would say, while that’s what they said, it wasn’t inspired. It represented a distillation or a condensation of truth from the inspired Scriptures.

So, I want to quote from a book called Ecclesiasticus, not Ecclesiastes, but Ecclesiasticus. It was written about 200 years before Christ. And here is what the brother said. Now, he wasn’t writing as he was moved by the Holy Ghost; neither was Augustine or Luther. But he was giving the beliefs in the teachings of the fathers, about what the inspired Scriptures taught. And here’s what this sole gentleman said. He said, all wisdom coming from the Lord, and is with Him forever. Who can number the sands of the sea and the drops of rain and the days of eternity? Who can find out the height of heaven and the breadth of the earth and the deep of wisdom? Wisdom hath been created before all things. And if you wonder about that word, created before all things, you’ll find it again in Colossians 1:15, where it says, who is the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature. And some have tried to make out that that meant that Jesus was a creature. It means nothing of the sort. That idea of first born, it’s first born from the dead. And Jesus Christ is the first born, in that He, out of the dead, He’s the firstborn of the creation, because, what He is, the creation sometime will be. And what He is, you and I are going to be. And what He is, He’s going to make this world over in His image.

Now, I scorned to spend any time on the Sputnik. I don’t want to bother with that hunk of hardware, because I don’t think it’s worthy of my attention as a preacher of the Word. But the reason I’m not disturbed about satellites and all that is, that all this is temporary anyhow, for the heavens shall be dissolved with a great noise and shall melt with fervent heat. And we look for a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. And when God’s busy melting down the universe, He won’t need to mind melting down an extra hunk of Russian hardware. It will be easy to do, and if by that time, brother John Foster Dulles has got one up, why, He’ll melt that one down too. We won’t have to worry about it.

And that’s why I don’t get excited and stampede and start preaching sermons about it. I can’t because I see that all wisdom cometh from the Lord and is with Him forever. And who can number the sands of the sea and the drops of rain and the days of eternity? Who can find out the height of Heaven and the breadth of the earth and the deep and wisdom? Wisdom hath been created before all things and the understanding of prudence from everlasting. The Word Most High is the Fountain of Wisdom, the Word of God Most High, and Her ways of everlasting commandments. To whom hath the root of wisdom been revealed? There is One, wise and gravely to be feared, Jehovah sitting upon His throne. He created her and saw her and numbered her and poured her out upon all His works.

You know, there’s a Christian answer for almost everything. And while I don’t go into it, I think that we Christians have some answers. We wonder how the wild bird finds its way north in the spring and south in the fall? We wonder how the The Orchard Oriole and the Baltimore Oriole managed to build their beautiful swinging nest. We wonder how the bee finds its way across the meadows to its hive. We will wonder about what men call instinct. I believe, and there are some verses I’ll quote maybe later on in my series where that it says that God poured wisdom out upon His creation. And I believe that what the bee has is a touch from the Hand that made the bee.

Now don’t look down your nose and say, what does God care about a bee? God made that bee didn’t He? And also, God made the birds. And He even says in one place why you’re dumber than the ox that knows his master’s crib and the bird that knows her nest. And my people do not know, neither do they consider, they, made in the image of God, had lost the wisdom, but the very lower creation has that wisdom. That’s why I don’t worry about the universe. It’ll run all right. God has poured out that wisdom upon all His creation. So everything works alright and everything does all right because God made it that way.

Now, this is the doctrine. This is the doctrine of the Eternal Wisdom, which was incarnated in Jesus Christ. And that’s why He’s so hard to understand. A man named Bruce Barton one time, wrote a book called, A Man Nobody Knows. I read that book and came to the conclusion that there was at least one man that didn’t know Him, and that is Bruce Barton. Because he was writing about somebody. Somebody sent the book to me, an editor and said, Will you review, will you review this book? Well, I wrote back and said, Bruce Barton, writing about Jesus Christ would be exactly the same as Esau writing about Jacob. They just couldn’t make it. There was something that he didn’t understand.

This fellow Jacob, he wasn’t a nice chap, and he certainly wasn’t a straight fellow at first. God had to straighten him out. He’s name was, supplanter. He was crooked. But, he was touched with divine wisdom. The great God Almighty had reached down with His wand and touched his shoulder and said, rise, Jacob, and Jacob, got up Israel. He had a wisdom given to him. And Esau, a far nicer chap than he was; and was more socially acceptable that he was, nicer to live around, if you could stand the smell. He smelled of the field you remember, which the Lord has blessed and it’s all right in the field, but it’s not so good in the house and he came in with that smell on him.

And the fellow, Esau, a nice chap, lived in the flesh and died in the flesh. And Jacob, who wasn’t as nice a fellow had seen light and he had been illuminated and the Divine Wisdom had touched him. And Jacob came out all right, and became a prince with God. And men and women today name their babies Jacob, but they never name their babies Esau, because Esau, the name Esau is of the flesh and belongs in the flesh. And yet he was a nice chap.

Well, there we have it, my brethren. It’s the root of it and the base of it. It’s the old Hebrew doctrine that God is wisdom. And we sing it in our song, God is wisdom, God is love. And you will find it all through your Bible; run the references as we say. Go to your concordance, and you will be enlightened and illuminated and delighted. Perhaps even ravished as you see how back before Mary ever had her baby, back before ever the little baby Jesus wailed his tiny protest to the world in Bethlehem’s manger, way back before that in what the theologians called pre-incarnation times. Jesus Christ was, and He was the Wisdom of the Father. He was of one substance with the Father, equal with the Father, as ancient as the Father, eternal with the Father, having all the attributes of the Father, He was the Father’s outgoing, He was the Father’s expression. And that’s what the book of John says, in the beginning was the Word and everybody knows the Greek students have an awful time. What a deal of throwing around of brains takes place when some fellow starts to translate John, because John went so far up and so far in, that it takes a lot of sanctified imagination to understand John. Most people don’t have sanctified imaginations. They’ll just settle for a footnote. And that’s about as far as we go.

Well, now what do we learn from all of this? What is this? Is this Christianity? Of course, this is Christianity. In our day, we’ve degraded Christianity to be a kind of Salk vaccine shot against hell and sin. We round them all up and stick a needle in them and say, if you’ll just accept Jesus, you won’t go to hell and you’ll go to heaven when you die. Keep living as long as you can, but when you die, you’ll go to heaven. And we preach a kind of a lifeboat salvation. We even sing about it, about the lifeboat. I suppose it’s permissible, maybe, I don’t condemn it, but it certainly is an inadequate concept of Christianity, Brethren.

The purpose of God in redeeming men was not to save them from hell only. The purpose of God in redeeming man was to save them on to worship, and to let them be born through, into that Eternal Wisdom which was with the Father, which is synonymous with that Eternal Life, which was with the Father and which was revealed unto men, in which John said, our eyes have looked upon and our ears have heard and our hands have handled of that Word of Life. For you’ll find in the Gospel of John that the Holy Ghost through the mouth of the man John, mixed up in an holy and happy confusion, light and life, Light and Life and the Word, the Spoken Word was life and life and light, and the light was the light of men, and In Him was life.

Well, it’s all one because it is Jesus Christ our Lord, this Eternal Life. And doesn’t it touch you my friend? Doesn’t it touch you, or have you been brainwashed by footnotes to a point where you can’t think this way? Doesn’t it touch you that the Greeks sought after this and couldn’t find it? Doesn’t it touch you? It did Paul. In the 17th of Acts, Paul preached on the hill in Athens, and he said, I see that everywhere you’re very religious, not superstitious, you’re very religious, for you have an altar to the unknown God. You’ve put up an altar to every god you know by name, and then for fear you will slight some god, you put up an altar to an unknown God. And then, happy, smart Paul said, He whom thou dost worship in ignorance, I now preach unto you. Well, Paul understood and he said, in Him we live and move and have our being, and that we stretch out after Him, they did, stretch out after Him, if per chance they might find Him.

And I don’t think there’s anything more unbecoming, than for an evangelical preacher to get nasty and tough and say a lot of harsh things about the Greek philosophers and the ancient religions. Brethren, they did what they could with the light they had. I wonder if we can say the same about ourselves. Old Heraclitus who lived 600 years that I say before Christ, perhaps he had never heard of Solomon’s proverbs. Maybe the Book of Job was unknown to him. And maybe he had never read a Psalm in his life. But somehow in his dreaming and crying after the Most High God, he thought his way through to the idea that the eternal life, and that that word out of that word, everything came and he gave the Greeks the doctrine of the word which Plato and others brought to perfection.

Some years ago, I preached of all places at the noonday meeting down with the Christian business men. And I preached from the text, Jesus Christ is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. And I said that the Jews sought after righteousness. And Jesus Christ came, and was that righteousness; that the Greeks sought after wisdom, and Jesus Christ came and was that wisdom. And the religionist sought after redemption and sanctification, and Jesus Christ came and was that redemption and sanctification. And I gave an altar call. I got a letter from a professor at Wheaton College and he said, Brother, I have believed this all my adult life, but I never hoped to hear it turned into an evangelistic sermon. I didn’t know it either. But I did my best on it.

But that’s the fact my friends, that the quest of the human race; the Jews sought after righteousness; the Greeks sought after wisdom; and the religionists sought after redemption. And when Paul was preaching Jesus, He said to these people, I’ve got news for you, I preach unto you, Jesus, who is the incarnation of all the Jews sought, and the incarnation of all the Greeks sought, and the incarnation of all that the religionists sought; wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. And the Greek scholars tell us that when he said, He’s made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, that we don’t get quite the right meaning in the King James. They said, what Paul actually said was, Jesus Christ is made unto us wisdom, and that wisdom is our righteousness, our sanctification, and our redemption. They say that’s what he actually said. He said, this wisdom, this that we call Ancient Wisdom, which the Greeks and the Hebrews before them talked about as a Uncreated, and yet somehow created strangely. But, is it any stranger than that passage that says, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God? Now, which was He? With God? Or was it God? Well, He was both.

And so, we say that that same truth applies to the ancient idea that there is a Fountain of Wisdom, the Womb out of which was born all things that be. I can live in this world believing that and not worry about it and not get into too many jams intellectually, because this world is beautifully put together, Brother, beautifully put together. Talk about a watch. I have a watch here given me by the church for 25 years and I carry around it. It’s a Lord Elgin, a good watch. It’s magnificently made. I haven’t looked at the jewels. You never look a gift horse in the mouth. I don’t know how many jewels it has you know, whether it’s 17 or 21, or how many. I’ve never tried to find out. But I know it’s expensive and I know that it is beautifully made. And it’s a tribute to the genius and skill and patience and perseverance of men who can sit down and screw a telescope in their eye and go to work, and do work so fine. But it’ll last 100 years, and if this isn’t dropped and smashed and thrown around, my grandchildren or great grandchildren can be carrying it.

Wisdom, where did they get it? There was a man named Bezaleel at one time. Bezaleel, if you like. Bezaleel I like to call him. It is easier. He was a Jew. And God said, we’re going to build a temple here and a tabernacle. And we’re going to have a veil, a veil, and that veil is to be thick, and it’s to be embroidered, embroidered so beautifully. And you would have thought, now the way we’d have done it when we were making that veil, we’d have run to the women and we’d have said, Mrs. Henderson, you make your children’s clothes and you’re good with the needle, could you give us a half a day to work on the veil? But the great God Almighty wasn’t going to allow anybody to simply turn loose his human skills or hers. So, we picked a man by the name of Bezaleel and He filled him with the Holy Ghost and wisdom. What for? In order that he might ply his needle to make beautiful embroidery work on the veil.

So, the very veil of the temple was wrought by the wisdom of the Holy Ghost. So that all that you see. This is a great time for this series, because this is the time when we are materializing everything. We’re materializing everything. I lay for an hour last night and listened to a one hour, eight to nine, summation of where we stand. Did you hear that, put on by the Columbia Broadcasting Company? Everybody was quoted and spoke on tape and told us where we were. Everybody’s scared until he’s shivering. Generals and admirals and all the rest are just shaking. Because you see, they’re conquering outer space.

And I even heard in the radio the news just recently, well, in fact it was released only today, this afternoon. I heard this broadcast that the President of the United States, one General Dwight Eisenhower, has written Bulganin. He’s premier something or other. He may be running a filling station in Siberia one of these days, you know. But he’s got a job over there, and he wrote a letter tonight. And Ike wrote a letter back. And Ike actually said and suggested in his letter that we and Russia get together on what we’re going to do about outer space. We can’t even run Washington, and we’re working on outer space. And the first fellow that puts a flag up there on the moon just as sure as you live, now watch it. We can do it they tell us. We actually have what Truman used to call the know-how, a terrible Missouri word, but we’ve got the ability to do it, and the rocketry and the rest. That little word rocketry, that’s a new one. And we’ve got the rocketry to send a, something to the moon. Well now, if they will listen to me, which they won’t, here’s what they will do. They will put a copy of the Constitution of the United States and a silk American flag in that little hunk of hardware. And when they showed it to the moon, it’s ours. We stake out our claim and say, you lay off.

I don’t know where I got there, but I’m just saying this is the time when space and moving bodies and matter and law is on everybody’s mind. Well, back of all that, you see, God made all things, and all things came out of wisdom. Now, what does this teaches us? Well, I’ll give you a sketch of what it teaches us and then that will be all for tonight.

From this, we learned a number of things. We learn that the universe is basically spiritual. Now, we learned that, basically spiritual. A few years ago, back in the time of Lucretius when he wrote his famous, what did he call it, The Nature of Things. He said that there were atoms, and he lived about, oh, a little before Christ’s time. And he said that there were atoms and that they were a little hard, square balls, like dice. And they were little hard things. And a ball, not balls but were square blocks, blocks, that’s the word, like dice. And he said that everything was made up of these little square blocks. And that was the first, so far as I know, the first, at least he popularized the idea of the atom. And then 3000 years nearly went by over 3000 years, I think went by before we discovered that Lucretius had an idea, but he was wrong. He said everything is made up of atoms. He was right about that. And when he said atoms were square blocks hard as diamonds, tiny beyond all belief. And everything was made out of those little square blocks, he was wrong. Because modern scientific technique has discovered that these tiny little blocks that Lucretius saw 3000 years ago, nearly, were not hard blocks at all, but disembodied bits of energy, and that you can keep breaking them down and breaking them down and breaking them down until you find exactly nothing at all. And I know they’re right, they proved they’re right by their ability to run a ship by atoms and put up and send an atom bomb on Hiroshima.

So, the modern idea of the atom coincides perfectly with the Old Testament idea of the creation, that all things are, come out of spirits. And that if you go back far enough, and back far enough and back far enough, you come to Spirit. Things are spiritual basically, that the earth is not a solid thing. And then there’s Spirit that hovers over it. But that the earth is an emanation of Spirit, and that all things that are, came out of Spirit, even that Eternal Spirit which we call God, and Who was incarnated in the form of a man and lived among us. And was so wise that He astonished men though He’d never been to school.

The second thing we learn from this doctrine of the Eternal Wisdom as the source of all things is that man is a spirit and sheathed in a body, not a body having a spirit. How do you think of yourself? Do you think of yourself as this being you? Is this you? Some of the movie actors, they call them, the body. That’s an awful thing to say for them, because if that’s all she’s got and usually it is, that’s going to get old on her one of these days. She’s going to get arthritis and gray hair and teeth will come out, and then she won’t have anything. But is that the way you think of yourself? As a body with a spirit? No. That’s not the Bible teaching. The Bible teaching is that we are a spirit, living in a body. And it’s vastly different Brethren. If I was a body having a spirit, then I could worry about this body. But knowing that I am a spirit made in the image of God, and God is Spirit, and God made me and made me spirit, made you spirit, and said, now live for a while, in what William Jennings Bryan called, this tabernacle of clay.

So we’re here. The greatest thing about you is not your body, not the house you live in, the car you drive. The most awesome and all inspiring thing about you is you are a spirit. You’re a spirit. Bacon said, God made the angel spirit, and he made the beasts, flesh. But he made man greater than all compounded of spirit and flesh, so that man is a spirit which has a fleshly tabernacle to dwell in. You’ve got to remember that, that all things came out of spirit. And Jesus Christ was incarnated, and He was that Eternal Wisdom, and that man is a spirit ensheaved in a body. You see, that fixes your values for you. That decides what’s valuable and what isn’t.

The trouble with this is, we don’t know what’s valuable. Did you ever have this experience, and we’ve gotten all of two houses full of grandchildren. We’ve seen this happen. A couple of times happened this year. It happened a couple of years ago when everybody was hilariously happy around the Christmas tree onloading gifts and giving gifts and unwrapping gifts. Here would be a little 18-month-old baby sitting somewhere quietly playing with a box that the present came out of. Well, the little thing didn’t care. I remember one sitting there chewing the little red box having a time of her life and everybody else was “ooh, just what I wanted. Ooh! How’d you know what I needed? Just the thing.” And everybody was looking at what they got, and she a box, and was chewing on the box. It happened twice in our house right down where we live among our grandchildren. That is I mean happened among them.

And why, you see they don’t know what’s valuable. This watch I referred to, it came in a box. But I don’t carry the box around with me, because the box is relatively unimportant. It’s the watch that matters. A stale fish head is a precious treasure to a cat. Why? Because he is a cat. A bowl of the same red pottage was of great value to Esau. Why? Because he was Esau. And the everlasting covenant was a value to Jacob. Why? Because he was Jacob. He was touched with heavenly fire. And the man Paul found value only in Jesus Christ our Lord. Only in Jesus Christ. Why, I give up all things he said and count them but dung, that I may win Christ and be found in Him. If you understand this Eternal Truth you’ll know why what is valuable and why it’s valuable.

Now the truth, that the Word was made flesh, stands as a warning, lest we forget who we are. And it stands as a rebuke. It stands as a rebuke to us for living as animals, for living as people of one world when God made us for two. Living for time, when God made us for eternity. And back in the Book of Proverbs we find a beautiful woman. In the ninth chapter, she’s said to be a woman, here she’s not. She’s just called wisdom. But in the ninth chapter she’s called a woman. Wisdom crieth without, she uttereth her voice in the streets. She crieth in the cheap places of concourse. What is this? Oh, it’s nothing but the voice of Jesus, the voice of the Holy Ghost. In the opening of the gate, she crieth. In the city she uttereth her word, saying how long, how long, ye simple ones. Will you love simplicity. And the scorners delight in their scorning and fools hate knowledge, turn you at my reproof. Behold, I will pour out my Spirit upon you. I will make known my words unto you. And those terrible words, because I have called and you refused, I stretched out my hand and no man regarded. I will also laugh at your calamities; I will mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation.

My dear friends, you’re not an animal. God made you a spirit and gave you a body to cart you around in, to live in, carts so that you could, that spirit could be carted around. And it’s a rebuke that we live as if we were animals. We live as if we belong to this time. I’ve known old men. Old man, so old that they had all of the characteristics of old men. I have a few, but these men had them all. And yet, they were worried right down to the last about their property. Right down to the last, worrying about their property. Great God, how awful it is. To have been made in the image of God. To have had that eternal Ancient Wisdom which was with the Father, in which was God, come down and become one with us and be made flesh and die and rise and live above, and stretch out His hands and say, come, come, come ye foolish. Come ye foolish for I have set my table. I have prepared my feast. Come. Why will you die? Come ye simple, foolish ones in your wisdom.

We walk about on the earth thinking about our car and how high the tailgate is. Tailgate is an old farmer word. These things are called fins I think now, fins. How many lights are on the fins? And some of you if you didn’t have four lights on the fin, you couldn’t sleep tonight because the fellow across the street has four lights on his fin. Some of you women with your clothes. Some of you women with your gifts and your property. Great God, that we should be like this, that we should be a dove, made to soar and sing, or soar and coo and be a dove and act like one. That we should find ourselves in the garbage heap digging like a buzzard. And yet that’s what the world is doing. And they’re doing it because Christianity hasn’t told them what I am telling people tonight. Christianity has told them, come and accept Jesus and you won’t go to hell. And they said, oh, hell, I don’t care whether I go to hell or not. We’ve cut the ground out from under the Truth. We’ve cut the foundation out from under it with our materialistic theology and our carnal approach to things. When you walk out onto the sidewalk tonight, look up at God’s stars and say, I’m part of the everlasting universe. And I will not, I will not respond to the Voice of Eternal Wisdom as if I were a man made for time, for God has put eternity in my heart; not as if I were a man made for this world because God made me for another. Not as if I were a man of flesh, because I’m a man of spirit. I will respond as a man made for eternity.

Dear friend, if you don’t have it straightened out about eternity, the yellow curd that looks, that digs in the garbage can for food is better off than you are. Listen to me now. Don’t get mad at this. It’s terribly brutal, but it’s true. If you, made in the image of God and destined to be conscious through eternity, an individual, a conscious entity through eternity, with God having given you birth out of the Ancient Womb of Eternal Wisdom, and then incarnated that Eternal Wisdom in the power of a Man and sent Him to die for us. And if you go on your way and live your lives as if you were a beast, and Esau, I say the yellow curd that digs tonight in the alley for a crust, is better off.

When John Bunyan was under the great conviction of the Holy Ghost for sin, they didn’t get saved so easy in those days. And when they did get saved, it mounted to so much. We get saved so easy now. I told the Youth for Christ’s outfit over here that I spoke to Wednesday. I nailed 13 Theses on the door and one of them was this, that we have no right to make Christianity ridiculously easy when Jesus Christ made it tremendously hard. But we’ve made Christianity so easy.

Well, John Bunyan lived in the days when Christianity wasn’t easy. You carried a cross if you were going to go to heaven in those days. And he got under such blistering conviction that he was sure he was going to hell. And one day as he walked down the street, a man in despair, he saw a dog loping along. And he said, O God, I wish I were that dog, then I could die and be no more. But I’ve got to face Thee in judgment. Well, it didn’t take God long to straighten him out and saved him and made the great John Bunyan out of him. But he had to come there first. I say that though you walk all up the Gold Coast and all out in Beverly Hills and everywhere you want to go and see them out with their Cadillacs on the highway, Brethren. If they don’t know who they are, and if they don’t know why they’re here, and if they don’t know out of what they were created and back to what they will go, they’re as ignorant as Dani in the Baliem Valley. And all of their high fins won’t do them any good. Better be a living dog than a dead lion, said Wisdom. Better be a humble Christian who knows God than a big shot who doesn’t even know who he is himself, who doesn’t know he was made in the image of God to go back to God again.

You oughtened to go out of here tonight a man. You ought to go out of here a man in God. You oughtened to go out of here tonight and an Esau looking for the same red pottage. You ought to go out of here tonight a Jacob, changed and transformed by the power of God. Let’s pray.

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“The Hebrew Doctrine of Wisdom“

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“The Hebrew Doctrine of Wisdom”

January 5, 1958

In the Book of Proverbs, the eighth chapter, verse 12 says, I wisdom, I wisdom dwell with prudence and find out knowledge of witty inventions. Verse 17, I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find me. Still wisdom is talking, and says, the Lord Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of His way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was, I brought forth. While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there. When he established the clouds above: When He gave to the sea His decree, verse 30, then I was by Him as was one brought up with Him. And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.

You cannot in the reading of this, if you’re a student of the Bible, you cannot miss the similarity with the first chapter of John here. Hear instruction and be wise and refuse not, O ye children. For blessed are they that keep my ways. Blessed is the man that heareth me watching daily at my gates and waiting at the posts of my doors. For whoso find me findeth life, and shall obtain the favor of Jehovah. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death. That’s an Old Testament passage.

In the New Testament, we find this, 1 Corinthians 1:22 and 24, to 24, For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks, foolishness, but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. Colossians 2:2,3, That their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgement of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ; In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. There’s love, understanding, mystery, wisdom and knowledge all wrapped together there.

Well, I will quote more Scripture, and I will read a little passage from the Old Testament apocryphal book, the Wisdom of Solomon after a while. Not that it is inspired, in the sense that canon of Scripture is inspired, but that it does represent the beliefs of men who lived before the time of Christ, Hebrews, students of the Word.

Now I am to deal with the Hebrew doctrine of eternal wisdom particularly as it relates to Jesus Christ our Lord. The Hebrews believe, and you can take only what I’ve read already here tonight and there’s much more. Because you will find this taught in Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the prophets. The Hebrews believed that there was an ancient, uncreated afflatus, a breath, and that it was variously thought of. Sometimes it was thought of apart from God. Sometimes it was thought of as being God. Sometimes it was thought of as being brought into being and other times it was thought of as bringing all things into being. And in this, it is very close to John 1 where it says, strangely says; Have you ever thought how strange this is? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. There, John thinks of the Word as being with God in one breath, and being God in the next breath. So, it’s the same with this doctrine of wisdom as found in the Scriptures. It is considered to be the womb out of which all created things were born.

Let me read a little of what they thought about this doctrine back in the days about the time of our Lord, a little before and a little after; oh, 130 years before Ecclesiastes was written. And it was a translation from something that had been written two generations before. So, that would take us back maybe 200 or 250 years before Christ, but this is a little later. It says this about this wisdom. Now, Solomon didn’t write this, but it represents the teachings, the beliefs of the Jewish teachers.

And it says, wisdom is the worker of all things; for in her is an understanding spirit, holy, one only, manifold subtil, not subtle, lively, clear, undefiled, plain, not subjected to hurt, loving the thing that is good, quick, which cannot be hindered, ready to do good, kind to man, steadfast, sure, free from care, having all power, overseeing all things, and going through all understanding, a pure and most subtil spirit. For wisdom is more moving than any motion, and she passeth and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness, for she is the breadth of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty. Therefore, can no defiled thing fall into her. For she is the brightness of the Everlasting Light, the Unspotted Mirror of the power of God, and the Image of His goodness. And being one, she can do all things and maketh all things new. And in all ages entering into holy souls, she maketh them friends of God and Prophet, God and prophets; for she is more beautiful than the sun and above all the order of stars: being compared with the light, she is found before it. For after this cometh night, but vice cannot prevail against wisdom.

Now, I don’t quote this because I think that it’s inspired even in the sense that the book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are inspired. I quoted as I might quote Spurgeon, or Ironside, or Augustine, or anybody, who while they were not Bible writers, nevertheless, were keen students of what the Bible wrote, and therefore can be trustworthy teachers of what the Bible teaches.

Now, that is the belief that the ancients had about this. And here’s a strange thing. It is this wisdom, this I, wisdom dwell with prudence. I was with God. I was brought up before Him. And when He laid the foundations, I was there. And John says, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made. And He is in the bosom of the Father and He’s revealed unto us. The language is the same you see. You’ll find that Old Testament and the New Testament staying close together there. And then the Scriptures teach, and the fathers believed, that this Spirit that they talk about here, this, this, this Spirit which is called the breath of the power of God, the pure influence, flowing from the glory of the Almighty. This that is the brightness of the Everlasting Light. The Unspotted Mirror of the power of God and the Image of His goodness, that this is Christ; that Christ is the wisdom of the Old Testament. Sophia, they called Him in mystical days.

But this is what the fathers believed, many of them believed, and I think it was pretty generally believed. And so when John wrote, in the beginning was the Word, he was not identifying Christianity with Greek thought. You see, because the word elogious is Greek. The liberals claim that when John wrote the Gospel of John, he was under the influence of Plato, that he was being, and early Christianity was being strongly influenced by the Greek doctrine of the Logos, the thought and expression of God, for one word will not take it, thought and expression of God. And therefore, they’ve tried to tie Christianity in with Greek thought. And they said, you cannot trust, you cannot trust Paul. You cannot trust those writers that identify Christianity with Greek thought. You’ve got to go to the Gospels. Take the gospel, Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of Jesus and go back to Jesus. That was the cry a generation ago, back to Jesus, which meant back to the simple teachings of Jesus, such as the Sermon on the Mount.

Now, the simple fact is, when John wrote this, John was not identifying Christianity with Greek thought, for there isn’t one line anywhere in the New Testament that would allow us even to hint that John knew anything about Greek thought. John was a brother of James and a simple workman. And he didn’t know about Greek thought. Palestine was an occupied country. And John was not a scholar. And he had not gone to Athens or studied somewhere as Paul had studied under Gamaliel. But he was identifying the doctrine of the Word with Old Testament doctrine. He was identifying Jesus Christ with Old Testament doctrine, the doctrine of the Creating Word, for that is not a Greek thought; that antedates Greek thought by hundreds of years.

You take the Book of Genesis for instance, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. And God called the light, day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the heavens and it was so. And God called the firmament, heaven. And God said, that the waters under the heaven be gathered together, and it was so. And God called the dry land, earth, and it was good. And God said, let the earth bring forth, and it was so. And all through this, it was the Creating Voice of God. It was that Greek elogiouis, pronounce it as you please. I was taught to pronounce it logos. They call it logos I think now.

But this ancient Word that said, let there be light and there was light. Let the earth bring forth and it brought forth. And the Scripture says that it is through the Word He commanded and it stood forth. He spoke and it was done. It was the commanding voice of God that brought things into being. And it is written again that He upholds all things by the Word of His power. It is the speaking voice of God in His universe that holds things together, my friends. It is in Him all things are held together, not by adhesive, or by law, but they’re held together by the voice of God.

Is this awful dull? No? To me, this is just wonderful, but I don’t know. I guess you have to preach about Sputnik to get anybody to hear. Maybe after I’m through with this series I’ll preach about what the Bible teaches about Sputniks. And when I do that, I’ll just be as dumb as all the other preachers that are preaching about Sputnik. They don’t know anything about it either, only they know that’s the way to get people interested. And I’m so naive and stupid that I think God’s people ought to be interested in what I’m preaching now. I hope they, a few of them will be anyhow.

Well, I say that John was identifying the, Jesus Christ with the old Hebrew doctrine of the Creating Wisdom; the Spoken Word, the Creating Voice created all things; and not with Greek thoughts at all. Now, the church fathers believed this. And they saw in Jesus Christ, the incarnation of this ancient afflatus, this brightness of the Everlasting Light, this unspotted mirror of power of God, this image of His goodness, this that maketh all things. And in all ages entering into holy souls, she makes the friends of God and prophets.

Now what was it that entered into holy souls and made them prophets? It’s written that it was the Spirit that did it. It was the Spirit and the Spirit of Christ speaking in the book of Psalms, testifies, and David’s, the Spirit is speaking in David. He makes David sometimes sound like the Messiah, so that it’s the voice of the Messiah speaking. My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me? Well, that was David writing, but it was the Messiah, the Spirit of the Messiah, the Ancient Wisdom of God, the Word, that was speaking in the man David.

And so, it says that entering into holy souls, she maketh them friends of God and prophets. Then you come to this, for after this cometh night, says the Holy Ghost, says this man, but vice shall not prevail against wisdom. Doesn’t that remind you of that passage that says that the light dwelleth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. And if you’re a student of other versions you know, that what he said there was the darkness lays not hold of it, or the darkness does not rise up and prevail against it. The darkness cannot prevail against the light. And so we identify the Hebrew doctrine of the ancient and eternal wisdom with the New Testament.

Now Paul taught this. And Paul distinguished it sharply. He distinguished Greek thought from Hebrew doctrine. The other apostles wouldn’t have known how to do that. But St. Paul did because he was a learned man and he had studied Greek philosophy, but the other gentleman hadn’t. And so, they were forced just to stay by the text. But Paul could talk about Greek thoughts. So, Paul said this, for the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks, foolishness, but unto them which are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. And he said, a little further down in that same chapter, first chapter of 1 Corinthians, that Christ is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. And he distinguished sharply in those first two chapters, Greek thought from the Hebrew doctrine of the Messiah. And he said, when I came unto you, I came not with words of man’s wisdom. You will remember that in the second chapter of 1 Corinthians. He said, I didn’t come preaching unto you the speech of wisdom, excellence of speech. For I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ. And I was among you in weakness and fear and much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom.

There he was writing to Corinthians and Corinth was a learned city and the city of a great many philosophers. And this man was deliberately inciting here he got in past their guard. He was giving it to them where it hurt. And he said, this is the demonstration of the Spirit and power that we’re preaching. For in order that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men.

Always remember my friends, whenever we begin to equate Christianity with any current philosophy, or any ancient and honorable philosophy, it loses its power immediately. As soon as we begin to equate Christianity or show how that it can be made to fit into any of the doctrines of the fiery store of the Greeks and the Romans. Just as soon as we do that, we, it loses its power, Paul refused to do it. Paul distinguishes the doctrine of Christ, the wisdom of God, from the doctrine of the Greek doctrine of the Logos, the Word, the Wisdom of the Word, they got pretty close to it. Sometimes those old Greeks, and I saw in His magazine just this week, this came this last week, and I saw an article there about Hinduism. And the brother said, there what’s usually dangerous to say, these times, that the old Hindus sometimes managed to get awfully close to truth. And they said, some very noble and wonderful things. I’ve been saying that for a generation now, that not only the Hindus, but the Buddhists, and the you know, the men who wrote the laws of Manu and the Egyptian Hotep. And many of the others were very close to truth.

And I’ve been thinking about writing an article about Marcus Aurelius and show him how Mark Aurelius an unredeemed Roman was a better man than 99% of us Christians, and he had no redemption at all, and we have redemption. That’s an amazing thing, Brethren. And it proves to me how completely down, how down our Christianity is, how weak it is, how meaningless it is, how, how undistinguished and insignificant it is. When the whole power of God, the whole wisdom of God as it came down and took incarnation and went to a cross, can’t produce men as good as this stoic philosophy produced when it produced Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves before God Almighty and we ought to lie all night between the door and the altar, and repent and grieve before our God that we’re so unlike Christ, and that there’s so little spirituality, and so little godliness in us. That wasn’t part of the sermon, but I couldn’t help but say it.

Now, Paul, I say, taught that, that the doctrine of Jesus Christ, incarnated idea, the incarnated Word, the incarnated Wisdom, was Hebrew and not Greek. And he said, I reject all your Greek ideas, and I give you Jesus Christ and Him crucified the Messiah. He is the fulfillment of the ancient Hebrew doctrine of the internal wisdom out of which, out of whose womb came all things and that is worth more than jewels and silver.

Now, I have read you some from the book of Proverbs. Now I want to read a little from the book of Proverbs again. This time from the ninth chapter. Wisdom has builded her house. She has hewn out her seven pillars. She has killed her beasts. She has mingled her wine. She also has furnished her table. She has sent forth her maiden. She crieth upon the highest places of the city. Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither. As for him that wanteth understanding, she said to him, come eat of my bread and drink of my wine which I have mingled. Forsake the foolish and live and go in the way of understanding.

Now, I read you a passage in the New Testament. Jesus answered and spake unto them by parables and said, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king which made a marriage for his son, and send forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding. Tell them which are bidden, behold, I have prepared my dinner. My oxen and my fatlings are killed and all things are ready. Come unto the marriage. Almost word for word from the book of Proverbs. So that the Lord Jesus Christ literally was the incarnation and the fulfillment of this voice of wisdom that cried out to the sons of men.

That my brethren is not only the Lord and Head of the church. He is that, but that’s not all He is. He’s not only the coming King of Israel and King of the world. He is that, but that’s not all He is. He’s also the Enlightener and the Illuminator and the Quickener and the Annointer. Somebody said that there is no better commentary on the Scriptures than a good hymn book. I think they’re right. And I think that anybody will, that’ll borrow them, you can’t borrow them. You just can’t. I’ll try to find you one. But I won’t lend you mine because my friends are good bookkeepers. And I’ve gotta have this, but I think that the man, was it Watts and Wesley just to mention two, were better commentators than the fundamentalist writers that have written over the last half century. And if you will get their hymns and read them and study them, you know. They didn’t stick a lot of stuff in to fill space the way they do now, to make it rhyme. Everything was thought out carefully and set down and cut like jewels. At least, all that’s been saved for us it is so, that it’s commentary.

I have at home a book sent me by Leonard Ravenhill from England. It’s a book of I would suppose 300 pages, quite old, leather bound, and the leather is getting old and cracked, but it is this. It is Charles Wesley’s commentary on the Scriptures done into hymns. Not the whole scriptures, but the salient passages of Scripture down from the beginning Genesis 1 on down through to Malachi. All the outstanding passages of Scriptures instead of preaching a sermon on them, he wrote a hymn on them. Why, you’ll get more information and more light by reading it than you do in all of this so called commentary business.

And then He is, I say, our Enlightener. I got off onto those hymns by starting to say this, that when Isaac Watts said, the Lord pours eyesight on the blind. Incidentally, he didn’t say that John Wesley added that and made him say it. The Lord pours eyesight on the blind. Now there’s what I, can’t you think of that wonderful thing? Can’t you think of a man sitting over there blind from birth. And here comes someone with a vessel filled with a fine liquid, he just pours it on his temple and it runs down onto his eyes. He shakes his head twice and says, glory to God I can see. God pours eyesight on the blind.

My Brethren, that’s true. He’s a bringer of eyesight. The colored brethren say he’s a mind regulator. And He’s all that. He’s a regulator of the human mind. He’s an Enlightenment. So, that when the Scripture says that they that sat in darkness saw a great light, and they that sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned upon them, they’re quoting from the old Hebrew doctrine of the Eternal Wisdom, the Wisdom that created all things, that which was God and that which was with God, and that out of which came all things that are. That which had all the attributes of Deity. Have you noticed how they make wisdom to have all the attributes of God, or I don’t say all, but so many of them that you couldn’t give them to anybody else? Listen, an understanding spirit, holy, one only, one only. There you have the famous Hebrew doctrine, hear O God, hear O Israel, the LORD thy God is one Lord, and which cannot be hindered. There’s His sovereignty. And having all power, there is His omnipotence. Overseeing all things, there’s His omniscience. And going through all understanding, there’s His all knowledge. Pure, there’s His holiness. And, it is the breadth of the power of God and influence, pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty. For the brightness of the Everlasting Light, she is on the unspotted mirror of the power of God in the image of His goodness.

Who else can you talk about there? You can’t put the Virgin Mary in there. You can’t put Paul in there. You can’t put David in there. They weren’t describing David. They were describing none other than their Messiah, who was born of the Virgin Mary, to suffer under Pontius Pilate, and arise after His suffering from the dead and take His seat at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. He is an Illuminator it seems to me, like the Enlightener of the mind, he is an Illuminator of the heart. He is an Anointer that pours eyesight on the blind, and we don’t know it.

Now, Paul’s prayer in Colossians 1:9, let’s look at it a minute here. Paul prayed in Colossians, a little prayer and He prayed it for those Christians. And he said, for this cause we also since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.

Now, what would wisdom and spiritual understanding make out of a man? If a man was filled with wisdom and spiritual understanding, would he write poetry? I hope not. I hope not. There’s too much of it now. Too much of it now. I get too much of it already. What does he do? What does he do? Walk around in a brown study and pull loose from the world and hide in a cloister or in an ivory tower? No, no, what’s the purpose? What’s the purpose of this baptism of the ancient wisdom of God into the heart of a man? Well, the old wisdom man said was to make a man a friend of God. But Paul said, that ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God and strengthened with all might according to His glorious power and to all patience and long suffering with joyfulness. It had this practical meaning.

This that I’m preaching to you tonight, is not something that once or twice a year you take out as you take out one of Mozart’s little pieces of chamber music and play it for a friend. This is not something like that at all. It’s as practical and hard and sound, and you can gear into it and it means something. It means something to the whole church of Christ. If we only saw this and understood it. And it says in Ecclesiastes, which is older than the wisdom book I read from. It says into a malicious soul wisdom shall not enter. Wisdom will not enter into a malicious soul. And he says that this is poured out. This is poured out upon men. And she’s pure, and she won’t come upon any of this, this wisdom won’t come upon any other. But she will not dwell in the body that’s subject to sin. The inner heart and the outer body have to be clean. We have to be right inwardly and outwardly before we can have this, this afflatus, this anointing that Paul prayed the Galatians might have.

Now, there’s this little poem, I’m just about finished for tonight. So, really, this is introductory. And this is the hard, this was the grubbing out, the laying the foundation. But we’re going on next week. But here’s a little poem and I don’t know where I got it. It’s got only four lines, which is in its favor, three better and two still better. But there are four here. It says this, wisdom and goodness are twin born, one heart must hold both sisters never seen apart, never seen apart. Wisdom and goodness are Siamese twin sisters and you’ll never see them apart. And if you’re going to have wisdom in your heart, you’ve got to take the other sister along. And the other sister is goodness. Wisdom and goodness are twin-born. One heart most hold both sisters and they’re never seen apart. I don’t know who wrote it. It’s not very good poetry, but it’s wonderful theology, that when the Lord redeems man and saves him, He takes him out and not only that he might go to heaven at last and escape hell. This frightful effort to get across that bridge and escape hell, it would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. But that isn’t the purpose of God in redemption, to save us from hell. The purpose of God in redemption is to save us unto heaven. It is to save us unto something not from something; although to save us unto, He’s got to save us from.

And so we are saved. We’re saved from sin, but that’s the negative side. We’re saved unto holiness. We’re saved from hell, but we’re saved unto Heaven. We’re saved from the devil, but we’re saved unto Christ. And that’s the teaching of the Scriptures that we Christians, we Christians are followers of One who came to the world and claimed to be the fulfillment of all the ancient teachings of prophet and sage and seer, and men who walked with God. And we are followers of One who claimed that He was with the Father in the beginning, and that out from His bosom there flowed all things, that He was the fountain out of which came all wisdom, all knowledge, all light. He had no hesitation in saying I’m the Light of the world. He has no hesitation in saying Wisdom said when you meant some prophet had spoken. He said wisdom said. Do you remember that? Jesus used that word, wisdom said so and so. And he quoted it from, He had no hesitation in saying you that look on me, you’re seeing that ancient afflatus, that ancient Breath of God, that Ancient Word. In the beginning was the Word.

I don’t know what this does to you. But this is wonderful for me. If any of you are students in colleges where the professors don’t believe in Jesus Christ and you’re ashamed to speak up for Him, you ought to be deeply ashamed of yourself. Because that poor man is ignorant. He may be a PhD, but he’s ignorant. He doesn’t know that Ancient Wisdom, which was with the Father, and which stood up before the world was, he doesn’t know Him. But you know Him and you you’ve been introduced to Him by incarnation, by atonement, by resurrection, by the new birth you know that Ancient Wisdom.

And as Spurgeon said, let a man, let a man build himself a house on the hillside under the shadow of Calvary and he would be wiser than the Seven Sages of Antiquity. He’s perfectly right. And yet some of you are ashamed. You hide away and you try to try to keep covered up that you’re an evangelical. Brother, I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not going to stand up before Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer and all that gang and say, now I’m a poor little dumb evangelical. Please forgive me. I won’t say it at all, because there’s no reason for apology. The only thing we have to apologize for is our sin.

When we’ve got rid of our sin and the Lord has taken our sin away, we are as wise as the angels, and as discreet and as knowing as the seraphs before the throne; for we have an afflatus of that wisdom. It won’t teach you mathematics. It won’t teach science. It won’t teach you chemistry. It won’t teach you English literature. But it will teach you something vaster and wider and deeper and grander and more wonderful. It will baptize you into that Light, that wonderful Light.

I just can’t get enough of this what the old man said. He said this is the breath of the power of God, that pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty. She is the brightness of the Everlasting Light, the Unspotted Mirror of the power of God, and the Image of His goodness. And in all ages entering into holy souls, she makes them friends of God and prophets. And I’d rather have a baptism of this in my spirit than to have the biggest church in the world and to be known widely around the world. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? Yes, yes, yes. Seek not fame, seek not popularity, seek not publicity. Seek only to know Him, to know Him.

That’s why Paul said, that I might know Him and the power of His resurrection, the fellowship of His suffering, that I might know Him. That’s why Paul said that. That’s why he pressed on and pressed on to know Him better and better. That’s why because in doing it he was going back to the fountain of everything.

Do you know this Savior? Do you know Him tonight? Do you know Him? Remember this and I will read this passage and quit for the night. Do you know this? You don’t find this out in school. In fact, I don’t suppose anybody mentions it in school, anywhere, from kindergarten on up to the PhD, but here’s what it says. Jesus answered and said, I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and the prudent and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight. All things are delivered unto Me of my Father, and no man knoweth the Son but the Father. Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son. And he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him. Babes, children, humble people, meek people, they know! And the wise and the prudent and the learned and the proud and the arrogant think they know. Let’s pray.

Tags Answered Prayers, Country, God, Prayer, Tozer

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“Conditions for Answers to Prayer“

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“Conditions for Answers to Prayer”

March 11, 1956

Now, before I speak, I want to comfort Brother McAfee. I want you to stand up Brother McAfee, please. He’s been walking around upstairs in his study shaking his curly head and saying, oh, it’s such a beautiful instrument and it’s out of tune. I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed. Something happened to our piano. How many here noticed the piano was out of tune? Raise your hand. One? Few people know. Two people knows it’s out of tune? Now, isn’t that wonderful? Here he’s been groaning over the fact that the poor, lovely piano, such a beautiful thing, and it’s out of tune. We couldn’t get the man to tune it. He was ill. And something happened to it. It was, I suppose a piano can go down with a cold like anything else. And it’s out of tune and only the pianist and the Director noticed it. If everybody was, expressed themselves. So, from now on Brother McAfee I beg of you, don’t worry about it.

Now, another thing is, the board Sunday night, uh, Thursday night took notice that we’re in need of a little facelifting in here. And we are proceeding to have a housecleaning this spring, a new decoration job which should last us another couple of years. This has been about two or three years of Chicago soot, and of course, it’s a little dirty. If I hadn’t called attention to it you wouldn’t notice that either. But I’m as bothered about that as he was about the piano. How many knows how dirty the auditorium is? Well, he had two and I had about a dozen, about a dozen people notice.

Now, last Sunday night, I made the mistake of saying that next Sunday I would speak, give my third in a series of talks. I don’t know what was wrong. Brother R.R. Brown says when he gets above 2.98, he’s in higher mathematics for him. And when I get above three, I can’t figure right. I had three Sundays to conjure with last Sunday when I spoke, next Sunday, that I’ll be in Pittsburgh, and tonight that I will be here, leaving right after church. And I told you that it was next Sunday night that I’d finish my series, but it’s tonight. And therefore, we’re all confused tonight. But you know, it’s a blessed thing to not mind it. And I will finish tonight and then I’ll be ready for something fresh and new. When I returned from Pittsburgh.

I have talked on prayer from the book of John you know. We’re in the book of John, the 15th chapter. And I have taken that passage in John 14:13&14. Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in My name, I will do it. If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you. Now, there are other verses that I have read, but I’ll just limit it to those tonight for a few minutes and then I want to read a little more Scripture.

But I have demonstrated before in two previous sermons that prayer has a specific power over the one who prays. And not only that, but that God answers prayer in the world of nature in external matters, so that it is both subjectively and objectively powerful. Prayer changes the individual subjectively, and also prayer changes things objectively. And I think, at least I hope I laid the emphasis upon the former as being the more important. It’s vastly more important to me that I should be changed to suit God than that I should have the power to change external things. Though the Bible teaches, as I want to point out, that God does change external things. I preached a sermon on that last week.

Now tonight, I want to talk about conditions, the conditions that must be met. It might be well for you to take this down and think it over later in your prayer times. I want to show you that there are about six conditions. I have no doubt there are more. But there are just six that seemed to me to be important enough to deserve a stress in this message tonight.

The first condition for prayer is that we have a right relationship to God. When ye pray, say, our Father. Now, God does not become our Father by our saying, our Father. And it’s not necessarily true that He was our Father and we didn’t know it. But he said to those whose children, who were children of God, when ye pray, say, our Father. God hears his children.

Now, there is a popular notion that God hears everybody. And this notion that God hears the prayers of everybody that prays is not an Old Testament doctrine. If I want to stay by the word of God in my beliefs, then I must discover whether a thing is Old Testament doctrine or not. And this is not Old Testament doctrine. In fact, the Scriptures were very plain in the Old Testament that God only heard those who met His terms.

And the idea now popular that God hears everyone is not New Testament doctrine. It is not found in the New Testament either. And Christian testimony all down the years have never taught that God hears everyone. This idea that anybody anywhere, a gangster on his way out to bump off a rival, or someone ready to rob a bank, or a man whose soul is all loaded down with iniquity, that all he has to do is simply pray to the all father or to the man upstairs and he will get the answer. He is unenlightened guessing. It is wishful thinking and no more. It has not tradition behind it, the tradition of holy men. It has not the New Testament behind it. It has not the Old Testament behind it. It has not the testimony of the closest walkers who walk the nearest to God.

Therefore, we should throw it out. In case anybody says, well, but if it’s not in the canonical Bible, it’s found in some other books. Well, I happen to have most of the other books. That is, I have what they call the Lost Books of Eden. And I have also the apocryphal Old Testament and the apocryphal New Testament. I’m taking the apocryphal Old Testament with me to Pittsburgh to study there in my quiet times. I have read these books, and there isn’t anything in any of them that will give credence to the doctrine that God hears everybody. Jesus said, when ye pray, say, our Father and God hears his children.

Now, we go back to the book of 1 John 5, 1 John, the fifth chapter. And listen to this, whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. And everyone that loveth Him that begat, loveth Him also that is begotten of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments. For this is the love of God that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not grievous. For whatsoever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is a victory that overcomes the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcome the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God. This is He that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ. Not by water only, but by water and blood. It is the Spirit that beareth witness because the Spirit is true. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, the water and the blood. And these three agree in one. If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater. For this is the witness of God which he hath testified of His son, he that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself. And he that believeth not God has made Him a liar, because he believeth not the record. God gave of His Son. He that hath the Son hath life and he that hath not the Son, hath not life.

There you have a sharp distinction drawn as fine as a razor blade between those that do and those who do not; those that are and those that are not; those that had life and those that have not life; those that are God’s children, those who do not; those that have the witness; and those who do not have the witness; those that love God, and those that don’t; those that keep His commandments, and those that do not. There’s a line drawn. You will find that same line drawn through all the New Testament. So one of the conditions for getting our prayers answered is that we should have a right relationship to God. And in Galatians 3;26 it says, we are children of God by faith in Jesus Christ. Now, these are the ones and the only ones that can say, our Father Who art in heaven.

Now, in 1 John 3:16-22, we, uh, 19-22, we read that a good conscience is necessary before we can pray and get our prayers answered. My little children, let us not love in word neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth. And hereby we know that we are all of the Truth and shall assure our hearts before Him. For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth of all things. Beloved, if our heart condemns us not, then have we confidence toward God. And whatsoever we ask we receive of Him because we keep His commandments and do those things that are pleasing in His sight. Now there is a passage from the first John epistle. And thus, the innocent heart is the confident heart. And the man who has a heart that troubles him, a conscience that’s bad, can never believe. He can pray, and he can pray endlessly, but he won’t get anything for his prayers because God will not hear a man’s prayer if he allows unconfessed sin to dwell in his heart. If he has a bad conscience, says the Holy Spirit, why there’s no use to pray. But if his conscience is clear, then he has confidence in God, and whatsoever he asks for, he gets.

And then we must pray according to God’s will. I typed these over so I could read them more easily, 1 John 5:14-15. Listen to this, and this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us. And if we know that He hears us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him. We have confidence when we ask according to God’s will, and we know that then God hears us. And if God hears us, He answers us. The two are the same. One is tantamount to the other and the equivalent of the other. When God hears prayer, He answers it. And we know that we have the petitions that we desire of Him. So there, we must pray according to the will of God. God hears no prayer contrary to His will.

Now, the extreme example of praying out of the will of God is the Mohammedins who goes out on a forage to kill and to rob the caravans. And before they go, they kneel on their prayer mat and ask Allah if He will be so kind as to help them murder the traveler and steal his goods. Now, don’t smile, the human heart is capable of great iniquity and of great delusion. And of course, these people are deluded, deeply deluded. And they might as well, they’d better pray to the devil, because it’s the devil that wants to help them to kill and rob and steal and it’s not God, but they pray to God.

Now, no Christian would be so foolish as all that. The Christian ethic is too well known for that. And the Christian standards are too well known. No Christian would do that. But you can refine that a little bit and here at any Sunday morning in the average church, just refine, take away the blood and the bones and the dying and the robbing, and people pray selfishly out of the will of God. And God hears no prayer that is out of His will. And there is no possibility of praying with confidence if we pray out of God’s will. And if we pray without confidence, we pray without faith. And if we pray without faith, we pray without effectiveness.

Now, how can we know God’s will? There are two ways we can know God’s will by the Scripture and by the Spirit, by the Word of God, and by the Holy Spirit. First of all of course, there would be the Scriptures. A man can know that it’s the will of God that certain things should be done. And he prays within the bracket of the Word of God, knowing that the word of God gives him full authority thus to pray. And then where the Scripture doesn’t cover certain details, then he has the blessed Holy Spirit that can whisper to his inner heart the will of God, not contrary to the Scripture, though there may not be a text to cover it.

In a book on prayer written many years ago; and I read many years ago, but Dr. Reuben A. Torrey, he told about going to a YMCA and preaching on prayer to a young men’s group that gathered there. He preached on prayer and Torrey you know, was a believer that when you ask God for anything, you had the right to expect it, and God would give it to you. He just lived like that, though he was, they said, one of the most learned of the evangelicals. He still had got past that to simplicity of heart. So, he preached on prayer, and after he was over, the very embarrassed leader of the YMCA group said to him very courteously and yet was very much distressed. He said, Dr. Torrey, I’m sorry, and pardon me for mentioning it, but he said, you know, I think you left a wrong impression with these young men. Oh, Torrey said, indeed, and how was that? What did I say? Well, he said, you left the impression that we could ask for specific things and get them. That we could pray for specific events to take place and specific things and God would answer our prayers. Well now, he said, I’m sure you didn’t mean to do that. But I’m sure that that’s the impression you left.

Well, Torrey breathed a deep sigh of relief and said, well, my young friend, if that’s all you’re worried about, let me hurry to tell you that I meant to tell them that. That’s exactly what I meant to say. And if I said that and made my point, then I’m glad. Oh, but the embarrassed young man said, Dr. Torrey, you know, that’s true in the will of God of course, if it’s God’s will, we can pray and get anything, but how are we to know God’s will. How are we to know God’s will? Dr. Torrey said, young man, there’s a passage that says, if any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God and God will give wisdom to him. So that ended that and the young man probably piped down, but I doubt whether he was convinced that Dr. Torrey, this wise old saint of God, knew that if you didn’t know the will of God, you had a perfect right to ask for wisdom that you might know the will of God, and thus pray according to the will of God.

Mostly the Scriptures will cover the will of God, so that we can pray within the will of God according to the Scriptures. But as I say and now repeat, sometimes you cannot know without appealing through the Scriptures to the wisdom of God. And God answers your prayer and gives you wisdom so that you will not be praying out of the will of God.

Now, I don’t want to introduce anything humorous here because this is very serious truth, but there have been some very humorous things said and done. I remember a young lady who came to a preacher and said, Reverend, would you pray for me? Well, he said, what’s the matter with you? And she said, well, I want you to pray for me that I might be two inches taller. He said, are you healthy? And she said, yes, but I am two inches too short. Well, and you believe that God answers prayer and will do anything the Lord, that we asked Him to do? And I want you to ask the Lord to make me two inches longer and taller. And he said, well, I’m curious, why do you want to be two inches taller? Well, she said I want to get in as one of the girls in the chorus, as a chorus girl and dancer, and I’m two inches too short for the line. And unless I can stretch two inches then I won’t be able to get the job in the nightclub. Well, if that preacher was what I think he was, I’m sure he didn’t pray for her. I’d like to handle that lady. I’d have enjoyed that, I really would. I’d have liked to enjoyed that.

Well, now that’s funny, but she was a serious young woman. Now, nobody told her any better. And until you’re told better, sometimes you can be very foolishly wrong about very evident things. Things, that we after we see them and see how wrong we were, we smile at ourselves or blush. But until we are told and it’s pointed out to us, we can be very badly deluded. This young lady was. Now, that is a grotesque example of praying out of the will of God. There just isn’t any use to pray out of the will of God. If you pray in the will of God, God hears you. And if God hears you, He answers your prayer.

Now, right here, it’s not in the sermon, but I’d like to step aside from the regular development of the truth long enough to say this to you. Don’t press your prayers and expect them to be answered immediately. I suppose there are prayers that will have to be answered immediately or they won’t be answered at all. When Peter said, Lord help me, as he was sinking beneath the wave, he had to have an answer within one and a half minutes or there would have been no Peter. They would have fished him out and buried him somewhere. So I suppose there are prayers that have to be answered immediately, but they’re not very many. Mostly, God allows our prayers to drag along a long time. And it’s for our good that we might learn patience, that we might learn to trust Him, that we might have an opportunity to be disciplined and chastened and taught, instructed, and led in the right way. And that we might have an opportunity to check to see whether that prayer is of God or not, and then see whether we really mean it.

I don’t like to do this, but sometime I like to travel around and take down the number of petitions that I hear in prayer meetings or church services, and then check on how many of them ever get answered. Well, not only do most of them not get answered, but it would be a total surprise if they were answered because most of us pray more than we remember what we prayed for. We asked for things that we promptly forget because we’ve heard somebody ask for those things. We rib the Catholics because of their formality and ritual and because they pray by set form. We Protestants pray by set form too, the difference being that they’ve worked it out so that it sounds beautiful and we just improvise as we go along and play by ear. And because we haven’t the time to do it, mostly, it’s pretty bad. I believe there’s just about as much ritual in the average Protestant churches there is in the Catholic or the Lutheran or any other the ritualistic churches, they print theirs, and repeat them. And we remember ours and repeat them. And they’re about the same old thing. I could pray a pastoral prayer if it was nine o’clock any evening hanging by my toes on a clothesline wire, and know exactly how to intone it and how to make it work and then how to finish it off.

Now that’s, that’s simply religious habit. Brethren, by the grace of God I want to be delivered from that, even if it means that my prayers can’t be beautiful, and they can’t be, can’t be eloquent, they just have to be blunt preaching I pray. I remember one time that old W.T. MacArthur, William T. MacArthur was asked to lead in prayer. This sharp old man who God, one of the sharpest brained old man I’ve ever known, and a spiritual man, walked with God, but he wasn’t anybody’s fool. But he said, now we’ll have brother William T. Macarthur lead us in prayer. He got up and waddled over and he said, what do you want me to pray for? He wasn’t going to waste his words nor go through a ritual. He wants to know what they wanted done and what they wanted God to do for them and he wanted to pray with some meaning back of it. I thought it was rather blunt, but I’m not sure but it wasn’t all right. What do you want me to pray for him He said. They got him straightened out and the old man prayed and sat down.

Well now, the next thing is, what have I said up to now, you got to have a right relationship to God. There must be a good conscience, and it must be according to God’s will. And then in Jesus name, John 14:13-14. Ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it. Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. Now, this is so overwhelming that you won’t believe it. And it is so huge that I scarcely believe it even as I preach it. I pray that I might believe it. And I try to believe it and I cry, O Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. But you know what He says here. He gives power of attorney to praying people. How many here know what power of attorney is. You go to a lawyer, an attorney, and you sign over, sign your name to certain papers giving that man a right to act for you in anything pertaining to your business. He can commit you to anything, power of attorney.

Putting it around another way and giving it a biblical figure rather than the one I’ve chosen, He puts in the hands of any of God’s children, the royal seal. Did you know back in those old Bible days, they didn’t have typewriters and telegraphs and TVs and radios and all the rest that they have now? A man had a seal, a royal seal, a king did. And that royal seal had to be on all documents or they were invalid. Anything that was supposed to go out from the King and it didn’t bear the royal seal, they could have torn it in pieces and laughed at the messenger and thrown it on the floor. It didn’t have the royal seal on it. But everything that came out with the royal seal on it, instantly must be done, because it had the seal of the King on it, the emperor’s seal.

Do you remember back in the Old Testament when Joseph received the seal from Pharoah? And that meant that anything that Joseph did, the King had to back. He had the royal seal. And so, Jesus Christ puts the royal seal in the hands of His people. They usually wore it as a ring. That’s where we get our word signet ring. You know, occasionally now you’ll see some youngster running around with the signet ring with his initials, or initials cut in it. And that’s an old hangover from the days of the royal seal.

When a king had his seal on his ring, just to save him time, I think it’s pretty neat myself; in place of having to hunt around for the thing, he just had it on and all he had to, was just turn it over and stamp it and it was sealed with the royal seal. And when the King gave that royal seal to anybody, he could go throughout all the King’s domain and act for the King and have all the authority of the King and the power of the King. There wasn’t anyone from the corner policeman on up to the assistant king but what had to hop to attention when anything was spoken in the name of that royal seal.

That’s exactly what Jesus had in mind and what He meant, and it was out of that background, the figure that Jesus said, anything ye asked in My name, I will do it. I hereby bestow upon you the royal seal. I put the ring on your finger and all you have to do is pray and turn it over and stamp it with My name. And it carries all the power of the King. It carries royal power with it–absolute authority. Now, I said before I introduced that idea that you wouldn’t believe it. And I said that I have difficulty believing it. It’s true. I believe it’s true. But to believe that means, me, now that’s a difficult thing.

Do you know what unbelief says? Unbelief says, some other time, not now. Somewhere else, not here. Somebody, else not me. And faith says, if it happened somewhere else, it can happen here. If it happened to other people, it can happen to me. If it happened at some other time, it can happen now. There’s the difference. There’s what’s hard. O Lord, help our unbelief. God puts into the hands of his children the royal seal. But do you notice my brethren? God is not foolish, and God will not give the royal seal to the wrong man. Never would a king give that royal seal to an outlaw. Never would he give that royal ring to a man that he had reason to believe that would betray Him. He gave that royal seal only to one who had proved himself to be worthy of every confidence.

So before Jesus turns the royal seal over to His children, He says, you must have a right relationship to my Father by the new birth so you can say, our Father who art in heaven. You must have a good conscience. For if your conscience is against you, how can you use a holy thing like My name? And you must act in my Father’s will, because if you’re not in my Father’s will, then you’re in rebellion. And how could I give a royal seal to someone in rebellion? And having met these tests, being children of God and being good children of God with good consciences, and living and walking in God’s will and praying in God’s will, we have all the authority to move heaven and earth that Jesus Christ has. Do you believe that? Does anybody here believe that? That’s true, my brethren. That is true. That’s what the New Testament says. That’s what the Bible says. That’s true. And our wretched unbelief is the reason we do not put it in operation.

And then, here’s what the Scripture says. The Scripture says in Matthew 7:7-8, ask and it shall be given you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh, receiveth. And he that seeketh, findeth. And to him that knocketh, it shall be opened. If ye then being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that asked Him. In other words, if you’re born in sin, conceived in iniquity, having walked in the ways of sin, and having the disadvantage of having been a sinner, if yet your love for your little children makes you willing to give your little children anything they want, If it’s good for them of course, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to them that ask Him. He didn’t say, how much more will your heavenly Father give anything to them that asked Him. I wouldn’t hand a revolver to a two-year-old child. I wouldn’t hand a razor to a two-year-old child. I wouldn’t hand a pound box of chocolates to a two-year-old child. But I would give good things to that child.

And so, He doesn’t say He will give anything. He says He will give good things. And the good things are in His will. And the good things are the things you want if you’re right with God. And in Mark 11:22-24, Jesus answering saith unto them, have faith in God. For verily I say unto you that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea, and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he said should come to pass, he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore, I say unto you, whatsoever things ye desire when you pray, believe that you receive them and ye shall have them.

I said a while ago that we will not depress our prayers and would be discouraged if we didn’t get them answered right away. I believe that faith can afford to wait. Real faith can afford to wait. And the way God operates is very likely to be in nature the way it is in grace and vice versa. If you want a stick of chewing gum, or a little bar of Hershey’s, put a penny in a slot in the subway and you’ll get it. If you want an ear of corn, plant a grain of corn and wait. Cultivate it and watch it grow and wait. First the blade, then the tassel and the green ear and then the full corn, ripe corn in the ear. That’s the way God works.

God doesn’t work with slot machines. I am on a one-man lonely crusade against slot machine religion. I’m a voice crying in the wilderness. And nobody in within hearing distance, slot machine religion, put a nickel in the slot and get anything. Well, that’s the way people work, but that isn’t the way God works. If God wants chickens, He waits 21 days and makes the old hen sit for 21 days patiently there. I used to pity them. I used to say, Oh my, why couldn’t you just flop down and get up and they would follow her away. But no, she had to sit there for 21 days. And with some birds, it’s 28 days, and with others it’s still longer. If God wants an oak tree, it takes him 20 years to grow it. When He wants wheat, it takes all winter and up to July of the next year. And the God of nature is the God of grace, so that I think that the parallel there out to teach us that we oughten to rush heaven when we pray; that we ought to pray in the will of God and then watch God work slowly.

I’ve asked God for things and almost got discouraged, and then saw them begin to happen. They’re too personal. I would not want to introduce them here. But I would only say that some of the prayers that I’m carrying around with me in a little notebook. I bought a little notebook in a little 10-cent store in this little town of what I call the lazy sprawling village of Nyack one time when I wrote about it. I got it. I never have been without except once. I was afraid that I had lost it, but I found it around the house. I’ve carried that little thing with me since about, I guess,17 years. And I have prayers in there that I look over every once in a while, and remind God of them. And you know, some of them aren’t answered yet. In 17 years, God hasn’t answered them. But some of them have not only been answered, they have been answered so far beyond what I asked, that I wouldn’t have accepted it as a fact if God had told me what He was going to do then.

Sure, you can afford to knock and then wait. An American, you know, have brass knockers and they knock three times and want to go right in. But the kingdom of heaven can wait. You can wait and I can wait. So, let’s trust God and be patient. Some of them in the Old Testament even in that 11th chapter of Hebrews which is the Westminster Abbey of the Bible, even there some of them died without ever having their prayers answered. They got them answered, but not during their lifetime.

Now another thing about prayer if you want to pray successfully, and I take it you do, is that the whole life’s got to pray. God sometimes answers emergency prayers. There isn’t any doubt about that. They say that once during a flood, there were two houses. One was going one direction; another was swirling in another direction and they passed within hearing distance. And there was a colored woman on top of the roof of one of those houses, and somebody else on the roof of the other and the one was praying loudly to God; and the colored woman shouted, God doesn’t hear scared prayers, son. But God does hear scared prayers. He hears the prayers of His true people no matter, and He does hear emergency prayers.

So, I’m not going to stand here and tell you that your life must be perfect before God can, will hear your prayers, but I am going to tell you this, that while God does turn aside and hear sometimes emergency prayers, prayers that are a little above the level of our living, that isn’t His highest will. His highest will is that we should live the way we pray. William Law in his most famous book, “A Serious Call to Religion,” this William Law makes an argument which I have always thought, I guess I read this 25 years ago and it’s stuck with me ever since. He says that our trouble is often, we pray one way and walk another. And we cross ourselves up. He said, we ought to go the way we pray. Our prayer ought to go the way our life is going. If a man walks a holy walk, he can pray a holy prayer. But if he tries to pray a holy prayer and walk an unholy life, he’s crossing himself up. And he pleads that the people of God might begin to live the way they pray.

That’s what I mean tonight. I mean, our whole life ought to pray. I mean our whole life should be a prayer. I mean it should be a sacrifice on the altar. But the whole life should be. And I mean there should be nothing in the life that can cancel out the prayer. There should be nothing in my conduct, in my thoughts, in my deeds or ambitions, or my relationship to people that could make it impossible for God to answer my prayer. My whole life ought to pray. And you know what I think? I think the greatest prayer in the world is the unuttered prayer of a great life. I believe that. Jesus prayed. He sent up ejaculatory prayers. He prayed long prayers. He prayed before meals. He prayed in company. He prayed with the people. He prayed alone. He prayed every kind of prayer, I suppose there was. But the greatest prayer He ever made was the walk He took from the time He toddled out of Joseph’s carpenter shop until they nailed Him on a cross. His life was his greatest prayer.

The Bible says He pleads for us at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, making intercession for us continually. That has given some people the impression that Jesus Christ is engaged in a perpetual prayer meeting on His knees before the Father, interceding forever. No, His presence there is the most eloquent prayer in all the wide world. That He is there and that we are here, and that He wears our nature and has our shape and looks like us. And an angel walking about could see that form and say, a Man has arrived. A Man’s in heaven, a man. Sure, a Man is there, our Man, God’s Man, the sample Man, the second Adam, He’s there. And His presence there by the right hand of God is the great eloquent prayer for you and me. He bears our names on his hands and on His shoulder and on His breast. And there before the Father His eloquent presence is His mighty efficacious prayer.

And I believe the greatest prayer in the world is the prayer of a life, a life that goes in the right direction. That’s not to spiritualize praying and that is not to give it a mystical turn and relieve us of the privilege and necessity to pray for specific things and expect them. I think we should do both. I think a man is a mighty unskillful, is mighty unskillful in prayer if he has to unscramble himself, wash up and get a quick haircut and straighten himself out and try to look decent as he walks into the presence of God. He should have been like that all the time, should have been. Children of God should be presentable all the time. A man who allows himself to run down, four days growth of beard and clothes that are soiled and then suddenly he has to appear before the King; he’s got to do some fast footwork to get ready for that royal appearance. He should be ready all the time.

God’s people should never need morally and spiritually to have to rush around and get straightened up to get into the presence of the King. They should live so they can enter that Presence without embarrassment anytime. They should have on the robes of Presence that would allow them to go in before the King without embarrassment.

Now, three more thoughts and I’m through. In the Book of James it says, ye have not because ye ask not and ye ask and receive not because ye ask to consume it upon your lusts. And then it says, ask and ye shall receive. Now, here we have the word “ask” three times. Ye have not because ye ask not, and there is the penalty of prayerlessness. You could have it if you had asked for it. You’re not asking for it and therefore you’re not getting it. How little we have may be the result of how little we ask. More asking means more getting. Less asking means less getting. Ye have not, because ye ask not. That’s the penalty of powerlessness. But, ye ask and receive not because ye ask amiss, that you might consume it upon your lusts. There’s the penalty of selfishness. To ask selfishly that I might have it to consume upon my lusts is to make it impossible for God to answer. And then, ask and ye shall receive, and there’s the reward of faithfulness. Anybody can have that outline who wants it and you preachers, ye have not because ye ask not, the penalty of prayerlessness; ye ask and receive not because ye ask amiss, the penalty of selfishness; and ask and ye shall receive, the reward of faithfulness.

So now I hope that this may have encouraged you to know that prayer is not simply something that religious-minded people mumble, but that it is a science, that it is an art, that it is a skill to be learned by the grace of God, that it is a privilege to be enjoyed, that it is authority to be wielded, that it is a right you and I have in the blood of the Lamb. And we can go to God and ask what we will and it shall be done unto us. Do you believe that? Will you then practice it a little more than you have been? If I could be sure that you would pray 15 minutes more a day than you’ve been praying, it would be well, would have been worth my time here tonight. Will you do it? Will you take it on yourself? Will you dare to go to God? If you shouldn’t have it, don’t ask for it. Don’t want it. Stop wishing.

God’s poor sheep wishing, wishing wishing like the farmer that sits on the front porch and wishes for 10 acres of golden corn. And he calls his wife and says, May, would you please join me in wishing for 10 acres of golden corn. So she joins him. She says to him, George, I think that we ought to call in our neighbors. I think there’s power in numbers. Let’s call in our neighbors. So she goes to the old phone and rings three times and the neighbor answers and she says, come on over, George and I are sitting on the front porch wishing for 10 acres of golden corn. Pretty soon, they have a front porch full of people all sitting there wishing for corn. I know it’s ridiculous. I know it, but a lot of God’s children are doing the same thing. They’re wishing for things. Stop wishing. If you ought to have it, pray and you’ll get it. And if you can get it without asking for it by a miracle, get it. Go do it. God won’t do what you can do. And there’s no use for you to try to do what only God can do. And if we can get untangled on this thing so we’re not trying to do what only God can do, and not asking God to do what we ought to go do.

Could I tell again the old story of Moody? It is so old that it’s as worn as the shoes that he looked at when he came into a prayer meeting one time and there were a lot of monied-men, Christian men with money. Here they were, and as he walked in, all he saw was the soles of a whole lot of businessmen’s shoes all around a circle. They were asking God for $1,500. Little old blunt Moody said, Brethren, get up. I don’t think I’d bother God anymore about that. He had it. Any one of them could have written a check and never noticed it. But they were down on their knees asking God Almighty to give them what they could have gotten by a scratch of the pen. Don’t waste your time asking for things you can do yourself. Do them! God isn’t going to spoil us by waiting on us hand and foot. God won’t make your bed. God won’t wash your dishes. God won’t mow your lawn. God won’t shovel your snow. And be careful you don’t do what I did. I shoveled snow twice during the week I had off and I’ve had a sore back ever since. But watch it. But you do it. If you can do it, do it. Hire it done, but get it done. Don’t bother God about it.

But oh, there are so many things you can’t do, and those are the things God wants to do for you. God specializes in the impossible. With God, all things are possible. And all things are possible to him that believeth. And there’s a realm of impossibilities, a realm of exploits where human brains can’t do it and human hands can’t do it. Only God Almighty can do it. That’s where prayer becomes powerful. Prayer moves the hand that moves nature in the world. But if you can do it, do it. And if God doesn’t want you to have it, don’t waste your time wishing for it. You only learn bad mental habits. If God doesn’t want you to have it, don’t want it. And if He wants you to have it and you can’t honestly get it, pray for it, that is, if it’s in His will. If it’s unselfish, if it’s for His glory, if it’s for the good of humanity, pray for it. And the Lord will answer your prayers.

Amen. You’ve got the royal seal. I hope you use it. I hope you’ll learn to use it. What couldn’t we do if we learned to use the authority given us by our Savior? What couldn’t we do?

We’re deliberately not using man’s methods in this church, deliberately not using man’s methods. We repudiated them as bad, opportunism and advertising methods and big businesses. We’ve thrown them out as being bad and we’re trying to go the New Testament way. We must look out now that if we choose the New Testament way, that we have the New Testament Spirit, because technically to take the New Testament way and then not live the New Testament life is to work against ourselves. Let’s believe God together and let’s pray more than we have. Ye have not because ye ask not. Put prayer to work and see what God will do for you and your family, your business, your home and your church and your life and your country. And everywhere within the will of God, green grass will spring up by the water courses. And where dragons used to lie, roses shall bloom, and you will find yourself wonderfully enriched as you pray believing.

Now let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the privilege of prayer. We thank Thee that we’re not out of touch with heaven. We thank Thee Thou dost incline thine ear unto us and hear us. We confess to Thee our staggering unbelief and our doubtings. We confess to Thee Lord, that as a company we’ve not dared to be as bold as we should. But we want to correct that. We want to come boldly to the throne of grace and ask for what we need. Thank Thee for the answers we’ve seen, marvelous answers Lord that couldn’t come except Thou didst send them. But there are still some things unanswered. O Lord, we pray Thee, make this a praying church. Make these people so bold, so aggressive in their praying that they will cry under Thee boldly and dare to continue to pray until the answer arrives even if it takes weeks and months, and in some instances may be some years. But it will come, for Thou art God and Thou wilt not confuse Thy people nor cause their faces to be ashamed. Teach us to pray O Lord. Teach us to pray. In Jesus name, Amen.

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“Things Prayer Will Do for You“

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“Things Prayer Will do for You”

March 4, 1956

I told you last week that I would speak on prayer. We have come to prayer in John, John 14:13 and 14. Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it. In John 15:7, If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what you will and it shall be done unto you. And in the 16th chapter, there where our Lord says, on that day ye shall ask in My name, and I say unto you that I will pray the Father for you. For the Father Himself loves you because you’ve loved Me and I believe that I came out from God.

Now, this is only one of hundreds of passages having to do with prayer. And last week, I pointed out, and I will only sketch this briefly and go on from there, that there were two contradictory views of prayer. They are made to be contradictory, where actually they are not contradictory, but are complementary. One of them is that the only value prayer has is the subjective effect it has upon you. If you pray for your enemy, it doesn’t help your enemy, but it helps you to feel better toward your enemy. That’s a sample of it.

And then, the other view is that prayer is a way of getting things done. That the Lord is our servant at our command. And that He has put Himself in our hands and made promises from which He cannot escape. that enable us to go to God and ask Him for something and get that thing. If two men are bidding for a contract, one of them is a Christian and one of them isn’t, the man who is the Christian prays that he might get the contract. And so, his sealed bid is a little lower than the other man. When two men are in the prize ring, one says he’s accepted Christ and the other one is a pagan unbeliever and the man who’s accepted Christ prays that he might be able to knock the other fella groggy. And the Lord answers prayer and He does. That’s making God our servant and getting things from God.

Now, both of those views are wrong and both are right. God isn’t going to help a business man chisel another businessman. He isn’t going to help a prizefighter knock another prizefighter unconscious. But nevertheless, God does answer in the realm of nature. He does answer prayer. And then your prayer does have a subjective effect upon you. Both are right, but either one run to extreme is wrong.

Last week, I talked about the subjective benefits of prayer. Tonight, I want to sketch briefly the things prayer will do for you; what we may expect God to do in answer to prayer.

Now, there are about seven provinces that prayer embraces. And any one of these would be well worthy of a full sermon. I will name them for you, and then try to sketch them as quickly as I can. One is our personal, spiritual life. The second is our bodies. The third, our family. The fourth, our material needs. The fifth our friends. The sixth, our country. And the seventh, the progress of the gospel. Tonight, I suppose the seventh one will receive the greatest amount of emphasis.

Now, there are those that say that there is no use to talk to God about any of these things; that it is impossible to believe that a God as great as the God of whom the choir sang, the great God who speaks in thunder, the Mighty God who holds the world in His hand. That God should be interested in details. They conceive God to be the chairman of the board or the president of a vast company. And you might as well ask the president of the company to replenish the paper cups in the dispensary at the watercooler in one of the small offices of his vast plant, as to ask God Almighty to be interested in any of the small details of our life.

Now, if there’s anything that the incarnation of Jesus did, it was to explode this idea and to teach something else. When Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, before He was incarnated, left all that and thought it not being equal to God something to be hung on to, but voided it all and left it and came down in the form of a man, and took upon Himself our nature and our flesh, our nature without sin and our flesh, and became one of us. Then immediately we draw from that to conclusion that God must be interested in us in detail. That God is not the great president of the company, the top figure in a descending scale of important figures down, but that God being the God He is, can take care of the sparrow and the grass and the lily. And Jesus said that there was not a hair on our head, but the Lord had them numbered. And that Jesus said that the sparrow’s fall was observed by the Father. And the Bible teaches that God the Father Almighty was interested in the care of his prophet Elijah and sent an angel to bake him barley cake for him to eat. And we read in the New Testament that when Peter was in jail, that the great God sent down an angel with a cloak, or at least he brought the cloak, Peter’s cloak and told him to put it around him, put his shoes on his feet. It was cold outside, and then led him through the locked doors, showing that God the Father, because He’s omniscient, omnipresent, and imminent, can take care of all the details of all of His people without any bother and without ever getting confused.

If one man, or the President of the United States, had to take care of Ward 19 and had to see whether the light was working here at the corner of 69th and Halsted and it had to do that all over the United States. And had to see that all the post boxes, the mailboxes were painted, and that all of the little details were all taken care of, He would die of a nervous breakdown in 24 hours. Nobody could do it, because men are men.

But God being God can do everything as easily as He can do anything. And He can do all things with as little effort as He can do any one thing. And the eyes of God go throughout all the earth. And God sees not only everybody that lives, He sees every hair on all the heads of all the people that live. He sees not only all the sparrows that were ever hatched, but He sees all the feathers on the wings and misses a feather and knows where it falls. So, the Bible teaches us that God is personally interested in us. That He’s interested in the details.

Now, I want to talk a little about our spiritual lives and since I preach on that so much, I suppose that I really ought to give that only once over lightly and say that God is interested in your spiritual welfare, and that God is ready to hear you pray. David, when he got himself into a jam because of his sin, got on his knees and talked to God about that the same as you would talk to a doctor. And he let God probe him and analyze him and diagnose him and find out what was wrong with him in order that He might be able to make him well again.

And you and I can go to God, and we should go to God. We shouldn’t waste our, all our time on ourselves. It’s a very and decidedly selfish kind of praying that’s always talking about me and my and I. But before we can pray rightly for anybody else, we have to be right ourselves, and therefore we can come to God with all the details. You have a perfect right to go to God and talk to God about anything that bothers you in your spiritual life. Then have God give you a sympathetic hearing, and a warm, friendly attention to all the details. That’s your personal spiritual life.

And then our bodies. Now, there are many people who do not believe that God is interested in human bodies. Oh, when God knelt down, as the poet said, out of the river he scooped the clay. And there the great God, like a mother bending over her baby, worked over a lump of clay until it became the shape of a man, and then blew into it the breath of life and man became a living soul. God sanctified the human body. And when God the Son came to the body of the Virgin Mary and Himself took a body which grew to manhood and became a full, mature human body with all the functions of the human body, God swept away forever that doubt, that says, God is not interested in our bodies. There is a passage in 1 Corinthians that says, the Lord for the body. And Simpson and those around him made a great deal of that little phrase, the Lord for the body. I think he wrote a book on that subject, The Lord for the Body.

The Lord is interested in the human body. So don’t you imagine that He isn’t. We go to God, some of us, only about the things that matter and then we look at the other things ourselves. That is, the things that we think that matter that they are particularly interesting to God, but God isn’t interested in the other things. God is interested in your baby. God is interested in its temperature. He’s interested in you. He’s interested in your body. And you and I have a right to come to God believing that. Now I’m not quoting scripture tonight. But the Holy Ghost is bearing witness to the truth of this because I am giving you the distilled essence of the Scriptures, and the sum and substance of what’s found all throughout the Bible.

So, God is interested in our bodies. You say then you believe in the Lord healing the human body, Mr. Tozer? I do, I don’t think that we ought to become so body-conscious that we become physical the way some people are. There are people that would not drink two glasses of water before breakfast, if they thought it was for medicinal reasons. There are people that wouldn’t stretch nor yawn if they thought it would do them any good physically. They expect God to keep them well by a perpetual, sparkling miracle. Well, I don’t go for that.

Neither do I go for big healing campaigns. You may put me down there that I do not, because it’s 95% psychology and 5% is a racket. But I do believe that God’s interested in my body. And I believe that I have a right to go to God, and to talk over with Him my condition, and then to hear God speak to me. And I believe that in the will of God, I have a right to expect deliverance when it’s God’s order that I should have it for His praise. I don’t believe that I can just eat as I please, live as I please, do what I please and use my faculties and powers for my own amusement and pray and joy and pleasure and then goes through the world as a worldling, seeing what I can get out of it and then run to the Lord and have the Lord do a miracle deliverance on my body. I don’t believe that. I wouldn’t respect a God who would stoop to that kind of thing. But the humble child of God walking in humility before God can go to the Heavenly Father and ask prayer and ask in prayer for deliverance and can get that delivered. The Lord knew that I’d never make good healing evangelist or good healing preacher, so the Lord gave me a verse back in the Old Testament, as thy days, so shall thy strength be. God gave me that, as thy day so shall thy strength be.

Well, we have a man for instance in the Alliance. He is now I think about to give up his position and retire. And about 35 years ago he had tuberculosis. And he took it to the Lord in prayer and the Lord healed him of tuberculosis, but he only has one lung. And he is about this tall and about this wide. And he has been all over the world Brother Tom, all over the world, traveling all around, up and down the mountains going everywhere like brother Thomas here, and he’s been doing it for 30 years, and still he’s able to keep going somehow or other. You look at him and wonder why and what holds him up. But he has learned he says, to take strength from the Lord day by day. He says, I’ve learned day by day to take strength from the Lord.

That’s Dear Dr. Sneed, one of the saintliest and one of the best informed and one of the most poured out and devoted men that I know in Christian circles anywhere. He should have been dead long ago. At least he should have been retired and dangling his long legs in the water in Florida long ago. But he’s still able to get around. The last picture I saw of him looked to me as if he wouldn’t be around much longer. He’s an old, old man now. But he should have died 25 years ago, but he’s lived on the strength of God. God took care of him.

What I’m trying to say here tonight is that the human body lies within the province of God’s prayer willingness in our families. Because some of us weren’t able to get all of our children actively in Christian work. There’s one of my boys that’s not a Christian. Why the people sneer and say, who are you to talk? Who are you to talk? Brother, did you ever stop to think, we brought up six boys in Chicago, Illinois, and not one of them got hanged or went to jail. That’s a miracle in itself. If the great God Almighty hadn’t helped us and answered our prayers, we would have had at least two juvenile delinquents out of the six. So, God did answer prayer. God does answer prayer. And He answers prayer for the family.

Now, you have a mean husband, and you’re a Christian and living with your husband is like living with a bale of barbed wire. And you don’t like it. And you’d love to have him changed. And so, you pray continually, O Lord, bless my husband so he’ll be easy to live with. He won’t hear that prayer, because God knows what you want to do is you want the weather to be warmer in your house. You don’t want to live with a fellow like that. Oh, you want to live with him, but you want him changed. God isn’t going to answer that selfish prayer at all. And until you get to you accept him as he is, rusty barbed wire and all, the Lord won’t even hear you for him.

Dear old brother Tom Hair, I heard new one about him just recently. I think it’s worth telling. Dear old brother Tom is up in St. Paul. And some woman came to him, and he saw she was a selfish, carnal thing and that she wanted her own way. So, after a number of conversations with her and she’s following him around one day, he said, by the way Sister, do you have your gun with you? She said no, no gun. What do you mean? No. He said, I’d like to shoot you. You’d be more good in heaven than you are on earth. You’re no good down here Sister. And he bid her goodbye and dismissed her. That was praying Tom’s Irish way of handling her. I suppose she went out of there white as a sheet and wondered what happened to Tom. But he’d been in Chicago and decided that was the way to handle your enemies. But Tom didn’t mean he was going to kill her. He just meant that she was so hopelessly wrapped up in herself she was no good to anybody. You can get that way. There are people that haven’t wept in sympathy for anybody else’s family but their own for 25 years. There are those who never pray for anybody but their own family, except in a more or less hit and miss way.

But God does care about your family. And God does hear pray for your family and He will, because the point is now, your family is embraced within the province of prayer. It lives within the boundaries of prayer possibility and God does hear for your family and their material needs.

I got myself in a bit of trouble here and there by some of these rub the Aladdin lamp and make God Your servant kind of prayer fellows. And they’ve written some sour things about me. And I thank God for every sour thing. But the impression is among some people that the Lord is your junior partner to run errands for you, to sharpen your pencils and be sure that you get the help you need so that your prosperity will grow and then in order to keep God coming, you give him a tithe of your money. God works on a percentage and he works on a 10 percent percentage and if He keeps you prosperous the more He prospers you the more he gets.

Now, that is literally what you would gather from a lot of tracts and a lot of testimonies that I read, that God works on percentage. No. What does God need of your money? God has to give you a dime before you can give Him back the dime anyhow. Did you ever think of that? It’s like getting a Christmas present from your four-year-old boy. Where did he get the money? You gave it to him. And so you give him the money for the Christmas present he gets and comes to you just as innocently as if he’d worked and earned it. And so when you give anything to God, where did you get it anyhow? God gave it to you or you wouldn’t have had it.

God isn’t concerned with your money. It’s awful to tell an audience that isn’t it Brother Tom? It’s awful to tell and audience that God isn’t concerned with your money. If any of you think that you can buy God off or get an in with the Lord or get any special favors from God because of your generosity, you might just as well sleep on your wallet and sew the thing up and hide it under the bed because God isn’t interested in your money. He’s interested in your soul and he’s interested in what giving will do for you.

But the Lord has lots of money. Think of it all. Think of the uranium God has and the gold and the silver and the pearls. Why, of all the oysters with all the pearls, that God knows where they are, were fished up on earth and the pearls taken out, why it would be more than you and I could ever pay for in a million years, yet God owns all of His oysters and all those pearls. And all the silver and gold, and anything we give, it’s God’s in the first place. And God isn’t going to work on a percentage or on a commission at all. But if you want things for His honor, He will bless your business. And He will help you and He will work with you. And the workman has a perfect right to go to God. In fact, he should do it and consecrate his business, his job, his occupation, his profession, whatever it is to the Heavenly Father.

And I think of a man, say, like a surgeon that a good many of us in this church know. A fellow said that he had to have a very serious bit of surgery. And this man knelt down by his bed and said to the nurse, would you kindly go out and get so and so, and she went out and closed the door and this surgeon got down on his knees and prayed. The surgeon told me this in another instance. He said a man brought his wife to him and he said, this woman, my wife has something wrong with her leg. And I’m bothered, we’re bothered about it and we’d like to have you see what the trouble is. And he examined and then he said, I am afraid that I’ll have to tell you that you’re in trouble and I’m afraid that it’s cancerous.

Well, they both jumped up and went up and said, we won’t take that. We won’t take that diagnosis. We’ll go somewhere where people know something. So, they went to Mayo’s. And after she had been thoroughly examined by Mayo’s, they corroborated his testimony and they said she has cancer. And the only way they can save her life is to amputate, take her leg off. And they brought her back to this good brother, rather humbled now and chastened. They said, Doctor, we’re sorry that we blew up on you and talked the way we did. You were right and we were wrong and we want you to perform the surgery to save her life. And he said, Mr. Tozer I got down and cried and cried and cried. He said, think of it brother Tozer. For me to take a knife and cut off that white leg. He said, I cried, but I did it. He said I did it to save her life. I did it because they both wanted it and now, she’s healthy and well, but she’s crippled. And you tell me God doesn’t hear prayers for a man like that brother. A man whose tears lie close to the surface and who loves and who’s sympathetic and who wields his knife and prescribes after seasons of prayer.

Yes, God hears prayer for our bodies and he hears prayer in our professions. He blesses the farmer and glorifies God in his living. He blesses the laboring man who glorifies God in his home and in his work. He blesses the businessman who glorifies God in his business. He blesses the professional man who takes God into his profession. But He doesn’t run errands for anybody. And He isn’t a water boy for a proud Christian businessman. But if we’re humble and meek and live for the glory of God and live to praise Him and live for the good of our fellow men, God will work on our books and God will work on our sales and God will work on our jobs. And God will help us.

Then our friends. Our friends lie within the province of prayer possibility too. I’ll simply say that means intercessors. You’ve got to watch in praying for other people that we don’t get our nose in other people’s business. Some people are careless and don’t care for anybody. Other people are so careful about everybody, that they’re really in danger of intruding. Let’s watch that. Don’t intrude in other people’s affairs. Be careful not to do it. But if you know where prayer should be made or if someone comes to you for prayer and counsel, then you have a perfect right to take that person on your heart as though you were that person and intercede in a unity that makes the two of you one.

Did you know Everett Rowl in the city of Akron, Ohio? Everett Rowl was a worker in the rubber shops in Akron and a lay preacher and one of the dearest and most wonderful Christian men that I ever knew, and quite a preacher in his own right. There was an evangelistic campaign coming to town, and wise Brother Rowl went to the Lord about it. He said, Now Father, I want to pray, but I don’t want to waste my prayers. So, I would like to have you lay on my heart the people I ought to pray for to get converted during this meeting we’re having. And he said, slowly there began to crystallize within his mind five men’s names, rough, tobacco-chewing, dirty storytelling, rugged Adamic sinners they were who worked with him in the shops.

So, he said, I went to God Almighty on my knees and in intercession I pleaded for the souls of these five men. And he said before the last night of the meeting, four of them had come and been soundly converted, but one held out. He said, I went back to God and I said, God, you’ve given me four but four fifths is not enough. I want five fifths. Give me that last man. So, that evening meeting was about to close, it was closing that evening, and the invitation was given to those who would like to become Christians. And this man stood and held on to his seat solid in the church. And then, just before the last song was sung, he bowed his head and went forward and knelt and surrendered his heart to Jesus Christ and became a Christian too.

There were five sinners, literally snatched as brands from the burning by the determined intelligent intercession of a man for his friends. Your friends lie within the province of prayer possibility. There may be some things God won’t answer, but that’s not one of them. He will answer for your friends. You have a right to go for your friends, your neighbors, your relatives and intercede, provided you will take the blame on yourself as Jesus did, and carry the load as Jesus carried it in a more limited and relative sense.

Then there’s our country. Our country lies within the province of prayer, God will hear for our nation. When brother Thomas told me that these different allied groups would have nothing to do with other allied groups with a no man’s land between, I said you’d think they were civilized. That’s the way we do it after 6-4000 years of civilization education. But our country and the nations of the earth and the rulers and those in authority, and those whom God has set up and put in authority to carry on the business of politics. That dirty word politics is not a dirty word. It’s the science of managing human affairs. And it once was a beautiful thing, read Aristotle’s politics, read John Locke’s politics and see what it meant to them. A high and lofty thing, a beautiful thing, the managing of human affairs, human society so as to achieve the greatest amount of freedom and the least amount of oppression for the vast numbers of people.

You and I have a perfect right to go to God. I will not bring politics into this pulpit. I have been advised to tell you who to vote for but I’m not going to do it. And you wouldn’t do it any half a day. I’m not going to drag politics into this pulpit. I stand here not as a Democrat nor Republican; I stand as a Christian above both of them. But I have a right to go to God as a Christian and we have a right to go to God as a church and pray that He will throw his shielding arms around this land of the free.

Our worst enemy is not Russia. Our worst enemy is ourselves. If America would clean up and brighten up and pray up and get right with God and preachers would begin preaching the Word of God again, and we’d repent and become penitential, not all the armies of the world could destroy us. For our beams were laid deep in theology and religion and a high moral philosophy and righteousness and nobility. And the country was dedicated to the glory of God. And there aren’t enough enemies, there aren’t enough enemies no matter how they pool their interest in the whole wide world and destroy America unless we destroy ourselves from within. But if we rot from within, we’ll collapse and go down as the Romans did. Nothing could stand before the Roman Empire while she worshipped her rugged gods and held to a strong, stoic morality but when she began to laugh at God. That’s happened, it’s now happening in America. It became necessary for the police to protect women walking the streets in Roman cities. And they’re doing it in America and in Chicago today. They rotted from within and then it was easy for the Vandals and the Goths and the rest of them to come down and destroy a nation that was already rotten inside. So, our country lies within the province of prayer.

And of course, the progress of the gospel. We can pray the Danis to sanity. We can pray. We can pray Capulcas to righteousness. We can pray the tribes in the Philippine Islands to God. We can do it. We can break the chain of Russia. We can pierce the iron and the bamboo curtains. We can. We can deliver these countries if the people of God pray. And next time I talk to you it will be two weeks from tonight. And I want to talk about conditions of prayer. What they are, but I’ll leave it for tonight.

There is a hymn sing following at the Ver Ploegh home down in Beverly Hills. We want all you young people to go and have yourself a nice time and get in off the streets. Poor brother Thomas, I thought we were going to have our greatest missionary convention, and I think we’ll have a $40,000 missionary offering this year. 35,000 last year, no reason why we can’t jump it to 40,000 this year or more. Are you going to join me over the next weeks in earnest prayer to God Almighty, that this church might come alive and begin to produce fruit in a manner never has before? Will you promise me that, hand up in answer to prayer. Will you pray with me and for me and for us? Brother Thomas Will you close in prayer? Our Father we would ask the that a real spirit of prayer, that kind of intercessory prayer that only Thou canst give birth to would take hold of every one of our hearts. Teach us the real value of prayer and make these thy people a praying people. This we ask in Jesus’ name, amen.

Tags Country, Family, God, Prayer, Tozer