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“Holy Ground-The Life of Worship After the Jordan”

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Holy Ground: The Life of Worship After the Jordan

 Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

August 17, 1958

Going on over into the book of Joshua, where the Lord said to Moses and Israel, “…and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. My angel shall go before thee, and I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries. And thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them. And ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he shall bless your bread and water. And I’ll take sickness away from the midst of thee, and there shall nothing cast their young. And the number of thy days I will fulfill. And I will send my fear before thee, and destroy all those to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs.”

We followed this, and we showed over in Joshua how this literally took place. And I said all the way through that while this was written to Israel as a nation on this earth, its spiritual principles apply to us now. And I believe this, and I have believed it for a long time. And I have seen God do some very wonderful things for people, for my own self. And now we followed Joshua across the river and into the land of promise. And two weeks ago, tonight I said that Israel had two things, there were two things, there were four that I wanted to mention, but I only got to mention two of them.

One was, Israel was circumcised after 40 years of wandering, and thus separation, which is always, always typical of separation in Scriptures. And then that there was the old corn of the land, and the manna ceased. The artificial manna, which came down from above, ceased, and they lived off the corn of the land. They became mature. I talked about maturity. And I said I would finish tonight and talk about this.

In the fifth chapter of Joshua, it came to pass, verse 13, when Joshua was by Jericho that he lifted up his eyes and looked and behold there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand. And Joshua went unto him and said unto him, Art thou for us or for our adversaries? And he said, I’m not a man on either side, I am here as captain of the host of the Lord. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and did worship and said unto him, What saith my Lord unto his servant? He knew he was talking to God. And the captain of the Lord’s host said unto Joshua, loose thy shoe from off thy foot, for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so.

Now this will conclude my little series. And we begin something new and fresh for next week. A little later, perhaps not until school begins and our people get back and this summer business is over. But when that is over and we start all over again in September, early September, I want to preach a new series.

Now, there are two things here that I want you to note. The Holy Spirit, the man with the sword, and the worship. There was the man with the sword.  I think that we will agree that this was the Holy Spirit. I believe that this accords with most Bible teaching, spiritual Bible teaching. And this angel here, this prince, I think the margin says, Joshua went, and the man said, as captain, that’s the word he used, prince, it says in margin, as prince of the host of the Lord am I come. And he had a sword in his hand. And it’s called the sword of the spirit in the book of Hebrews and of Ephesians. Now this angel, this comforter, was to go ahead and fight for them.

Now when we come to the New Testament, particularly in the gospel of John, we have the teaching of our Savior three chapters long about the Holy Spirit. My friends, this life in the land that I have preached about, you’ve listened to for these weeks, this life in the land, this crossed over life, this victorious life, is characterized by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

Now you have heard me say this many times, and I say it not only here, but wherever I have the pleasure of speaking. If occasion arises, I say that the church of today is gravely wanting in the power and Presence of the Holy Spirit. We have grieved the Lord by our sins, and there has been a withdrawing of the Presence, the lifting of the Presence.

We sang here, the Comforter is come. Not the Comforter came, but the Comforter is come. And this I believe with everything in my heart, that when He came, He came to stay, and He is come, and He is here. But it’s entirely possible to have the Comforter present in the church, present in a congregation, present on the earth, present in some measure in this church, and yet so grieve Him, so quench Him, so resist Him, and so ignore Him, that He cannot be to us the captain of the Lord’s host. He cannot be. He wants to be, but He cannot be.

We’re going to have to reverse ourselves in fundamental circles, and we’re going to have to do some prayerful, penitential rethinking of this matter of the relation of the Holy Spirit to his church. The Spirit of the living God was given to His church. We are baptized into one body by the Holy Spirit, that is true. And if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His, and that is true.

But it is one thing to be a member of the body of Christ, and to be baptized by that mystic union into the body of Christ, that regeneration. It is quite another thing to live in the fullness and in the friendly communion and friendship of the Holy Ghost. And my friends, I will simply have to say that this latter is something that we do not know very much about.

I am very deeply concerned, because we have brought up a generation of young people that know practically nothing about what I am saying now. We have brought up a generation, even some of them present here tonight, good, clean, young, converted people. There’s no question about that, no question about it. But they have never crossed over.

There is not the separation that is meant here by circumcision. There is not the maturity that comes from the old corn of the land and the secession of the manna. There is not the conscious presence and power of the Holy Ghost. It just isn’t, it’s not here, it’s not upon the people.

And I’d like to say, partly this is because it’s impossible to isolate this church and separate it completely from the flow of quasi-evangelicalism that is abroad on the earth. It is impossible to escape the chilling influences of a teaching that denies that there is any such a thing as a fullness of the Holy Spirit.

I teach it here, I have taught it, and some have entered. But what I say can be neutralized by what you hear on the radio or what you read in your Sunday school lessons or what somebody says or what some friend talks with you about, and we level back to this chilly condition where we find ourselves.

But Joshua found this man, this invisible man. Now Joshua went forward after that, and we read no more about the man. But as long as Joshua kept his heels clean and walked with his God, he had victory. And Joshua conquered the land and gave it to Israel. And yet it was obvious here that Joshua wasn’t doing it. It was done under the leadership of the man who appeared once to Joshua and then withdrew into invisibility but did not withdraw, who was no longer seen by Joshua but was present wherever there was obedience and faith and courage shown by Joshua and the children of Israel.

Now, my friends, we are reaping in this hour the result of a terrible misunderstanding. We are reaping in evangelical circles the result of a frightful and frightening misinterpretation of biblical truth regarding the Holy Ghost. We are forgetting that our denominational fathers, who once planted their great churches on this continent, believed as we do and as I’m trying to teach you here, and not as the modern spirit-denying evangelicals believe.

Although I’m an evangelical, a fundamentalist if you like, but our fathers believed that a man ought to be filled with the Holy Ghost and they didn’t hesitate to say so. But there came up a group of teachers a generation or less ago that nullified that whole thing, and that by careful argumentation made it very difficult for anybody to push his way through.

They said, well, but you’ll become a fanatic. Well, but look at so-and-so and he went off into wild fanaticism. And they put up a scarecrow in the middle of God Almighty’s cornfield to scare away all of the children of the Lord. They put up a scarecrow in the clover field, so the children of God are frightened away. And so, we were forced to the necessity of two or three things. We were forced to go forward either by learning or by gadgetry.

And so, by learning and gadgetry we have tried to labor through, but we haven’t gotten very far and we’re so desperately in need of refreshing in the day in which we live. What the church of God needs to do, the whole evangelical church, is to call ten days of prayer and apologize to the Holy Ghost. We’ve wronged Him, we’ve retrenched Him, we’ve denied Him, we’ve interpreted Him away, we have resisted Him, we’ve been ashamed of Him, we’ve been afraid of Him.

And the result is, He has pulled the blinds down over the light and we are without much light. But instead of our saying, O God, we have sinned, we have sinned, the light has gone out, we look around for a way to get on without the light. We look around for eyes that aren’t God’s eyes, methods that aren’t God’s methods, ways that aren’t God’s ways.

So, the church is going on, stumbling forward and going on, but we’re not going on with very much lift, nor very much buoyancy, nor very much blessing. I tell you that I would rather see a select number of the Lord’s people filled with the Holy Spirit and living in the sweet oil of the Holy Ghost than to see great religious movements. If you could see both, it would be very good. But you can have one without the other. You can have the second without the first.

We can promote great religious movements and not have the Holy Spirit at all. We can learn how to do it, my brethren. And if we do, we make a tragic mistake. What art thou? Who art thou? said Joshua to this man. Who art thou? And the man said, Nay, don’t question me. As captain of the host of the Lord, I am come.

And so, I want to urgently, urgently press upon you that you, particularly you young people, search your own hearts and search your Bible and prepare to spend some time alone. You know, Christianity is a social religion. We are called sheep. We are not called wolves. Wolves travel mostly alone until they run to kill, and they travel in packs, but mostly they’re alone or in twos. We are called sheep because sheep always travel together if they can.

So, Christianity is a social religion. That is, it’s a social religion in this that we worship together. There is the assembly, the coming together of the people of God, whether it be half a dozen or half a dozen hundred. They are the people of God nevertheless, and they are together. And this is good. But it’s also possible to get so that you’re not spiritual, you have made your religion to mean that you’ve got to get somebody to talk with, somebody to lean on, somebody to chat with, and we do not meet God alone.

Some of you are leaving shortly to go to various schools of learning. And I want to say to you, if you accept the dead level of mediocrity that you find in your student body as the highest will of God for you, you will waste your time where you’re going, and you will not go on with God. You’re going to have to, by the grace of God, deliberately and purposefully and determinedly rise above those that are around about you. And when you rise above them, of course, they’re not going to like it. They’re going to call you holier than thou. They’re going to have cute names for you. They’re going to snub you. They’re going to think you’re queer or they’re going to find some category to put you in and get rid of you. And they’re going to dismiss you one way or another.

But brethren, you can’t dismiss a man full of the Holy Ghost. Now, I want to warn you. You can’t dismiss a man full of the Holy Ghost. And you can’t frighten him, and you can’t quench him and you can’t squelch him and you can’t stop him and you can’t block him. For God says, I’ll go before you and the angel shall go ahead of you, and I will drive out the enemy. But he didn’t mention this captain. But when the time came, the captain was there. The prince was there with his sword in his hand, the Word of God.

And so I say to you that if you accept the common level, if you pray a little and read a little and sing a little and then chatter a little and yak a little and joke a little and then the next week pray a little more and talk a little more, pretty soon you have equated spiritual Christianity with fun and amusement and all that. And the result will be that you will grow up and go on and mature physically and mentally, but not mature spiritually.

We are not a mature people spiritually, not even in this church where I have struggled and prayed and preached so hard and brought men who could help and supplement and teach as well or better than myself to help us along.  But we’ll lean on each other, and we’ll look at each other as samples and Charles looks at Bob and Bob looks at John and John looks at Harry and each one says, well, I’m about like the other. And we accept each other as a sample of what a Christian ought to be.

Read the lives of the holy men of God. Read the lives of those who even in their youth and some even in their teens refused absolutely to accept the chilly Christianity of their day as normal. And they pressed themselves through and they were accused of being fanatical and they were even some of them deserted and some of them shown the door, but they went on with God, nevertheless. And now we write their biographies and sing their hymns and tell their anecdotes and build their sepulchers, but we’re careful not to follow them and live as they lived.

There is a land, my brethren. The Holy Ghost said, I’ll take you across into that land and it’ll be your land, and I’ll lead you. And I’ll send an angel before you and he shall go before you and he’ll drive out the enemy from before you. And the very things that are there to hinder you will become steppingstones for you to rise on your dead selves to better things. And that’s what God said, and He said it to His church, and He said it to His people.

Five years ago, ten years ago, as long ago as fifteen years ago, I saw a little turn for the better in spiritual things here and there. I’m speaking not only about church, I’m speaking about God’s people wherever I find them. I saw a little turn for the better, but now I see a little swing in the other direction. I see those churches, who at one time had very high standards for membership are now throwing the doors open and saying, while we sing number 39, the door is open for members. And so they come and join. This is a spiritual tragedy.

The plane that went down with 99 aboard, we were all horror stricken. But to open the church of Jesus Christ without discrimination to anybody that wants to walk down the aisle, and join is a tragedy infinitely worse than if all the airplanes in the sky tonight were suddenly to crash together. Because the worst the airplane crash can do is to kill the body. But when a church gets corrupt, it ruins the souls of men.

Now the second thing is, Joshua fell on his face to the earth and did worship. And the captain of the Lord’s host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoes from off thy foot. We would say now, take your hat off, bow your head. The place where thou standest is holy.

The land of crossing over is the land of worship. In Genesis 12:7 and 8, the Lord appeared unto Abram and said unto Abram, In the land, he said unto Abram, Now look around you. This land I will give to you and to your seed. And Abraham built an altar unto the Lord who had appeared unto him.

And then later, Jacob, a grandson of Abraham, after he had sinned and was driven from his home, that is driven by a bad conscience and fear of his brother, driven from his home, he went out from Padanaram, or toward Padanaram, and he traveled to the middle of the night. And in the middle of the night, he came to a place and lay down in that place and took of the stones of that place for his pillow.

And it came to pass that while he slept, behold, a vision appeared, and a ladder was set up on the earth and its top reached to heaven. And the angels ascended and descended upon it and God stood above it and Jacob said, this is holy ground. Why didn’t he know that that was holy ground? Had not God said it to Abraham, but Jacob found it out. And so he awoke and he anointed the pillar and said, This is the house of God. And we got the beautiful word Bethel, the house of God.

Later on, after various skirmishes and backslidings and restorations, Jacob appeared at Genesis 35. And in the 35th chapter, when he returned to the land, one of the first things he did was to build an altar unto the Lord. The land of promise is a land of worship.

And in Joshua 5, we have the same thing. They had been out of the land a long time. Now they come back into the land again, the land where Abraham had built the altar, the land where Jacob had built it and anointed or had raised and anointed the pillar, and the land where Jacob had built the altar again after returning to the land.  And then now they’re back in it. And one of the first things they do is to bow and worship. And this strange prince from heaven says, Loose the shoe off thy foot, for the place whereon thou standest is holy. This is holy land.

My friends, there is a place, a land here on earth for God’s people, a land where the soul anoints its pillar. There is a land where God appears to the soul. There is a place right here in the twentieth century amid Sputniks and automobiles and burning fumes and noise and confusion. There is a place where we can enter, where the soul anoints its pillar and where the heart takes off its shoes and where we worship as Abraham worshiped.

Let me take you back to this wondrous, mysterious passage. After these things, the word of the Lord came unto Abraham in a vision, saying, fear not, Abraham, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward. And Abraham said, Lord God, what wilt thou give me, saying, I go childless? And Abraham said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed. And behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, saying, this shall not be thine heir, but he that shall come forth out of thine own bough shall be thine heir, the promise of Isaac. And he brought him forth abroad and said, look now toward heaven and tell the stars, that is, count the stars, if thou be able to number them.

And he said, so shall thy seed be.  And he believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness. And he said unto him, I am Jehovah that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees to give thee this land. And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it? Here is one of the most wonderful mixtures of sharp reasoning and awestruck worship possible to imagine.

Here was a man who was using his head. He remembered the promise God had made. He remembered that things weren’t working out the way God seemed to say they would be. And he wasn’t going to give way to his feelings, and he was going to stick by the text. And he said, Lord God, but wait, you promised me, whereby shall I know? And God said, Take a heifer of three years old and a she-goat of three years old and a ram of three years old and a turtledove and a young pigeon. He took unto him all these and divided them in the midst and laid each piece one against another.

This was Abraham seeing Jesus’ day. This was Abraham by faith looking down the years and seeing a cross. Only he did only what he could do. He slew young animals and birds. And when the fowls came down upon the carcass, Abraham drove them away. And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abraham. And lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abraham, that is, God said unto Abraham, know of a surety, Abraham, know of a surety.

Even here in the deep sleep of ecstasy, even here in the horror of great darkness, even here when your reasoning is staggering, reason is staggering because of the mystery and wonder of it, know of a surety, Abraham. I’ll make good in my promise, thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs and shall serve them and afflict them four hundred years, and also the nation whom they shall serve will I judge. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace, thou shalt be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again. And it came to pass that when the sun went down and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. And in the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham saying unto thy seed will I give this land.

Now here was the wonder, the mystery, the mystery of it. I don’t claim to understand this, I do not know. But here was God appearing to the man, here it was all interlaced with good hard promises, no visionary dreaming of things. Here were good hard promises, the word of God was there, and the promises were there, and Abraham was insisting on them. And yet there was an overtone of the mysterious and the divine and the wonderful and the heavenly and the beautiful. And Abraham went into a deep sleep and Abraham woke from his sleep and here was the fire moving among the pieces.

Oh, this was God, my brethren, this was God. And I say that it’s this sense of the otherness of Christianity that is missing now. Everything can be explained, everything. We’ve got it all worked out on charts. Busy young fellows who’ve studied Christian education. They’re busy telling us how to do the work of the Holy Ghost.

Ah, my brethren, there is a land where in this life, down here now, right in the middle of this generation of worldliness, while we’re salty believers in the Word and where we will insist that God keep his Word and where we stand by the Book and refuse to have anything that doesn’t check with the Book.

And yet at the same time, there comes down upon the soul that enters that land, there comes down a sense of something wonderful and something mysterious. It’s only God, it is God, why should I say only God? But it is God, and the soul anoints her altar, the soul anoints her pillar.

Now, where are we? What kind of Christianity is yours? There are several kinds I want to mention briefly. There’s the social Christianity of which I’ve already spoken. There are tens of thousands of Christians who couldn’t stay Christian one month. If they were cast by themselves, they have to have the support of others, those round about them. They haven’t pressed through. Abraham, all alone. Jacob, all alone. And it was in those lonely times that the Spirit opened heavens and revealed wonders.

And I have no hesitation in saying that what Abraham and Jacob learned in those brief, beautiful, bright times of visionary, glorious insight, I have no hesitation in saying that what they learned there was more to them than six years in a seminary could ever be to a man today. Social Christianity.

Then we have formal Christianity. I won’t talk much about that because I don’t think you’re guilty of that and I don’t think that you’re going to hide behind formality unless it is the ugly formality of the gospel churches. The Episcopalians have their formality, the Lutherans have their formality, and the Presbyterians and Baptists in some areas have gone pretty formal, but they have a beautiful form. They’ve worked it out. They know what to do. It’s lovely. It’s at least lovely. But in our gospel churches, we’re likely to become formal, but have an ugly formality that doesn’t have the ripe beauty of age on it.

When a Lutheran or an Episcopalian turns around twice and bows, everybody knows what he’s doing. Symbolism. He taps a bell or lights a candle; everybody knows what it is. There’s beauty in it at any rate. But we have a formalism that isn’t beautiful. It’s an ugly formality. Ugly formalism.  Always we go the same way. Always we do the same thing. And because it isn’t beautiful, we think it’s spiritual. That’s what I call the cult of ugliness.

Well, then there’s a Christianity which is pure entertainment and nothing else. Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s nothing else. But I would say that it is so mixed up. It has to have an entertaining value, or you can’t sell it. You just have to have an entertaining value. Most all, most all of the churches have gone that way. Most all the colleges, most all. Most all have gone that way.

I’m not saying a word about Wheaton or Nyack, or Moody’s, but I’m saying that practically all, some people want to murder me because I don’t come out and name names, but I’m not going to name names if you don’t, if I lay the principle down and if I rub the lens real good and say, now look, and you can’t see it.

As the fellow said, if you have to ask, you don’t know anyhow. And you never would know. So, if you can’t see what I’m talking about, if the Spirit of God has not honored you by letting you see, then there’s no use to ask me. But everything has to have its entertainment value these days.

Then, of course, there’s theological Christianity. It’s purely theological, nothing else. Then there’s escapist Christianity. That’s the Christianity of the red-hot evangelists and the missions. It’s just escapist. Jesus Christ provides an escape hatch, some way to get out and rescue ourselves. And we never quit talking about the fact we were rescued.

Brethren, Christianity does make a way of escape. It is theological, and it is social, but it is also worshipful. And this is what’s missing in this hour in which we live. There is such a thing as divine rapture. We sing about it. Fanny Crosby taught us to sing it, and we sing it, but we don’t have any idea what we mean when we’re singing it. We sing it in our hymns and don’t know what we’re saying.

But there is a place where we worship, and the Church must find that place again. The Church must find it again. We must find it. We here must find it. We here must put away every sin until we find that place, so that when you wake in the night, a sense of His presence is there, that when by chance you hear a bar of music, a bit of a hymn on the radio, or sometimes when you’re not expecting it, tears come to your eyes, and when you hear vast spaces and all they’re talking about now, a sense of blazing wonder comes to your heart. This is my Father’s world.

Worship, brethren, is what we need. Worship. We should meet to worship. We should meet to worship. We should meet always to worship. Worship should be part of everything that a Christian does. If it’s a street meeting, he ought to go there in the spirit of worship. If it’s a mission meeting, he should be there in the spirit of worship. If it’s a meeting to sew a sheet for a missionary, it should be done in the spirit of worship. And it can be done. But it can’t be done unless we’re in the land, unless we’ve pushed across and gotten in. There is a place where the child of God can get in.

You say, is that what the Alliance teaches? Yes, it’s what the Alliance teaches, but it’s what 97 percent of us don’t have. But it’s also that which some people who aren’t in the Alliance have. I meet them here and there. I told you about one this morning, a pastor I heard pray. That man is in. And I have met a few like that. They come from the North and the South and the East and the West and they’re Arminian or they’re Calvinist or they’re post-millennialist or they’re pre-tribulation or they’re post-tribulation or their eschatology is all mixed up. But they’ve gotten in. They’ve gotten in. And you’ll always tell them. You can always tell them. You can tell them by their faces. There’s a timber in their voice that tells they’re in.

We’ve put rapture over to the coming of Christ and we’ve made an eschatological historical event out of it. And we have explained it as downrightly as you would explain just exactly what the Lord is going to do. And we’ve got the Bible to prove it. But the saints talked about rapture, and they didn’t mean the second coming of Christ. We push rapture to the coming of the Lord Jesus.

But it said here, take your shoes off your feet. And by an instinct the man went down on his face. The fact that we can enter the church of God and joke with each other. The fact that we can enter the church of God and sit down and look around to see who has the sack dress on. The fact that we can enter the church of God and begin to criticize in our hearts. I don’t like that song. Why’d they sing that one? There’s that old man again with the same old stuff.  All right, maybe there’s a fault to be found. But the very fact that you can find it indicates something’s wrong or indicates there’s something wrong with all of us.

My brethren, God is in this place. Lo, God is here. Let us adore and own how dreadful is this place. I tell you; I tell you that I would shake hands with every friend and say goodbye to them all. Rather than give up even a little bit of this that I personally experience. This, this land of worship. This land where the Father is all. Shall we not obey God and go on to perfection? I believe you’ll want to, or I wouldn’t be preaching to you.

May God grant that together we may press on out into the deep waters, waters to swim in. All right.

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“From Wilderness to Victory“

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From Wilderness to Victory

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

July 13, 1958

Over the last weeks I’ve been talking about the angel of the Lord leading his people into and through and into the land which is the enemy’s land but becomes our land by the gift of God. I am now going to speak about crossing over the river. In the book of Joshua, I’m not read that long passage, you’re familiar with it, where God tells Joshua to arise and lead the children of Israel across, assures them that every place the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you.

Then he said to Joshua, be strong and of a good courage, for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land which I swear unto their fathers to give them. Some other verses here I want to read, the sixth and the ninth. Have not I commanded thee, be strong and of a good courage, be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed, for the Lord thy God is with thee, with this wherever thou goest.

Then in the third chapter, Joshua rose early in the morning, and they removed from Shittim and came to Jordan. And all the children of Israel lodged there before they passed over. Then verse 10, Joshua said, hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, the rest of them.

Behold the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth passeth over before you into Jordan. Then verse 13, it shall come to pass as soon as the souls of the feet of the priests that bear the ark of the Lord, that is Jehovah, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of Jordan, that the waters of Jordan shall be cut off from the waters that come down from above, and they shall stand up upon a heap. And it came to pass, when the people removed from their tents, to pass over Jordan, and the priests bearing the ark of the covenant before the people; the feet of the priests that bear the ark were dipped in the brim of the water.

For Jordan overflowed these banks all the time of harvest. There isn’t an official board anywhere living that would have voted to cross the Jordan at that time of year. There isn’t an official board anywhere, there isn’t a missionary society anyplace that ever would have voted to cross over at the time when the Jordan was overflowing her bank. They’d have waited until she was at her lowest and then gone over.

It came to pass that the waters which came down from above stood and rose up upon a heap very far from the city Adam. And the people passed right over against Jericho. And the priests that bear the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan. And all the Israelites passed over on dry ground until all the people were passed over Jordan.

Now Israel stands at the river’s edge, and behind her are 40 years of unnecessary wandering. Israel stands at the river’s edge. I say, and behind her are 40 years of unnecessary wandering. And do you know, people, I don’t suppose that there’s anybody here but what has wasted a lot of time which, if he had used, would have taken him much further in than he is now.

Now, I don’t hesitate at all to keep on pecking away on this, that the children of God ought to move on in. You don’t hear it much. Keswick comes along once a year and says it for five days, and then that’s about all you hear this part of the country, except little over here on this side.

But 40 years of unnecessary, irregular wandering about in a land that bear no fruit, that had no cattle, no sheep, no grapes, no grain, a wilderness, a desert. And ahead of her was the blessed land. Just ahead of her was the blessed land, the land all prepared and ready, made ready by the hand of God. Not heaven, understand.

We’ve made a great mistake in making the crossing over of the Jordan to be dying and going to heaven. The Lord never intended that to be so. He intended that we should now cross over. You see, it’s a picture, it’s a picture. God made a picture there, a historic picture. The old Egypt was the land of bondage and sin and oppression. Crossing over of the Red Sea was the new birth and the getting out into freedom. But it wasn’t yet, that new freedom wasn’t yet the blessed land. That was to be entered into just a little bit later as they went on in, as they were to go on in. But they goofed it and wandered for 40 long years, missed it, and all of the old fellows died. But now a new, fresh generation was ready to go in. And before them lay this land of blessedness.

And do you know, Christians, before you lies a spiritual experience which you yet haven’t entered into, some of you, in which you should. You should. We had a farewell for a lot of missionaries last night, going out from this church. I’m concerned that you go over there ablaze with the love of God, and that you don’t take a defeated spiritual experience over there. Because if you do, you’ll only lead others into that defeated experience. Converts made in the wilderness will remain in the wilderness. Don’t forget that.

And any kind or type or degree of Christianity that you now enjoy is the same kind that you will take over there. But you say, I’ll preach the Bible. You will preach the Bible as your heart understands it. You will preach the gospel as it’s sifted and strained through the meshes of your soul. And if you’re still wandering in the desert, you’ll never be able to get anybody else out of that desert.

Some years ago, in the little country of Korea, back about in the 10s, that is up to 10, about 1900 up to say 1914, somewhere in there, there was a little woman by the name of Jacobs, spelled with a J, Jacobs, Miss Jacobs. She went over to Korea. A lot of these boys, incidentally, that are going over to Korea now and having those tremendous revivals they tell about and take pictures of those Koreans getting up in the morning at five o’clock and going to prayer meeting, and leave the impression that they took that revival over there, or they’ve been used in that revival, don’t believe one word of the whole business. Because I happen to know all about that, or at least a good deal about that, long before these fellows were old enough to say mama without lisping.

Miss Jacobs went over to Korea, and she went around among the missions, various denominations, telling them that there was such a thing as crossing over the Jordan and getting into an experience in the holy blessed land and living in it. And they listened to her. The result was, of all things, the Presbyterian missionary got filled with the Holy Ghost, the missionaries.

And I knew a missionary, a Presbyterian missionary by the name of Adams, and I heard him tell this. If I recall, he came to our church and told it too, something about it, that he had to go around and hunt up the Christians that he’d made in the rice paddies, wherever he could, and tell them that he’d find him, you know, working in the rice paddies, and he’d have to say, listen, when I preached to you, I didn’t know what I was talking about much, but now God’s met me, and I’ve come to tell you there’s something better for you than I preached to you when I first preached to you. He told it with rather a wry smile. He had to admit that one of his jobs was to go around and tell everybody that he’d converted and won to a wilderness experience, that there was something better for them than that which he had been teaching to them.

Well, the Presbyterians got blessed, and you get a Presbyterian blessed, you’ve got something on your hands. And these Presbyterians got all warmed up, you know, and so did the other missions around there, and a great revival broke out. And what you see over there today in South Korea is simply the result of that revival that began there in around somewhere around 1912 or 14, led by this little woman, Miss Jacobs.

But you know, now we hear stories and write-ups, we get the impression that these brilliant young men are going over there and having those revivals, they’re doing nothing of the sort. That is strictly normal for those Korean Christians. That’s the way they act. They pray and pray all together, and pray at five o’clock in the morning, and pray long periods. But they did that, I repeat, when these world travelers were still nursing on a bottle, or before they were born.

Now, I don’t know how I got over there, that’s not part of tonight’s sermon, but I just thought I’d say that to you, that Joshua is sent now to lead the children of Israel across. He’s sent to lead them over. And someone must lead and exhort the rest. I wonder if it isn’t so here now. It’s an unflattering sidelight on human nature that the individual rarely finds the way alone. It’s not flattering, it’s not complimentary to us, that the individual rarely finds the way alone. He has to have somebody to direct him, and it’s still less flattering to us that we more rarely take the way even if we do find it. Unless we are prodded by somebody sent of God to lead us across and over in, we’re not likely to get over.

So, Joshua was God’s man, sent to lead the children of Israel across the river. And so Joshua, says the Bible, rose early in the morning. Have you noticed in the Scriptures how many of the great Christians rose early in the morning? No, I do not refer to getting up early. What I refer to here, and I think what the Bible refers to, is the eagerness that gets you at something if God is in it.

I remember that when Abraham was told to offer Isaac, it wasn’t a very pleasant thing, but it was obedience. He had it to do. So, he got up early in the morning and took his son and started up Mount Moriah. The point was, not that he was an early riser, so much as that when God placed something before him, he couldn’t rest right until he got it. He couldn’t relax until he was in there obeying God. So he rose up early in the morning.

I wonder what the greatest disappointment to God Almighty is. I wonder if it’s modernism. You know, there’s an awful lot of yelling around these days about modernism, and liberalism, and the new evangelicalism, and all the rest. And the Christians are managing to have a nice cat and dog fight over the whole business, which I don’t like and I’m staying out of. But I wonder if liberalism is as great a disappointment to God as the languor on the part of the Christians who know the way and don’t take it.

Lots of Christians don’t know there’s anything beyond John 3:16. They were brought up on John 3:16, and they were told if they accepted Jesus, that would be it, the end of it. So they accepted Jesus and they got themselves a marked New Testament, and started out what they call winning souls, and making converts and witnessing. But all they knew was the wilderness. They never got beyond it. In fact, they were told there wasn’t any place beyond it. They were told the earth dropped off precipitously right the edge of the wilderness, and if you tried to go on beyond the wilderness, you’d become a fanatic.

So that’s where the church is, and many thousands are like that, and yet there are some who are taught, and they do know that there is a place further on in. You know, you Christians here, if there’s any people in the city of Chicago that ought to be living holy lives, walking in the fear of God, separated from the world, pure in your individual life, right in your relation to others, godly in your relation toward God, and indwelt by the Holy Ghost, you ought to be the ones. You ought to be the ones.

You’ve heard this, and heard it, and heard it constantly, and yet when Joshua was told to lead them across, he rose up early in the morning, and not only that, he blew a trumpet, and he got Israel up. I wonder if the most painful, disappointing thing to our Lord Jesus Christ is not how God’s people drag their feet. We drag our feet. We’re not concerned. We get more heated up over a baseball game.

There are some of you young people right here listening to me now that get higher blood pressure Monday night playing baseball than you do when the mighty call of the Holy Ghost comes to you. You don’t get concerned enough when God speaks to you to crack a smile, or frown, or bat an eye, but if you’re called out on a cheap little old scrub baseball, you’re all steamed up.

If some of you young people who claim to be Christians in this church could get as steamed up over God as you can over pizza, you’d be far out into the land by this time to next week, but you just can’t get your concern. You drag your feet. You don’t get up early in the morning.

Joshua rose early in the morning. There was the blessed land, and Joshua was going into it, and he got up early in order that he might not miss anything, and the languor on the part of us now is almost unbelievable.  Now, he said, when you see the ark of the covenant, that’s 3:11, when you see the ark of the covenant going in, you go in.

Now, it’s vitally important, my friends, that in your eagerness for something further on and better and deeper in your spiritual life, that you go God’s way, that you see to it that God is there, that atonement is there, that the mercy seat is there, that the ark of the covenant is going that way.

Some of God’s children, when they get interested, get disappointed with themselves and dissatisfied, they get up and start in what they call activities, and they get out into the activities, and you know there’s an awful lot of activities going on now, and yet almost all of our religious activities begin in the wilderness and end in the wilderness. They never get across the Jordan at all. They begin and end in the wilderness, simply move around in circles. The test of anything is, am I nearer God than I was before?

Now, this is July 13, 1958. Go back one year, go back one year and see. Are you nearer the blessed land than you were a year ago, or are you in it? Have you crossed over? Has there been an epoch in your life, a specific crisis in your life? Has there been? Have you entered into the blood-bought privileges that are yours through the atonement in Christ Jesus? Have you entered in, or are you about where you were? I say that’s the test. Am I nearer the blessed land? Am I in the blessed land? What direction have I been moving?

We sing a great deal about pressing on, I’m pressing on the upward way. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to break down and make a little confession to you. That song makes me sick. I’m pressing on the upward way, new heights I’m gaining every day. Lord, lead me on to higher ground.

There are old, dehorned deacons that have been singing that forty-two years, nine months, and fourteen days, and they’re not one inch higher than they were when they began to sing it. I have heard that song, Lord, lead me on to higher ground, sung so languidly, with such draggy-feated languor and such carelessness, that the result has been that I’m allergic to the song. I don’t like it. It’s a good song, I admit it’s a good song. A man wrote that song to comfort his dear old mother, and it’s a good song.

How many of you old people now that the pigmentation has gone out of your hirsutic adornment? In other words, you’re gray-headed, and you, my brother and sister, are right where you were forty years ago, still singing, I’m pressing on the upward way, new heights I’m gaining every day. What a lie! You haven’t taken one inch of ground in years, some of you, and all you have to do is to scratch you the wrong way, and you’ll find the carnal man less than eighteenth of a sixteenth of an inch under your skin.

I’ve had to learn how to get along with people that are hard to get along with. I’ve had to learn how to get along with old Christians that are so churlish and resentful and touchy that you’ve got to treat them like an old cross dog to get along with. Yet they lead in prayer, and they carry their Bibles, and they sing off-key, I’m pressing on the upward way, new heights I’m gaining every day.

I ask you, please, either make something out of this, or stop lying. Stop singing what isn’t true, for there aren’t very many that get anywhere. They just go on, just go on, round and round and round and round, the progress of a dachshund chasing his tail, round and round and round and round. Another dachshund is looking on and saying, that’s an Orthodox brother. Look, he carries a Bible under his arm, but round and round, not getting anywhere.

Well, we sing a lie a good part of the time, and I wish that we’d quit it. Jesus said, do you wish you were either hot or cold? If you were cold, I wouldn’t mind it. I’d know where to place you. If you were hot, I’d know where to place you. But here you are, dragging your feet, and I don’t know where to place you. I’ll spew you out of my mouth. You go the way the ark goes. A lot of religious activities, not following the ark, because the ark isn’t going in circles, it’s going to go in a straight line. It’s going to go across that river into that land where dwell the various “ites” of various sorts. The Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, and Gergesites, and Amorites, and Jebusites. They own the land, but God says they don’t own anything. They’re holding it by my sufferance, and I’m giving it to you because you’re my chosen people. And they’re not morally fit to possess the land they have. Out they go, and in you go if you’ll go.

Israel finally went, did a languid, poor job of it, but they did get in. Well, he said now in 313 about the soles of their feet. It had come to pass that the soles of the feet of the priests that bear the ark of the Lord, that is Jehovah, the Lord of the whole earth, shall rest in the waters of Jordan, that the waters of Jordan shall be cut off from the waters that come down from above, and they shall stand up as an heap. They had actually to wade into the Jordan, and it was only after they got into the water and got their feet wet that the water parted.

Now that took three things. It took courage, faith, and cooperation. They had to believe God, they had to have the courage to move in, and they had to have the faith to believe, and they had all three. Now there are too many of us, too many of you people listening to me now, that are waiting for the removal of all obstacles. You’re not going to make any progress in your Christian life until you get something, some obstacle.

You say, well, I got a more appropriate time. The removal of all obstacles, and you notice that the Lord had the obstacle before them, and not only that, He had it swollen out to maybe twice its width. It was the time of the overflowing of the Jordan. Some of you say, well, I live in a home where there’s not much spiritual help. If things change in my home, then I’m going to press on the upward way. You’re not following the laws of spiritual principles laid down here. They didn’t wait for the waters to abate. They went right in, and the waters were there before them. The angry, muddy waters were there. But some are waiting for a miracle of providence.

Some of you wives, you’re hanging around, you’re afraid to pray at home, and you’re afraid to take your stand because of your husband, but you say, I will do it. When my husband gets converted, then the two of us will go along together. If you want God to take all the obstacles out and do a miracle of divine providence ahead of you. No, that won’t work. God isn’t going to smooth the way. He’s going to lead you right up, so you can’t see your way. You can’t figure it out.

You see, the human heart is so sinuous, serpentine, and deceitful, that if we can figure out how it can be done, we’ll take the glory or give the glory to some brother. But God wants to lead us in in a manner and in a way, that’ll give him the glory 100%. So he takes us right up to the brimming river and says, put your feet in the water. And the moment you put your feet in the water, behold, it’ll stand up as an heap.

I like that old English expression. It’ll stand up as an heap. And so, the mighty, turbulent, angry, excited old Jordan, overflowing her banks at flood time, right then was when the children of God walked up against that river, instead of waiting for it to calm down.

Now, the Christians that I’ve noticed that get across, and I see one here and there that gets across, they obey God even if it looks as if they were going to drown in the process. Because, you know, when they stepped into that turbulent river with twice its width, they had no earthly expectation that it would open, because the river hadn’t been in the habit of opening. You never saw a river open up, did you? I never did.

Rivers don’t open up. Rivers are moving according to a natural law, water sinking its lowest level, and following the channels cut for it by the centuries. And rivers don’t just suddenly stand up on end. They had nothing on this earth. If they had gone to the University of Chicago, they could have hunted through all of the research, done research, and gone through all the books on the shelf, and they wouldn’t have found one instance where the river ever stood up.

They could have asked Dr. Von Braun, or Dr. Oppenheimer, or some of these others with great brains, and not one of them would have given any encouragement. They’d have smiled and said, well, I appreciate your faith, but don’t expect it. Particularly, don’t expect it now. It’s inopportune.

Oh, that devil. He knows the big words. And he says it’s inopportune, your parents are grouchy, and when you get a little older, you can move in. Dear young fellow, God’s calling you to get up and obey, even if it looks like drowning. It’s God Almighty’s business that you don’t drown. And if you obey God and go the way the Ark of the Covenant has gone, the way of atonement and blood and mercy, see, in the direction that God is, God won’t let you drown.

And if He does, you’re better off dead than wandering in the wilderness forty years. Better off dead. And oh, all that’s going to happen to some of you, dear young people, old mother nature is going to start working on you. Gravitational pull is slowly going to pull you down. That’s why people, when they get older, they begin to bend toward the earth. They’ve fought gravitation for years. Gravitation slowly pulls them down, pulls them down there. They are all bent over. That’s what’s going to happen to you.

And all these little things are going to happen. Your hair is going to let loose and your teeth and you’re going to get lined up and too much of this and not enough of that. Nature is going to work on you. And if you don’t get into the land of promise while you’re young, the chances are you’ll get a habit and never go into the land at all.

The people of God are the ones, the great people of God are the ones that obey God, I say. And count on God to do his part and take the leap of faith. Take that leap of faith and dare to believe the Lord. Dare to believe the Lord. Believe sanely, believe according to the Scriptures, but believe the Lord.

And there are the waters of Jordan. Oh, you waters of Jordan. There has gone that river of the obstacle, the hindrance to your Christian life. There it is. It’s been flowing how many thousand years? Only God knows. And it’s a barrier between you and the promised land. And you have learned to expect it to be there.

I think that one of the most terrible things that we can imagine in the light of eternity and the coming Savior is how we accept defeat as normal. When it’s just not normal. Defeat isn’t normal. When Joshua crossed over the river and went into the land and was subduing the nations and installing Israel in their proper places, every time they got defeated, it was abnormal. Something was wrong. Victory was normal.

I heard Dr. Shulman say one time that in the book of Acts, that Christians had learned the habit of victory. They lived with a habit of victory. But instead of victory, there’s defeat, constant defeat among the children of God. And now they rise up as in heap. They stand up and do what they’ve never done before because the Lord of all nature commands them. Jesus Christ wants to lead you into the place of complete victory in your life, a place of consecration and surrender, a place where ambition will die inside your heart.

Some of you dear people are so ambitious. God bless you. You’re so ambitious. I remember the poet William Cullen Bryant said that he admitted that when he was a boy, an old beech tree, he said, I wrote on high a name I deemed would never die. And there’s the ambition, the long, long thoughts another poet talks about. You’ve got your ambitions all laid out ahead of you. Do you know your ambitions may not be God’s ambitions for you at all? The will of God is what you want, my friend, not your ambition, the fulfilling of your ambition.

How many church singers have gone into TV and movies and nightclubs? How many there are? You’ll read along about somebody and say, got his start in a church choir. As soon as he found that the public would pay him for singing, out he went and sold out to the devil for 30 pieces of silver, learned the habit of defeat and has gotten used to it.

Just as a man with one short leg gets used to hobbling. He’s used to it and he doesn’t know how to do any other way except hobble. Because that’s the way he does. When he goes down the street, he hobbles. And he doesn’t expect to be any other way. Because he learned to hobble. It’s part of him. He’s got a physical pattern of hobbleness, if there’s such a word. I don’t know either, but there ought to be and I guess there is now.

And there are some Christians like that. They live a defeated life. And they have got the habit of it until it’s become a pattern for them. And they wouldn’t know how to do anything else. Many a fellow walks around over these hot sidewalks of Chicago hobbling, and if God were to suddenly lengthen out that leg and limber them up for him and renew them, they wouldn’t believe it. They’d say, I’m not the same fellow. They’d go home and ask their wife. They wouldn’t believe because they’ve got the psychology of hobbling.

And there are Christians, and there are by the hundreds, Christians who have the psychology of defeat. They’re so used to being battered around by the devil that they don’t believe there is any other kind of Christianity at all. And they even write poems about it. Yeah, I’ve seen them, little poems, telling about how out of their bitterness and their defeat, why they learned some lesson or other.

There are better ways of learning lessons than to lie down at the devil tramp on you with hobnailed boots twenty-seven days out of thirty. And some of you are like that. God bless you, God bless you.  Is there any use for me to go on? I don’t know. I don’t know. The Lord’s people drag their feet so.

Well, when God Almighty says, you go in, put your feet in. Start out, start out as though there were no river there, and I’ll take care of the river. Now what is that problem that faces you? What is that thing that lies ahead of you? What is that? A husband that’s unsaved? A wife that’s nasty and hard to live with? Parents that don’t understand you. An office where to try to be an extra good Christian just opens you up to all of the persecution? A school where to determine to live a spiritual life makes you a target for the lampoons of the rest of the students?

What is your problem? That young fellow you’re engaged to, who’s a bum and you know it, and he’ll never help you spiritually? That pretty little snipe of a girl that you can’t stay away from, but she’s worldly and carnal and vain, and you know it? That job that you want so desperately bad. What is your problem? What’s that river that lies ahead of you? I don’t know, different ones for different people.

But I do know that when the Ark of the Covenant moves across it, and you know God’s calling you that way, and He’s calling it a consecration and surrender and complete abandonment of yourself to Him, you’d better take it. You’d better take it, because all around are the old derelict ships that went on the rock. Old derelicts.

You go to the average Bible conference, let me take my hair down, excuse the expression, but let me take my hair down and just talk to you about Bible conferences. I go to them; I’m going to one this week. You know what you find? You find a few bright-faced young people, and an occasional hungry one. But the majority of them are old hulks that have long ago washed up on the shore. The compass fell overboard, and they’ve missed the plan of God for them, and they’re desperately trying to make up for their failure to obey, their unbelief, their carnality. They’re desperately trying to make up for it by going to another Bible conference.

Well, I’ll go to another Bible conference, and then I’ll go to another, and some travel across the country going from one to the other. I usually can tell who they are. They come in in great big loud shirts with the tail out. Great big loud shirts like Harry Truman used to wear. And they sit down next to the back seat. They’ve got their Bible and their notebook. And then as soon as the meeting’s over, they’re off to the golf course. But there they are. Well, oh dear God, the old hulks, the wrecks on the sands of time, the old empties.

That’s why I like to preach to college students. I like to preach to college students. I wish I could be free to just go from one college to another. I get constant invitations. I don’t know why, but they’re always asking me, could I come here? Could I come there? Could I come here? And I say no to I couldn’t tell you how many dozens of invitations right along to colleges. I like to preach to college people because at least they’ve got a future. They’ve got a future.

Some of you, the only future you have is behind you. To people, young people, Christian colleges where they’re all alert, catch every nuance, every change of expression. They’re ready to fly off in a burst of laughter if it’s even a little funny. Ready to take it with wide-eyed seriousness and come to you afterward with their Bible asking you questions. And here we are.

But it says here that the priests that bear the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan. And all the Israelites passed over on dry ground until all the people were passed clean over Jordan. I like those good, strong modifiers in there. Clean over Jordan. Got clear over.

Well, next time I preach, I want to talk about the pile of stone they put there and why. And the man they met just across the river. Joshua said, who are you, for us or against us? And he said, no, no. I want to talk about that next time. That’ll be two weeks from tonight. In the meantime, now, all I want you to do is think this over.

Now we could have an invitation tonight and I could have you come down here and you’d get that all out of your system and felt that you’ve done God’s service. Then you’d go out and have your pizza and forget it. But I don’t intend to do it. I want you to take this with you home. And I want it to be with you tomorrow. And I want it to color your thinking about your tomorrow. I want it to be a gadfly to sting you out of mediocrity. I want it to be a needle to needle you on to seek the face of the Lord. Then we would have a revival indeed. That would be a revival when God’s children stop wandering in the wilderness and cross over Jordan.

I say, that’s the truth I was brought up on as a boy. And I’m sure that if I hadn’t heard it, I’d have gone back to the world. I’m sure of it. Because what I was seeing in the church where I was, there wasn’t enough grip in it to interest me. I got converted from hearing somebody preach on the street. And then I joined a church because it was closest. Always a bad thing to do. I joined the nearest church there was. And there wasn’t enough spirituality around there. Any lightning bug on the south side had more fire in one flash than that old church put together had if they turned the light on and kept it on all the time. Any lightning bug anywhere had more fire in just one flash. And I would have back slid, but fortunately by the grace of God, I heard about something better and went on to seek it.

And then I found I wasn’t alone. I found there was an Andrew Murray. I found that there was a Charles Spurgeon. I found there was a Saint Bernard and a Francis of Assisi and a Holy Ann. And I found that this, this burnt-out ember type of spirituality that I was seeing wasn’t normal at all. I found out that it was abnormal.

So dear people, let’s think it over. Let’s just think it over over the next few days. You say, what do I recommend? Well, did you ever try missing a meal? You say, that’s fanaticism. If it is, the Bible’s full of it. Did you ever try missing a meal sometime and going alone with God and your Bible? Shut out all outside contact so far as you could and search and wait on God. Then begin to clean up your life. Begin to clean up things.

Where you find things, you’ve done wrong, clean them up. Debts you forgot you had, clean them up. People that you’ve fallen out with, try to get straightened out with them. If you’re not tithing, start tithing. If you’re sleeping in instead of getting up and going to Sunday school, set your alarm clock an hour earlier. If you look at television instead of come to prayer meeting, turn the old one-eyed monster off and go to prayer meeting. Begin to do something. Obey God. Prove to God that you’re not just living in an ivory tower, a Christian by theory. Do something to show God you mean business. Move in the direction the ark is going. Start obeying, and you’ll see, you’ll see what it’ll mean over even the next few days.

Now shall we pray? Come on, let’s pray. Now I’m going to pray, and I’d like some direction in my prayer. And there are those before me who this rambling sermon has reached. And you know that I’ve described you, but in your deep heart of heart there is a cry. There is a cry there in that heart of yours, a deep cry. And it’s something like this, O God, forgive my wandering and take me across. Deliver me from my defeats and take me in. Save me from my flesh, my temper, my fears.

My God, save me from these things. May I begin to know something of the progressive spiritual life. May I get up there, God, where I’ve been singing so long that I was going. Then make your vow to God to do whatever he wants you to do. He’ll probably want you to sign over everything you have to him. Settle it, give it over to God completely, your life, your future, your ambition, your boyfriend, your wife, your husband, your child, your job, your home, your car. He wants you to sign that over to Him, so you don’t own a thing. God owns it all and will let you use it.

It’s a transaction that takes place inside the human heart. You own nothing. God owns everything. Then you can keep it and God will bless it. And you’re saved from its curse. But in your heart, there’s a cry. If there’s no cry there, we might as well nail up the church. But if there’s a cry there, you say, pray for me, pray for me, Brother Tozer. Would you raise the hand? Yes.

Who else? Yes. Yes, I see. Yes, over here in the middle. Yes, I see back there too. Yes. Now let’s pray. Yes, I see your hand. Yes, now let’s pray.

O Lord Jesus, we sang about Thee tonight and our hearts sang. We were telling Thee who Thou art, the mighty Lord, King of Kings, God made flesh to dwell among us. O Lord Jesus, our Joshua, lead us. Thou hast brought us out of Egypt’s bondage.

We’ve been born of the Spirit and we’re now the children of the Father. But

O Christ, thou knowest what poor examples of Christians some of us have been. Temper, grouchiness, jealousy, lust, carnal ambition, inordinate affection, fear, all these things have hindered. And they are the Amorites and the Hittites and the Jebusites. Thou hast said, I will lead thee in unto the land of thine enemies. And every one of these enemies is a friend turned wrongside out.

And every place where these enemies are camped or have their cities, they’re ours by right of blood. And Lord, wilt thou lead these people in. Lord, lead them in. We thank Thee one now and again enters. And it isn’t long until everybody knows that something wonderful has happened to that Christian. But mostly we drag our feet.

O Lord, grant that these who’ve raised their hands tonight and ask us to pray may cast off the languor, cease to be at ease in Zion, push their way on by obedience and faith into a place opened for us by Jesus Christ. We thank thee, Lord, there’s nothing that what has been purchased for us on the cross. We thank thee that Thou did die there.

And when the spear let out the water and the blood, that we can say as the poet said, let the water and the blood from thy riven side which flowed be of sin the double cure. Lord, this double cure people don’t believe much in, but there’s a double cure. We pray thee help us that we may know the double cure by the blood.

Bless these friends, every one of them. We ask Thee to disturb them, upset them, don’t let them find rest until they find it in thee. Their heart’s too big to find rest in things. Thou hast made their hearts too vast to find rest in trifles. It would be as ridiculous as a married couple getting married and settling for a parakeet. Lord God, Thou hast given us hearts big enough to take in a family, not a parakeet.

Lord, thou hast given the Christians hearts big enough to take in all the land of promise. And we settle for a little barren patch in the wilderness. God forgive us and let the Spirit of God guide over the next few days these friends. Let them push forward and enter. Lead us, O lead us, blessed Jesus. We thank Thee Thou wilt.

Amen.

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“Appropriating the Blessing of God“

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Appropriating the Blessing of God

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

June 1, 1958

In the book of Exodus, the 23rd chapter, you know where the text is these nights. Behold, I send an angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Then, verse 23, for mine angel shall go before thee, to bring thee in unto.

Now, that is all tonight that I want to deal with. They asked me what I was going to speak on tonight, and I said, making our enemies work for us. But I got one jump ahead of my development. That will be next Sunday night, making our enemies work for us.

But tonight, I want to talk about the appropriating of the blessing which God has given us. Now, it says here, bring thee in unto. Those words just sink down into your mind. God said to Israel, the angel which I send before thee will bring thee in unto.

Now, this was the benign purpose of God for Israel. He would bring them into their possessions. But you know, there is a little bit of simple logic here. They were not in their possession. They were somewhere else.

So, God said, I will bring thee in unto your possessions, the place which I have prepared for thee. They had been in Egypt, the iron furnace it was called, that terrible place of bondage. And in order to get them in unto their own land, He had to bring them out of the land which was not theirs. In order to get them into the good land, He had to bring them out of the bad land.

 So, it was out of and in unto. Those prepositions are very important here. Out of, in, unto. Now, that’s very simple.I suppose that it couldn’t be made simpler than that unless we had a chart that God had given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the land which was way up on the north round Lebanon and was to be cleared down to the Dead Sea, that was to begin at the Mediterranean and go across the Jordan way east. And it was a vast territory there and extremely rich and fruitful.

And God said to Abraham, now this is mine to do it as I will, and I will to give it to you and all your descendants after you. But they had had a little lapse in their development, and they had been in Egypt for a hundred years, not their land. They were slaves there.

So God said, I bring you out of, and now you’re halfway in between out of and into. So now while you’re in this vacuum, I want you to know that I am sending my angel before you that he might lead you in unto.

Now, any child can make the application here for their spiritual principles that lie here as deep and solid as the hard rock upon which the temple is built. The purpose of Christ is exactly the same for His people, to give us a glorious inheritance. Not a little piece of land or a big piece of land, not even a rich piece of land or glorious piece of land that lies between Lebanon and the Dead Sea.

But His purpose in Christ is to give to us a spiritual inheritance infinitely greater than this land which He gave to Israel. That was a symbol or type of that which He’s giving to us. But you see, He cannot give it to His people while they’re in the old land. So He brings them out of the old land in order that He might bring them into the new land. He brings them out of the bad land that He might bring them into the good land. He takes them out of their sinful yesterday that He might lead them into their blessed today and tomorrow.

Now, there it is, as simple as can be. But there is a breakdown among us, and that breakdown is that we accent the importance of the out of, without following it with the into. If that sounds technical and dull, I’m sorry, but maybe we can get past that. Do you see what I mean? That the breakdown is that we are getting people out of and not getting them into. So that’s why we are the way we are.

You see, you can’t get people into till you’ve gotten them out of, and the out of is first. You’ve got to get them converted first. You have to get them regenerated first, forgiven first. You have to get them turned around unto God first. That’s getting them out of. But there is a vast and rich and sun-kissed land in the spiritual realm for His people now.

God’s people are extremely ingenious in dodging around spiritual responsibilities or even spiritual privileges. We have plaintively and poetically made the good land to be heaven, and some of our most beautiful hymns make it so. And I’m not going to stop singing them because I understand that God has another land for us, that land which He has for us in the world to come, that going across spiritual Jordan finally into the heavenly land.

All that is true. But in emphasizing it, we forget one most critically important matter, and that is that the good land is for us to enter and enjoy now while we are here in this present life. And yet almost nothing is said about it. They talk about getting us rid of our sins, and the average testimony has to do with, I used to chew, and I chew no more. I used to smoke, and I smoke no more. I used to take dope; I take dope no more.

Now that’s getting us out of. Then we sit down and pray for me that I may hold out faithful. We say, but the fact is that’s only the negative element. God wants us to now begin to emphasize the positive and begin to talk about that into which the Lord is leading us.

Now, somebody will say, will not this follow on automatically? If we get out of Egypt, will we not automatically get into the holy land? If we get out of our bondage of sin, will we not automatically enter into the place of spiritual victory? The answer is an emphatic no.

Remember this, and all of you embryonic preachers who will someday yourself be preaching and pulpits and having people listen to you, allow me to tell you this, that truth is effective only when we emphasize it. Unemphasized truth is never effective. You have to come down on truth with a hammer in order to detonate it and set it off. There are many churches in this town that say we believe in the new birth, but they never preach the new birth.

And the result is nobody ever gets the new birth under that kind of ministry. There are those that say we believe in the separated life, but they’re careful never to preach the separated life. Or they say we believe in tithing, but they never preach it. They believe in missions, but they never preach missions. They never preach these things, and the result is they are not in their midst, that truth is effective only when it is emphasized.

And Christians will not seek to enter a land they do not know exists. If we place the emphasis upon getting out, we will all line up on the bank of the Red Sea and build our tabernacles there and thank God for getting us out of the iron furnace. And we should thank Him, and we should never forget that we were once bound in sin as a captive I lay, neath the snare of the tempter under sin’s mighty sway. We mustn’t forget that any more than Israel should forget that she was once in Egypt in slavery. But we must remember that the only reason God took Israel out of Egypt was that he might get her into the land long promised her in the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

So, when the Lord forgives a man’s sin, He doesn’t forgive his sin in order that the sin might be forgiven. He forgives his sin because He can’t take him in where He wants him to be until the sin is forgiven. When the Lord breaks a habit in a man’s life, He doesn’t break it that it might be broken. He breaks it as a means to an end, as a way of getting him into the new land. So this is that which is overlooked in our time, and the result is decadent Christianity.

We three preachers were upstairs here, as we do three times a week in prayer, and a good brother called up and wanted to come. That is, he called up a little while before and said he’d like to come and pray with us. I’m not going to mention his name, for I don’t want to quote him without his permission. Although, knowing the boldness of his preaching, I’m sure he’d say it if he were here.

But he is on the staff of Moody Bible Institute, at least he works with Moody Bible Institute and has for years, goes up and down in the land, and I said to him, brother, so-and-so, I’d like to ask you a question. You get around a lot among Bible conferences and in prophetic conferences and Bible classes here and there. What is your opinion? How do you find the gospel churches? He said, rotten from head to foot.

This was a Moody man, a man who you might know certainly isn’t going to go too far overboard in saying things. He said, rotten from head to foot, he said, the tragic condition of things among the gospel churches.

Well, you know why? It’s because we have put the emphasis, the accent of importance, upon getting people out, getting their old life record canceled, getting them eternal life so they’ll be sure to go to heaven at last. But we say little to them about this glorious spiritual land that is now ours, and into which we can now enter by faith in Jesus Christ. And I wonder whether that terrible expression, rotten from head to foot, couldn’t be explained by reading something in Matthew 12.

Listen. When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places seeking rest and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out. And when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself. And they enter in and dwell there. And the last state of that man is worse than the first.

Now, I do not want to press the interpretation that a man who lies down on the shore of the Red Sea and never goes any further is worse than if he was in Egypt. I wouldn’t press it that far. But at least it’s a significant and ominous chapter here, this section of this chapter. Significant and portentous. Our Lord spoke those words.

Now there is a land of promise, my brethren. And as I have said, it is not heaven at last, that it eventuates in heaven. It will be there at last. But there are too many people living in defeat, waiting to be set free when they go to heaven, hoping that somewhere between the time that they die and they arrive at heaven, they will go through some sort of a purifying experience that will set them free from all their bondage, and they will discover all the blessed land which they were supposed to have had while they were here on earth. But I believe that that is a great mistake and a misunderstanding of the Scriptures.

The land of promise is chosen for us by God, out of the goodness of His heart, and secured for us by oath and covenant, and all the infinite resources of God are back of it. When God puts Himself back of anything, all of God is back of that. All of the infinitude of God is back of that. The limitlessness of God is back of it. Oh, I pity people sometimes, people who don’t have much. I’ve never been too rich. But I’m touched when I see how little some people can get along on.

My little grandson who has a bank account of a dollar and a quarter. A dollar? Well, he’s got two and a quarter. Now he had a birthday. And he got himself another dollar, so he had now two and a quarter. That’s a pitiful little amount, isn’t it? Two and a quarter in this day. This day of lots of money, little lad that’s five years old, and he has himself a bank account. In his own name, two dollars and a quarter.

Well, now if he were to put his resources back of anything, it wouldn’t be very much, would it, really? You couldn’t do much with two and a quarter now. But when General Motors puts their resources back of something, or Ford or Rockefeller, you’ve got money back of you.

And so, when we think of God, we think of limitlessness. We think not of any limit. There’s no little thing. God says, now don’t be careful. This has got to last a long while. And this grace I’m giving you now is, there’s only a small amount of it, and they’re using it up pretty fast. So be careful of it. No, no. The grace of God is equal to God, because the grace of God is not something God has, it’s something God is.

You see what I mean? The grace of God is not something God hands out bit by bit, as a father might hand out dimes and quarters to his growing children. It’s not something God has, gives, and hasn’t got. Because he’s given it, it is something God is. The grace of God is God. It’s a facet of God.

You take a great diamond, made out of one thing, carbon, and under tremendous pressure, geological pressure, made into a diamond. They cut that diamond into many facets. And how you can turn it around and look at it from a dozen different ways, and if it’s a good diamond, it’ll flash and catch the light and throw it back. Every facet is the same diamond. It’s just another facet of the same diamond. It’s all one thing.

And so, God is all one thing. Whether we’re talking about the love of God, it’s all one thing. It’s God-loving. We talk about the mercy of God, it is not something God has, it is God showing mercy. We talk about the grace of God, it is not something that God has, it is God being gracious. If we talk about the goodness of God, it is not something that God has, it is God, in his goodness, being good to people, so that we have it in infinite degree.

So, when God redeemed His people, redeemed us sinners, His lost sheep out of the land, His poor Israelites out of the bondage of Egypt, you and me, whatever our race or creed or color or background, when He redeemed us, my brethren, He secured for us this good land out of the goodness of His own heart. Never forget that. And what was this land into which he took them?

Now I want you to notice that this land was not a primitive land, waiting development, as it was here in America. There was a time on this continent when this land was primitive, when the buffalo roamed here, and the Indian. And when there was scarcely more than a patch here and a patch there in corn, outside of that it was a vast wilderness from what the politicians called the rockbound coast of Maine to the sunny slopes of California.

And men came here and with their axes and their spades and their shovels and their plows and their oxen and their horses and their good, tough, sweaty muscle, they conquered this continent. It was something they had to develop. And they began with a hut on the east coast and ended with all the glory that California claims for herself. So my brethren, that was America. But listen what God says about the land He gave to Israel.

When the Lord thy God shall have brought thee in unto the land, this is Deuteronomy 6, 10 and 11, in unto the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities which thou didst not build, and houses full of all good things which thou fillest not, and wells digged which thou didst not dig, and vineyards and olive trees which thou didst not plant. This was all worked out for them. It wasn’t something they had to do.

What busy beavers we are, and we’re always ready to sign a card or accept a challenge to go do something real hard and real fast. We’d like to sanctify ourselves and get victory for ourselves by wrestling it out, working it out. God said to Israel, now, normally men go in and take over a land and they develop it, but this is the land I promised to your fathers. This land’s already developed. This is already rich. There are pomegranates on the trees and there’s fruit there, as they well knew, so big that one bunch had to be carried, grapes had to be carried between, on the shoulders of two men. And he said there are rocks there who are out of which the honey flows.

I remember the honey trees. Do you remember them, brother? You ought not to remember the bee trees of other days. Why, the bee tree, my father, you used to watch bees. And a fellow would sit down and he’d look up, and they might think he’d lost his mind, but he knew what he was doing, he was watching the bees. He was watching which way they went. And then he’d get up and move in the direction, sit down a while again, and getting their beam, finding out which way the bee was going. And after a while he’d find that bee tree, and he’d cut the thing down and he’d have enough honey to last him for several years. And you’d find it literally flowing out of caves and out of bee trees, back to where I come from.

And that was exactly as it was in Palestine. It was a land where the bees made honey, and where it flowed with milk and honey. Somebody says, what about that, flowing with milk and honey?

Now, I want to be delicate, but I have driven many a herd of cattle home with the udder leaking, with the milk literally flowing. They were so full of it and so well bred and so well taken care of that they couldn’t wait for it to be milked. And I just wonder how many gallons of it’s lost on the road coming home. Flowing with milk and honey, the honey flows and the milk flows and there’s butter and wine and food of every kind.

All you have to do is to recognize that what Israel had on earth, His people have in the Spirit. What they had in the flesh, we have in the Spirit.

Now, God would drive out these people, he said, and give this whole business to Israel. But somebody raised a question here and says, how could this be? Did not the Hittites and the Hivites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites and the Jebusites and the Amorites and the Philistines and the rest, did not they own this? What right had God to take it from them? The answer is, they owned nothing at all. The great God Almighty gave them breath for their lungs and blood for their veins and brains for their heads and muscles to move their bones about. The great God Almighty had given them everything and had given them that sweet, beautiful land that lay between the seas.

God had given it to them and their response had been to degenerate a people so filthy, so vile, so completely bad that Dr. R. A. Torrey said that God was forced to amputate them. As you amputate a cancer out of the body, they had gone so bad. They were rotten with syphilis and many other kinds of diseases. They were worshippers of the vilest gods. They offered their little children to Moloch.

Do you want to know what that means? You want me to be tolerant? That’s the word we hear now. If you express a conviction, somebody says, now be tolerant, be tolerant. They want you to be tolerant. Nobody is supposed to have a conviction about anything or be on the side of anything or against anything. Oh, you can be on the side of mother and against polio, but further than that, they want you to sit and say, now be tolerant, brethren. There are some things you don’t tolerate. You just don’t tolerate them.

And God in His sovereignty was not going to tolerate Moloch, for instance. Who was Moloch? Moloch was a great iron or metal of some sort, thing cast in the shape of a man, and his arms extended forward like this. And he was hollow inside, and there was a grate underneath. And those arms were hollow as the rest of the god.

And a man, an Amorite or a Hittite or a Jebusite or a Philistine or whatever it was, would, in order to appease the wrath of Moloch, would heat that furnace red-hot until those arms were hot. Then he would take his little baby boy or girl and throw it into the arms of Moloch. And there would be a wild, piercing shriek, and then a gurgle and death for that little one. Thank God it didn’t take long. They died quickly, but they died there.

And the Almighty God said, you caused your children to pass through the fire unto Moloch. And God wouldn’t have that. God had given them everything they had in the first place. God had given them breath for their lungs. God had given them intelligence to develop that land. And He said, you forfeited your right to the land, and beside that it belongs to Abraham. Abraham holds the deed to this land, and you have usurped it. He said, I’m bringing in My people. He said, here, it’s all yours.

They never quite took it all. They compromised with those frightful heathens. They’d have had a few Joshua’s, the son of Nun who never would quit till the work was done. If they’d have had a few Joshua’s, they might have done better, but they didn’t. The result was, they took the land, but they never quite took it. It was only half taken.

And so they mingled with the Amorites and the rest. And the result was a degeneration on the part of Israel, and so with the children of God. We either don’t go in, or we don’t go fully in, or if we go fully in, we don’t take it over.

Now, I want to talk a little more about our high spiritual inheritance, this gift from God, and I want to bear down on it that it’s a gift from God. You say, what is it, Mr. Tozer? Well, it is what we call the deeper life, or the spirit-filled life, the victorious life, and it is the sovereign goodwill of God that has given it. Remember, in God’s good heartedness.

You see, the reason you get things from God is not because you pray or because you fast. The reason you get things from God is that God’s goodhearted. God is good. His mercy brightens all the path on which we move. And it’s the goodness of God, it’s the goodness of God that decided to create us in the first place. I’m glad I was created.

Are you? Are you glad, or are you defeated? Do you wish you were dead? Do you wish, like Job, you never had been born, or being born, you’d been carried dead from your mother’s arms to the grave? I don’t, I don’t, I don’t. And I don’t anticipate the time will ever come when I do. Maybe I will when I get old, but I don’t, I am not now.

Now, stop your laughing. I mean, when I get older, maybe I will. But up to now, up to now, I’m glad I’m alive. And though I’ve suffered a lot, I suppose being sensitive, I’ve suffered more than a lot of people. I often tell about the dentist.

I said to a dentist one time, don’t you think some people are more sensitive than others? Brother, he said, some people’s pain threshold is so low they suffer from practically nothing, and other people never suffer much. He said, I had a truck driver fall asleep in my chair while I was pounding, pounding fillings into his teeth. He couldn’t suffer at all. Well, I’ve suffered some, and I’ve suffered more than other people.

And a lot of things that never happened to me have hurt me. You know that so too. A lot of things have never happened to me, but I’m still glad I’m alive. And if I’ll die five minutes from now, I’m glad I’ve lived this long. And I’m glad I’ve seen God’s sunrise in the morning. And I’ve seen the clouds drop down their rain and water that places below from his chambers above.

And I’m glad I’ve seen little children. And I’m glad I’ve read poetry and heard music and watched the birds fly and heard them sing. And I’m glad I’ve stood with others and sung, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty. I’m glad I was created, brethren. Some of you may have some cracks about that now. I don’t claim to be another Stan Musial.

But I’m just a man made in the image of God, and that was itself a gift from God. That was itself. That God made me not a cat or a worm, but a man in His image was a gift from God. And the wondrous personality that He’s given us. I grieve that people don’t develop themselves. We don’t develop our personality.

I said that some two or three Sundays ago when I was preaching about young men, last Sunday I guess, and how they waste the powers that lie within them. They study only when somebody gets behind them with a ball bat and threatens to bash their brains in. They study. And then as soon as they get out from under the thumb of the teachers, they go back to the comic strip and the baseball score. And they don’t develop that thing that is in them.

But some people say, but I never had an education. Neither did I. And I have known many that have not. Education, all the books of the world can be bought now for anywhere up to a dollar, and lots of dollars around to buy them. All the books of the world. And in this city of ours, you can get a musical education. You can get an artistic education. You can get an education in almost anything if you just apply yourself.

But the time that we waste, the wondrous personality that God has given us. Little, you’ll excuse the expression, little grandson today was looking at the cat. And he said, Daddy, why can’t I talk to her? Now that wasn’t a foolish question. There was an intelligent boy of five come up against the question of the inability to communicate with the lower world.

You can talk with God above you, but you can’t talk to the beast below. Half a dozen words he knows, but that’s it. But you have personality. You have the image of God built in. That was out of the goodness of God. He didn’t have to do it. He could have left us here to be guided by the stars, but He gave us a whole Bible. Sixty-six books. Sixty-six wonderful books.

Oh, Thy Word is forever settled in heaven. Here it is, out of the goodness of God. God owed Abraham nothing, the old idol-maker. He owed Isaac nothing. He owed Jacob nothing. He owed no man anything. But He gave us our Bible, and He gave us our Savior, and He gave us pardon, and He gave us the Holy Ghost to be in His church. And He guides His people.

Quote it here tonight, guidance. And I thought of another verse on guidance. When he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them. No true shepherd ever drives His sheep from behind. He leads them from before. He guides His children, and it’s all out of the goodness of His heart.

When will God quit? When will God run out of blessing? Never while the ages roll, never while the stars shine, never after He has rolled up the heavens like a vesture and laid them aside. Never, never, for as long as God is God, God will be all He is now. And the goodness of God is guiding you. God will guide you by His goodness.

You know, someone quoted here tonight this verse, I will guide thee with mine eye. But do you know that’s not quite correct? That’s correct as we have it in the King James. But if you look at other versions, you’ll see it says, I will guide thee with mine eye upon thee. Somebody let a couple of words fall out there in transcription down the centuries. I will guide thee with mine eye upon thee.

Dear old Nicholas of Cusa got an icon, a picture. He said, now look at that picture there, look at that. One of those pictures, you’ve seen them, wherever you go, they seem to be looking at you.

Did you ever see a picture like that, a face and the eyes? And anywhere you went, they followed you. As a boy, I used to go out and look at the moon and try to run away from it, run all around over the yard or field. And everywhere I went, the moon followed me.

And so these eyes follow us. And old Nicholas of Cusa said, now let that be an object lesson to you. Just as this picture, the eyes on you, wherever you go, any part of the room, so the eye of God is eternally and forever upon you, and you can’t walk out from under it, and you can’t hide from it, and you can’t get away from it.

I will guide thee as long as my eye is upon thee, and my eye is upon thee as long as I exist. I am what I am, that is my name forever, the eternal God. From the eternity past to the eternity to come, God is God. And so the goodness of God is guiding us, and all the land is before us.

Now, I want to read here a little passage from Joshua 1 and show you how we take this, how we take this victory, how we take this guidance, how we take this place which is ours. God says to the man Moses, after the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Joshua, the son of Nun, Moses’ minister, saying, Moses, my servant, is dead, period. No, no, no, no, no, semicolon; Moses, my servant, is dead, now therefore arise. Go over this Jordan, thou and all this people unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel. Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you as I said unto Moses.

Now I want to tell you something. God has a free, full, victorious, God-conscious, God-blessed life for every one of His redeemed children. We can enter into it right now, right now, for every one of His redeemed children. And we can have just as much of it as we’ll take. We can go just as far as we will go.

But somebody says, if I entered into a deep, full life, would that mean that there would be no opposition? No. It would mean that for the first while people would point to their heads when you weren’t looking and say, always it’s that way, brother. The devil has an understanding with all the deacons and elders and half-dead pastors and soggy church members that everybody’s to stay half-saved.

But if anybody insists upon getting all the way in, they say he needs to see a psychiatrist. And they say he’s sick. You can expect to hear that now. That’s the charge they make against you. They used to just toss a man to a lion, and there was a groan and a crunching sound, and he was in heaven. But now they’re more subtle, you see, brethren.

If you don’t believe what is the proper thing to believe, what we hear from Washington and Moscow and the University of Chicago, if you don’t believe what you’re supposed to believe if you insist upon being a little bit individualistic, they say you’re sick. They say, well, he’s disturbed. I know who’s disturbed, but it ain’t me.

It’s the fellow that wrote the book, he’s disturbed. And the professor that stands up there before the church, he’s disturbed. When my disturbance has long gone down the drain, the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin, and my Father in heaven goes before me. So, they’ll say you’re disturbed.

I well remember it. I well remember it. I went through the whole business, even in our Christian Missionary Alliance. If anybody’s here a missionary or preacher from the Christian Missionary Alliance, say nothing about it in New York.

But it’s true, nevertheless. When I began to seek God, some of our good friends in the Alliance Church worried about me. They worried. They should have worried, but not about that. Ever notice that when you get a good, tough critic after you, he never criticizes you for the thing that’s wrong with you? He always digs up something that you’re not guilty of and blames you for that. And the thing that you and God know is wrong with you, he never sees that at all.

I’ve had that happen all down the years. Every time I’ve been put on a griddle and made to sizzle and fry, it’s been for something I didn’t do. But the things that did do and should have been jailed for, the Lord never brought up, because the blood of the Lamb cleansed them all away.

So if you go ahead with God, my brother, you may be perfectly sure that some stodgy old wooden Indian down there will say, I’m afraid he’s disturbed. Well, John Bunyan, you know, wrote about the man who got disturbed. His name was Christian. He started on the road toward the Celestial City and his wife wasn’t disturbed, neither was his family, but he was. He got out of there and started off for heaven.

Most of you, I think, don’t know that John Bunyan wrote a sequel. And in the sequel, Christiana, the wife got disturbed, and she came along after him. Did you know that? In the regular first part of Pilgrim’s Progress, we end with the Christian having a few gurgles in the stream and getting across to heaven and getting up on the other side. But there’s a sequel to it, and Christiana gets disturbed and says, now that I think it over, she said, I’m afraid we were tough on my dear husband now in heaven. So, I think I ought to become a Christian, too. So, she takes the whole family and follows that.

Now, you may be sure that you can’t get, you can’t go on with God and be let alone. If you took up almost any kind of sin, they’d let you alone. They’d say, be tolerant, let him alone, let him alone, be tolerant. But if you get right with God and then go on with God, they won’t let you alone. But the dear Heavenly Father will look after you.

This promise, an angel before thee, is valid, and it’s valid for you tonight, and it’s valid for me. But you say, how do I do this, Mr. Tozer? How do I, how do I put my foot down? Well, a lot of God’s people overeat and keep on overeating, but their mind never quite clears up.

Finney said when he felt the power lift off of him sometimes and he wasn’t as effective as he had been, he took a half day off fast and prayed. He said it took time out to wait on God. He didn’t eat any breakfast, just waited on God and got straightened out.

And if some of you dear people would risk being called queer and fanatical and would just decide some morning that you were going to give God a chance at you and put yourself in a position where the Lord can talk with you, and you can talk with the Lord.

Get the Bible before you there, get on your knees and wait. Don’t worry, wait. See what God the Lord will speak. And insist on pushing through. I like to push my prayers on God and insist that God listen and hear me. Your personal spiritual experience, God will guide you into it. It’s there for you. Your desire for guidance, so necessary in this big old dark world of ours, God has that for you.

And for this church, and that’s really why I started preaching this series, which continue yet for a few Sundays, this church, we need guidance now. We’re going to get it. And the fact that we don’t know what doesn’t bother me at all.

If God would tell me 24 hours ahead what He was going to do, I’d be one of the stuckiest-up fellows on the Southside, you know. But He just lets me follow along step by step, and then look back and see all the time God’s been with us.

Did you hear that song our brother sang a while ago? It says, I will make the darkness light before thee. Do you believe that? Where does it say that in the Bible? Doesn’t it say that in Isaiah? I will go before thee, and I will make the darkness light before thee? Yeah, Isaiah, on about 43rd, 45th chapter. What is wrong, I’ll make it right before thee.

Now listen, I will send my fear before thee and will destroy all those to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their back, and I will send hornets before thee. I won’t read the rest. All thy battles I will fight before thee, and the high place I’ll bring down.

When thou walkest by the way, I’ll lead thee, and on the fatness of the land I’ll feed thee. And a mansion on the sky I’ll deed thee, and the high place I’ll bring down. With an everlasting love I’ll love thee, though with trials deep and strong I’ll prove thee, but there’s nothing that shall hurt or move thee, and the high place I’ll bring down. But you know the trouble with you and me? The trouble is we try to be so modest in the presence of God. Why don’t we push in and take? Push in and take.

Moody told about a dog. He said that a friend of his had a dog, and it was customary, oh, my wife wouldn’t allow this, but it was customary, feed the dog at the table, just the scraps. No more, just the scraps. If somebody was eating a nice piece of meat and there was a little part too tough, he gave it to the dog. And he got used to that. He got used to living on the scraps that were tossed. There’s something even about that even in the Bible.

And so Moody said to him, do you know something? You conditioned this dog to live on scraps until he couldn’t eat a good piece of meat if he gave it to him. The fellow said, oh, I’ll show you. So, he took a steak and he set it down on the floor. The dog looked at it and then looked up at the master and looked down at it, looked up at the master, said, go ahead. Looked at it and then looked up at the master and said, this isn’t my, this doesn’t look like my rations. He said, I’m used to scraps. And he went over and laid down. He said, you win. He has been conditioned to live on scraps until he won’t eat steak when he’s got a chance.

Moody said a lot of Christians like that. He said they’ve lived on crumbs so long that when God sets a whole table before them, they’re too modest. They go off and lie down and say, no God, excuse me, but I’m poor worm and no man and a miserable man and don’t deserve it. Of course you don’t deserve it. Nobody argues that you deserve. You don’t deserve to be led. You don’t deserve to be guided. You don’t deserve the rich land of victory and hope. You don’t deserve the fullness of the whole. You don’t deserve anything. But can’t we stop seeing or begin to see and stop thinking that it’s deserved? It’s nothing we deserve.

It’s out of the goodness of God. Goodness of God. God’s good and therefore you get it. Not you’re good and therefore you get it. But he says, yes, but brother, so-and-so’s a good man. He fasts four days a week. He isn’t a good man because he fasts. Fasting is a convenience for him, as I suggested here a while ago. But it’s no virtue and no merit. And it doesn’t change God’s mind any.

God is good and our God already has given you rich spiritual land flowing with milk and honey. And it’s out of his goodness and not out of your merit.

Why don’t we do something about it instead of just listen and then go home. You dear young people. Now here you are. You’re in your teens now. You’re impressionable, alert, intelligent. God can talk to you. In ten years, you’ll be in your twenties, middle twenties, late twenties. Ten more years you’ll be getting middle-aged. Ten more after that and you’ll be starting down the hill.

We have them all around us. Old dried-out empties that had a chance or were brought up in our Sunday school and church, that heard the best preachers in all of America, and I don’t refer to myself, preaching from this pulpit and missionaries ablaze with God. And they had every opportunity in the world, but they settled for crumbs. And now they’re getting old and they’re getting rigid and rigor mortis is setting in their soul before they’re dead. They hope to go to heaven, but they’re not even too sure about that.

It would be a convenience if there were a purgatory, but there isn’t any. It would be a convenience if there were for some of God’s poor people. They might go there and straighten out. But Paul said, absent from the body, present with the Lord.

Where’s purgatory? No purgatory. As the Nazarene preacher said once in my hearing, he believed in purgatory, but he believed it was right down here now on this earth. When the fire of God falls on a man, that’s purgatory. God cleanses him then. I believe in that kind, but not the other kind. Not a niche somewhere where God hangs souls up to cool off and dry out and purify. No, I don’t believe it. I don’t care how high up in the ecclesiastical scale you go, I still don’t believe it. God wants to do it for you now.

Some of you young people may be impressed a bit now that you’re going out of here tonight and you’re going to go off quipping, joking, fooling. You’re going to go out and eat a lot of stuff, and then you’re going to go kidding and joshing off to your house and go to bed. Tomorrow morning, any good that God may have wanted to do for you has dissipated like the morning dew. It’s all gone.

Oh, that God would raise a few, and he’s done it. He’s done it. We have a high batting average here. He’s done it, that God would raise a few serious-minded young men and women who break loose from the frivolities and nonsense of youth and seek the face of God. Will you? Will you? Will you?

If I give an altar call, say, will you come down here, come down, sniff, blow your nose, and go home. I don’t want that. I want you deep, deep inside of your heart, I want you to settle it. God first. And I’m going to give God my life, and I’m going on if it costs me my friends, and if I’m thought queer, and if my people think I ought to see a doctor because I’m disturbed, I’m still going on with God. We raise a few like that up. You’ll see what God will do for you.

May God bless you. I send an angel before thee. Every place you put your foot is yours. Take it tonight. Take it. It’s all yours. You don’t have to fight for it or work for it. It’s all yours. A gift from God. Amen?

Father, we pray tonight. We pray tonight in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. O God, we don’t have to beg Thee. We feel sheepish in begging. It’s like begging it to rain when it’s already pouring. It’s like begging the sun to shine when it’s blazing at high noon without a cloud. Like blazing the river to flow when it’s flowing a mile wide out to the sea. O God, we can’t beg for Thee to bless us nor lead us. Already Thou art all prepared to do that. Thou art out ahead of us, looking back, wondering why we tarry.

Pray Thee for all these people that have been here tonight. We want guidance for our future. We want victory for our present. We want help, and Thou has promised to give it to us. Blessed be Thy name. Blessed be Thy name. I will break asunder the gates of brass, and I will cut the bars of iron, and I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hidden riches of secret places. And I will do these things unto thee and not forsake thee. Blessed be Thy name.

So we’re not going to beg, we’re going to thank and praise Thee this night, and ask only that Thou will touch one after another, that they might slip out of here with a hush of the Spirit upon them to find some quiet place in there with open Bible to press on and in until it’s all settled and the die is cast and the bridges are burned.

And as Elisha slew his oxen and used his wooden plow to cook their meat and make a feast, he couldn’t go back to farming because he had no equipment left. He’d slain it and burnt it. Help, we pray thee, that these friends may slay the oxen and burn the plow and not go back anymore, but go ahead. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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“The Victorious Leading of the Lord“

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The Victorious Leading of the Lord

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

May 25, 1958

Please turn to the 23rd chapter of Exodus. Exodus 23, everybody, let’s look at that, beginning with verse 20 on. This has been and will be, for some time, the scriptural basis for my series of talks on the victorious leading of the Lord, the angel before thee.

Now, the passage I particularly want to use is this one. If thou shalt indeed obey His voice, and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries. In verse 27, I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come. And I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.

Now, it is necessary, if we’re going to get anything out of this, it’s necessary that we believe. Once more I repeat that this has been my life chapter for thirty years, more than thirty, about thirty-two. And I have paid no attention to those who would not accept it as being for New Testament Christians. I believe that it is. And in order for us to get anything out of it, we’ve got to believe.

Not that this was written to us, for we well know better than that. We know historically this was written to Israel. But as I have tried patiently to explain from night to night, the spiritual laws here disclosed are operative in the kingdom of God.If we do not believe this, we limit ourselves tremendously. If we insist upon putting everything in its dispensational pigeonhole, we end up with nothing but the Book of Romans, and we don’t understand it.

But we’ve got to believe. And if you don’t believe, if thou shalt not believe, thou shalt not be established. And if you don’t believe, then I have no message for you at all. But if you believe, and will believe, that the spiritual laws here disclosed are operative now in the kingdom of God, I wish God’s people could see that. That while there are different dispensations, there is only one God and only one human race. And God never changes his mind and works one way one time and one way another.

There are those who believe that in the Old Testament, God saved by law, and in the New Testament he’s saved by grace, and no sillier thought could ever be entertained. A man would have to spin around for a half an hour to get that much many bubbles in his head to believe a thing like that. That in the Old Testament, law, men were saved by keeping law. In the New Testament, they are saved by believing. In the Old Testament, they were saved by law. In the New Testament, they are saved by grace. All this is wrong. It never was taught in the Bible. It isn’t taught in the Bible. It is a fiction, pure and simple, imposed upon us by Bible teachers.

The simple fact is God never saved anybody from Abel to this hour in any other way than by grace through faith. And you’ll find as much about faith in the Old Testament as you do in the New, and you’ll find as much about grace in the Old Testament as you do in the New.

The word, grace, occurs over and over in the book of Psalms. I don’t think the word grace, the actual word, grace, would be found as often in the Old Testament, but the idea of grace goes all through the Old Testament Scriptures. God saves by grace in the Old Testament as He saves by grace in the New. And a righteous man is justified by his faith in the Old Testament as in the New.

In fact, when Paul wanted to get established in the doctrine of justification by faith, he had to go back to the Old Testament to get it. And it was David in the 32nd Psalm who talked about the man who was justified by believing, and it was the minor prophet in the Old Testament who talked about justification by faith. So that the same spiritual principles that operated back there operate here. It’s such a liberating thing if the people of God could only believe that. We must believe, I say, that these laws, our spiritual principles are ours and they’re operative now toward God’s redeemed children everywhere.

Now, if we don’t believe this, by our unbelief we can hinder ourselves. We can hinder the operation of these laws by not believing in them. We can impede our progress in the Christian life, and most people’s progress has been impeded terribly. We can interfere with the Lord’s leading of us, and we can wander aimlessly around in the desert when we ought to be over in the land feeding on grapes of Eshcol.

Now, I want to talk a bit before I enter into the main part of the sermon about how you can identify unbelief. Unbelief is not the attitude of the atheist. Unbelief believes all the promises. That’s the subtle thing about unbelief, it believes all the promises. Every last one of them. Unbelief, I suppose there are some unbelievers that don’t believe anything in the Bible, but I’m talking a bit about unbelief up on the level of Christians and in the kingdom of God.

Unbelief believes all the promises for someone else, somewhere else, some other time. That’s how you can always tell unbelief. Unbelief says, I believe some other time, not now. I believe that God will do these things for some other people, not us, somewhere else, not here.

Those are the three errors that unbelief makes. And faith changes it around, and faith says, if some other time, why not now? If some other place, why not here? And if someone else, why not us? You can always tell faith, for faith is ready to believe if God did it for Moses, He’ll do it for me. If He did it for Isaiah, He’ll do it for you. Faith is always ready to say, if some other time, some other place, to some other people, why not now, here, and us?

Now, let us look. If thou shalt indeed obey my word and do all I speak. Now, the question comes up, does this disqualify everybody who has slipped? Since the Lord says, if thou shalt indeed obey and do all that I speak, then does this disqualify the people who have failed God, who have slipped, who have failed, who have lapsed, who have disobeyed, somewhere back down the line? Is everybody that has ever failed or lapsed or fallen, tripped or fallen on his face in the kingdom of God, is he mournfully to walk away into the shadows and say, this spiritual principle doesn’t apply to me because it applies to the person who is obedient, and I have failed the Lord? Well, let me answer it. Circumstances being what they are, and what are the circumstances? Well, the circumstances of our fall, to begin with. We are a fallen race. The circumstances of our inborn depravity, and the circumstance of our weakness and of our flesh, and the circumstance of there being a devil and sin in the world, that being true, then God could not possibly be naive enough to make His plan depend upon the indefectibility of His people.

I’ll explain what I mean by that. I mean that if the Lord is going to do anything for us at all, knowing us as He does, and He does know us, taking into account all the circumstances, and He does take them into account, if God is going to do anything for us, then He does not make His promises dependent upon our never defecting, our never lapsing, our never failing. For Him to do so would indicate imperfection in the Godhead.

Because if God believed in me and you, and said, Now I will bless my people, and I will make promises, and I send an angel before them, but only on the ground that they be perfect, then God would be starry-eyed and unrealistic, and He wouldn’t be the wise God that He is. But being the wise God that He is, and knowing us as He knows us, and being perfect in all His attributes, then God has thought ahead of us on this, and God has fixed it so, while He doesn’t want us to be imperfect, and He doesn’t excuse us when we fail, He has a way of curing us.

A mother does not want her children to be sick. She doesn’t want them ever to run a fever or to get a disease. She doesn’t want it, but she’s studied up and she’s in touch with her doctor, and if anything goes wrong, she thinks ahead and goes after it.

And so, God says, little children, these things write I unto you, that you what? Sin not. I don’t want you to sin. Don’t imagine I’m preaching here that imperfections and falling and lapsing is a part of God’s plan for us. It definitely is not a part of God’s plan for us.

But God being the realistic, wise, perfect God that He is, knows us too well to trust us too far. So, He has fixed it so that if we should fail Him, instead of surrendering and saying, O God, I give up, I’m going to go back into Egypt, we say, O God, pardon me, forgive me for Jesus’ sake and I’ll start over right here.

I want to read what a dear old German said. He said, it’s further written that love hides a multitude of sins. Perfect love and confidence cannot be where sins are, but love does hide completely. Love knows nothing of sin, not that man has not sinned, but sins are blotted out at once by love and they vanish as if they had not been. This is because whatever God does, He does completely like a cup running over. Whom He forgives, He forgives utterly and at once, much preferring great forgiveness to little.

Complete confidence is like that, he says. Moreover, to be forgiven much is to love much, as our Lord Jesus Christ said. Now that’s a quotation from an old devotional theologian of several hundred years ago, and he might have said that to us just five minutes before and would be as fresh, it would be no less fresh.

Now this, I’d like to tell you most, most to encourage your heart, that the Lord wants us to be obedient and He will not overlook, He won’t let us pile up a lot of wrongdoings, He won’t let us go one way and have Him try to lead us the other. There’s got to be an approximation of faith and belief and obedience, and if we should fall, He’s a Shepherd and He’ll help us to our feet again if we want to get up.

Granted that, now, and granted that this is for you and me, that if it was for Fletcher, it’s for us. If it was for Calvin, it’s for me. If it was for Wesley, it’s for you. If it was for anybody, it’s for anybody. And until you get there, you won’t have the buoyancy in your spirit that ought to be there.

Now notice what He says, I will be an enemy to thine enemy and an adversary to thine adversary. Now why does He talk about enemies and adversaries? Because He’s going before you to lead you into that glorious place He has for you right now down in this world, and He being the realistic God that He is and knowing what He knows, He knows that the devil won’t take this lying down. I admire the old scoundrel. I at least like a man who will fight for his rights, or fight for the thing he conceives to be his rights, and the old devil won’t allow any Christian to take one forward step without protesting it.

Modern teachers are trying to make pussycats out of Christians, but the devil’s no pussycat. He’s a roaring lion going about seeking whom he may devour. And he’s going to oppose you and straddle clear across the way, as John Bunyan said in Pilgrim’s Progress. He’s going to straddle clear across the way and try to keep you away from the delectable mountains and from the city of God.

So, you figure on enemies. You say, who are they, communists? No. Who are they, liberals? No. Communists and liberals and all that gang, they’re a thousand miles from you, friend. Don’t blame your backsliding on the liberals. Don’t blame the fact that you haven’t gone forward ten feet in ten years. Don’t blame that on the communists. They’re bad enough, God knows, and there’s a hell waiting for all such, but don’t blame somebody else for your own weaknesses and faults.

The trouble is, you’re not obeying and not doing what you should, not believing, and the angel of God can’t lead you. The Spirit of God can’t lead you because of your own fault. Don’t let’s blame the Catholics and say, it’s the priest. There’s no priest big enough in all the wide world. He was fourteen inches between his eyes and had horns four feet high. He still couldn’t stop you, not stop you one inch, if you want to go on.

Well, He says, I will be an adversary to your adversary. Now what’s the difference between the adversary and the enemy? Well, I suppose I ought to identify the enemy. I said who he was and now who is he? Well, the devil is your enemy chiefly, and demons and people and circumstances, those are your enemies. And the devil’s back of the whole business, just as the communists in Moscow are back of all of this stuff that’s going on around over the world. There’s one old devil in the Kremlin there, some they say there’s twelve devils in the Kremlin, and all this devilishness streams out from there.

So, there’s one devil called Satan and that dragon and the old serpent, and he works through demons, through people, and through circumstances to keep you from being led into the way which God has prepared for you, that beautiful, rich, fruitful way. And he works to oppose you, and he’s going to oppose you, and not only that, he’s too strong for you. You’ll never be able to whip him, you’ll never be able to beat him, you’ll never be able to outthink him, and there isn’t a gadget that’s ever been invented the devil’s afraid of. These theological screwdrivers and sanctified light meters, and all of these gadgets that men have invented in the kingdom of God in the modern day.

You know, a preacher nowadays has to be an engineer, a chemist, a chef, and an artist, and a sign painter, and he’s got to have at least a brush-up course in engineering in order to be able to preach at all. I wonder how our fathers managed with the hymn book and the Bible. I wonder how they got along. Maybe that’s why they had fire and all we’ve got light, and it isn’t even the light of God, it’s the light of a bulb.

Well, anyhow, I didn’t intend to say that, but I thought I’d throw that in. That the demons and the people and circumstances, they’re your enemy, and they’re too big for you because the devil’s back of them. He’s pouring in plenty of money and plenty of arms and ammunition, and he’s out thinking you all the way along.

The young fellow that struts out and says, I’ve got ideas. Yeah, you have, but there’s one idea that you ought to get, and that is how little and worthless and weak and helpless you are. Until you find that out, you’re a sucker for the devil and a victim of his power and his wiles.

So God says, now I’m leading you out, and I’m leading you in, and all I require of you is that you do what I say and go along with me and read your Bible, obey it and believe it, and come cheerfully along with me, and I’ll take you in. But I’m going to have to take you the rough way, and I’m going to have to take you the way that is surrounded by enemies. I’m going to be on the left of you, on the right of you, and in front of you, and all around you, but I’ll take you through.

Well, you say, God, how can we do it? How can we advance under such tremendous firepower aimed against us? How can we advance? Well, God says, I’ll handle your enemies and your adversaries.

Now, the difference between an enemy and an adversary is very fine. It’s really splitting your hair nicely, but as I see it, an enemy is one who is hostile to you, who has ill will and an attitude of hate toward you, but who may be inactive temporarily. An adversary is an enemy in action. The enemy may lie back and sulk, but the adversary is up after you, and they may be the same fellow under two different phases, the enemy and the adversary.

And God says, these enemies of yours and these adversaries of yours, they’re too big for you. Don’t imagine that you can ever study up on how to win over them. Don’t imagine you can ever read a book on how to beat the devil. You can, but don’t bother. Better read the comic strip, because that book is wrong. You never, you never can win, and you never can defeat him. You’re not as smart, you’re not as wise, you’re not as knowing, you’re not as powerful, and you’re not as sly, and you’re not ubiquitous.nHe’s so fast that he can get around you.

They used to say about Henry Armstrong, the prizefighter, that he fought, he fought and struck so fast that blows came from all directions, that the fellow that was fighting thought he had half a dozen adversaries in there, because Henry was pumping them in from all directions at once. Well, that’s the devil for you. You never know where to locate him, because if you say, I’ve got him, he’ll hit you from the other side. But he’s too much for you.

So God says, God says, I will be an enemy to your enemies. In other words, I will identify myself with your enemies so completely, and you with me, so completely, that every enemy you have, I take as my enemy. Every adversary that you have, I take as my adversary.

And I want this church to hear this. I want the people of this church to hear this. I want you to get that chin up off of your Adam’s apple. And I want you to hear God say, if you’ll just listen to me now, and be good and obey me, and do what I tell you, you won’t have to worry, because these laws operate now. They operate as powerfully as the law of gravitation.

God says, what I’ll do to the enemy, I will become your enemy. Let’s read verse 27. I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come. And I will make all thine enemies turn their backs upon thee. Now, how to treat our enemies? I will send my fear before thee.

Now, religious persons, for the most part, try to send their fear before them. I’ve seen this lots of times. Somebody, you know, that had a degree and was elected to something, if you criticized him, he swells up and looks dignified and stuffed shirtish and stands on his record. Oh, no, come on down off the pedestal, boy, because the devil isn’t afraid of you nor your record. He isn’t afraid of your swelling up and huffing and puffing. God says, I’ll send my fear ahead of you. He didn’t say, I’ll send your fear ahead of you. The devil isn’t afraid of you, and he isn’t afraid of me. He is afraid of God, and God’s the only one he is afraid of.

Devils, of course, there is a sense in which the fear of a man who has God in him, Satan’s afraid of the man who has God in him, I realize that. But it’s God he’s afraid of and not the man. I said God, I think, but I mean Satan is afraid of the man that has God in him, but he’s not afraid of the man without God.

So, keep that in mind. And instead of swelling up and standing on your record, I’m a Christian. I want you to know that you, you, this, this is, this is an impudence and a terrible thing for you to accuse me of this.

And so we defend ourselves and argue and write letters and get insulted. Nobody can insult a Christian. You’re only insulted if you’re insultable. But a Christian oughtn’t to be insultable. Nobody can insult Jesus Christ. Nobody ever could. They abused Him and condemned Him and lied about Him and called Him a devil, but they couldn’t insult Him.

A fellow that suddenly gets tart and brittle and acts insulted and walks out not angry, but very dry, he thinks he’s sending the fear of him ahead of his face. No, he’s not. He’s just making a donkey out of himself, is all. God says, I’ll send my fear before thee, but we write letters. I understand that you said that I believed so-and-so, or that I did so-and-so. Come on now, friend, don’t try to defend yourself. He that defends himself has himself for his defense, and he hath no other.

But he that humbles himself and looks to God has God for his defense, and I don’t know how you’d want any more than that. God will look after the man who lets God look after him. But the fellow that struts out and says, now, you have impugned my honesty. You have reflected upon my uprightness. Oh, dear, dear.

They called Jesus a devil and nailed Him on a cross. And we go around looking dignified and swelling up and standing on our record. One man one time sat in a meeting, and I wasn’t fussing, I was just sitting there trying to be good. And they were, this young fellow, he slapped me on the knee and he said, I’ll match my ministry with your ministry any day.

Well, I wasn’t matching ministries, nothing for me to worry about. So I just let him match and said, shut up, and never answered. And last I heard of him, he divorced his wife and married a 16-year-old girl and was running a cleaning and pressing establishment.

That’s what happened to his ministry. He was out matching ministries, oh no. Don’t compare yourself with anybody. Don’t defend yourself against anybody. Don’t write a hot letter and try to get untangled. Just say, Lord God, behold, here he is. Look at him.

Remember when Hezekiah’s enemies came and cursed and swore and used obscene language on the wall? Hezekiah took the letter, that beastly, ugly letter, took it in, turned it around so God could read it and said, God, look. God said, that’s all right, I’ll handle that. He said, I’ll take care of it. He said, I’ll put a hook in his jaw and out of here he’ll go. Hezekiah got up and brushed off his knees and said, all right, God, I knew I couldn’t do it because I’ve only got just a little handful of soldiers, and they’re half scared to death. But he said, if you’ll take care of it, I’m not afraid of Assyria.

So, the Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold and his cohorts were something in silver and gold, but before the night was over, they lay dead. 185,000 of them. Hezekiah never as much as used a water pistol. No, never did. He just took it to God.

Now, I’m not fooling. I’m preaching serious truth to you here. And here’s some of you fellows are going to be preachers in the time to come. Somebody’s going to start a rumor about you. And you’re going to write in to the district superintendent or the bishop and try to get it untangled. Never do it, boy, never do it. I will be an enemy to thine enemy and an adversary to thine adversaries. And if God takes him on, why should I worry about it?

Maybe I told this some years ago, but I knew a preacher, a Southern preacher, a great man of God years ago. Hent into a neighborhood and began to hold a meeting in the church. And the town big shot, who owned about everything. And what he didn’t own, he bossed just by his chin, going around sticking his chin out, everybody’s afraid of him. And he hated the meeting. He hated it, hated evangelists and evangelism and God and church in general.

So he hired a brass band and went across the street and on his lawn across from the church. He was bothered by their singing, so he hired a brass band. And every night at 7:30, when the meeting would start, his brass band would start and away it would go. And of course, all they could do was to close the church house and go home. And that went on night after night until finally this good brother said, I gave it up. He said, nothing I could do.They just brass banded me out of the town. Oh, he said, they wanted me to do something about it. No, he wasn’t going to do anything about it. He’d committed it to God.

So, he, a short while after that, got a call. He said, come quickly, this fellow that hired the brass bands on his deathbed, and he wants help. And he raced there, but as I recall, got there too late. And there he was, stiffened out, and his soul in hell. And they came to him and they said, Reverend, would you preach the funeral sermon for this man? Yes, he said, I will.

So, he said he was going to preach on the love of God. I suppose it would be John 3, 16, for God so loved the world. He said he went down on his knees and said, Father, I got to preach a funeral sermon for the man who had run me out of town, literally with a drum. And he said, what’ll I say? And God said, take your text. And the rich man died, and in hell, he lifted up his eyes. And the preacher said, oh, no, God, no, no, I couldn’t do that. It’d be awful. He said, they’d ride me out of town on a rail this time. He said, I couldn’t. God said, you do what I tell you. No, no, God, he said, I want to preach on love. He said, I want to show I love the poor man.mNo hard feelings. God said, you do what I say.

So when the day of the funeral came, the preacher walked in, in fear and trembling. And the whole town was out, you know, they’re afraid of the old guy even after he’s dead. And the whole town was out, and they gathered from everywhere. And the preacher got up and took his text. The rich man died, and in hell, he lifted up his eyes. He preached a sermon about the rich man who died and gone to hell, and here he was lying right in front of them.

Well, you know the result of that? And that little southern town, the result of that was the wife of the dead man, the widow got converted. The children of the dead man got converted. As things spread like wildfire, they reopened the church without a brass band. And in a short time, a fire of revival struck the whole town. But it took one man going to hell to get it.

God says, I’ll be an adversary to your adversary and an enemy to your enemy. Use your typewriter for something better than writing hot letters of protest. Don’t fight anybody. We try to fight people and only succeed in getting our noses bumped and our hearts injured, and nothing happens.

God says, I’m acting for you, and I’ll take your place, and I’ll accept your enemies as my enemies, and they’ve got to deal with me. And I’ll make them turn their backs on you. You’ll see the face of the enemy, but pretty soon all you’ll see is his back. No enemy can stand before you all the days of thy life. God throws a secret and mysterious fear in an enemy.

I’m a fighter by disposition, and if God hadn’t given me this when I was a young man, still in my twenties, I suppose that I would have been one that had joined some of these fighting fundamentalists as being a fighter, because I got it in my disposition. But I’ve never written a letter of protest. Did I ever? I don’t recall that I ever did since. If I did, I shouldn’t have, and if I did, I know that I got the worst of it. But I can’t recall having done it.

So. people write me letters, and I never reply. Or if I do reply, I write them one of the neatest little disclaimers you ever heard in all your life. People write me and tell me that I am a terrible fellow, and I write back and say, Dear friend, your charges are such that it would not be the coming of me to defend myself against them. Therefore, I must ask you to pray for me until I become such a man as you want me to be. Sincerely yours.

My wife said that was hypocrisy. I don’t know whether she’s right or not. But I mean it, I mean it, I mean it. If he’s got something on me and he really sees weaknesses, he can pray for me.

But don’t imagine I’ll defend myself, because just as soon as you start defending yourself, your knuckles get skinned and your knees get stiff. Get on your knees and the Lord will take care of your enemies. I’ll make them turn their backs upon you. You can destroy every enemy without lifting your hand or raising your voice, by turning them over to God. Accept the covenant and vow never to defend yourself.

Years ago, Dr. Simpson was going through the country putting on missionary meetings. He was quite a preacher, and people came to hear him in numbers. They do that with only a few preachers in a generation. He was one of them. And he’d go to a town and have a big hall and they’d come and hear him, then he’d go to the next town.

So, a certain enemy of his decided that he was going to go ahead of Dr. Simpson just about a day or two and ruin him. So he went, thought he’d start in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He’d hire the big hall there, knew Simpson was coming in say on Sunday, and he got there on Friday and announced he would preach and he was going to undercut Dr. Simpson. Dr. Simpson wanted not to get anybody, just trying to preach missions and the victorious life. He wasn’t mad at anybody.

This fellow didn’t like Simpson. So, he was quite a preacher too and could draw crowds. So, he had a supper one night just before the first meeting. He had a supper and he had a piece of fish. And he was sitting there, I suppose, thinking over the sermon, the pulverizing, devastating, annihilating, decapitating sermon that he was to deliver against Dr. Simpson. And suddenly he began to shake and rub his neck and said to somebody, I think I got a bone caught in my throat.

And sure enough, God used a whale to swallow Jonah. And he used a fish bone to stop the enemy of a good man. And that fellow never did get to preach that night. He had to go to a doctor and have some kind of a minor operation, if I remember, have that little silver fish bone pulled out of his epiglottis. The result was he gave the whole thing up in disgust and went back home. Somebody told Dr. Simpson, Dr. Simpson said, oh, him, I turned him over to God long ago and he went off about his business.

It’s always that way, my brother. If you want to fight your battles, you fight your battles and you lose nine times out of ten. But if you want to win nine times, ten times out of ten and not have to do any fighting, you believe what God says. I will be an enemy to thine enemies and an adversary to thine adversaries.

And for these 32 years, I’ve never asked for money. I’ve never asked for a raise. I’ve never asked for a job. I’ve never written and asked if I could come. And I’ve never grumbled if I got little. And I’ve never demanded more. And very often, uh, not very often, but sometimes at least, I come out in the hole in some of my meetings, financially.  But God says, now you, I’ll take care of your money, and I’ll take care of your enemies and I’ll take care of everything. I’ll go ahead of you.

And the result is, now I know I have a friend, God bless his memory, he’s still alive. But, uh, he, uh, he and I began to preach about the same time. And he fights everybody. And I don’t think I ever met him that he wasn’t two sizes larger than normal, huffing, huffing, huffing, puffing, puffing. Superintendent, you wronged me, I tell you, it wasn’t fair.

And, uh, he and I went along together and God met me and taught me 32 years ago what to do with the fellas that are not fair to you. Just pay no attention to them. Turn them over to God, mention their name on high, and then go about your business.

And this dear brother’s been getting littler and littler all these years, trying to get big enough with his enemies. One of these days he’s going to go on, retire and move to Carlisle or some other home and sit there and sulk over the way he’s been treated by his enemies. And my enemies have never done anything to me only to drive me to my knees.

I told you when I began to preach, I was going to do some testifying, and I don’t apologize. This is too real to me to make it into an ordinary objective sermon. It’s real. I live in this.

So, God looks after His people, and He’ll go ahead of them, and He’ll lead them into that wonderful place, if you’ll just obey Him. Some other time, Lord? All right, if some other time, then why not now? If you did it some other time, why not now? If you did it for some other people, why not us? If you did it somewhere else, why not here, says faith.

And the wise anointed eye will see tonight, and the anointed ear will hear, and the illuminated heart will understand, and the others will go out huffing and puffing and saying, he wasn’t dispensationally correct. Go on your way, bud. Have your dispensation, and when it’s all over, you’ll end up bruised and beaten and cold and hard and brittle and stiff.

And the ones who are ready to be malleable and obedient and believe God and go ahead, they’ll be way out there so far you can’t even hear them whistling anymore. And you’ll be coming stumbling along behind, trying to beat everybody’s skull in, and do it in a good dispensational way. You obey God, brother, and everything will be all right.

Are you ready to believe that? Are you ready to believe it? Is this church ready to believe it? Sure. This church, we’ve been led down the years, we’ll be still led. Don’t you worry about it. Don’t worry at all. Keep cheerful. Every time you wake up at night, thank God everything’s all right in your Father’s house.

When you get up in the morning, bless God before you get your coffee. Thank Him before you get your your eye opener. Praise him. Keep on doing it. God wants to be praised. He wants to be loved. He wants to be blessed. He wants to have people going cheerfully along.

I wrote a phrase the other day, God’s redeemed children, and the thing struck me one night. I said, isn’t this wonderful to be one of God’s redeemed children? Belong to God, to be redeemed. No more auction block, no more shackles, no more slavery. Free as a bird that flies. God’s redeemed child. You look at me, you go ahead.

Now, I’ve got an awful lot more to say on this same subject. We’ve got to talk next time about these parasites and highlights and satellites and Jebusites and all the rest. And what all this means, what all this means when translated into its spiritual meanings in the New Testament. And about bowing down, I want to talk about that next Sunday night.

Well, it’s time to go home. Let’s stand.

Thank Thee Heavenly Father tonight that we have a Friend, oh, such a friend, that He loved us ere we knew Him. And we thank Thee that as the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so are the Lord’s round about His people. And the angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear Him and delivereth them. We thank thee, Father.

We thank Thee we love everybody. We love the people that don’t like us. We love the people that are bitter and wish we were dead. But Lord, we thank thee they can’t kill us by wishing. And they haven’t got the courage to do it any other way. We thank thee, Heavenly Father, thou dost turn the edge of every sword. We bless Thee for the back of necks that we see. Here’s one and there’s one. He huffs and puffs and then turns his back when the fear of God strikes him.

Oh, help us, Father, we beseech Thee to live in Thy love and dare to obey and be obedient and try to remember everything that Thou hast promised and live in it. And then see our enemies go down before us and go in and inherit the land of the parasites. It’s our land and we’re going to take it.

And all the people said, Amen, we’re dismissed.

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Tozer Talks

“A Life of Victory in the Midst of Trouble”

February 6, 1955

Now, the 25th Psalm is the text for the morning. I do not intend to attempt anything like careful exposition, but simply let our minds play over the psalm. We have read it previously. If I were to pick a text out, maybe it might be the twenty-first. Let integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait on Thee.

Now in this psalm, we have a little section of a great spiritual autobiography where the man David is writing himself into this. He is telling us about himself and his relation to God and the world. And we see and hear in this 25th Psalm, a living man engaged in the business of living. We see here a good man living in a bad world. A right man living in a wrong world. And naturally, here it’s not a smooth psalm.

My brethren, nothing is ever smooth if it is a realistic, fair reflection of life. The life of our Lord Jesus Christ was not a smooth life. He had great inward tranquility, for he knew He was in the bosom of the Father. And He knew that not even His incarnation took Him out of the bosom of the Father. For He knew that the Persons of the Godhead are indivisible. You cannot divide the Son from the Father by incarnation or by crucifixion or by death. He knew that He could never be separated from the Father’s heart, though as a man among men He lived his turbulent life, his life surrounded by enemies so that I think it’s fair to say that if you’re living too smooth a life, you may well question whether you’re living in the will of God or not.

David served his generation by the will of God before he fell on sleep. And David was a man after God’s own heart. So, I think it fair to take him for an example. And David did not live a smooth, tranquil life. He had periods of tranquility. He had times when his heart soared away like a lark and sang in heaven’s gate. But he soon found himself down on the earth again, back in the in the turbulent and disturbed world where he had to live.

Now, we do not find here what we find in much modern religion, a man in a classroom learning and analyzing. We have taken on the classroom psychology too much in Christian religion in these days. Classrooms are necessary and this is not intended to be any reflection upon the classroom. It is only to say that the classroom is an abnormal situation. It is something apart from the stream of life, hoping that it will teach those who are in that classroom when they do go back into the stream of life to live better, more wisely. But it is for the moment, not a part of life really. It is the ivory tower of life.

Christianity is never to be understood, the faith of our fathers is never to be thought of from the classroom. It is not someone looking over heavy glasses, telling them the facts of Christianity or using a chart to illustrate. But, the faith of our fathers is the faith of the plain people, the faith of men living in the world.

The faith of our fathers is fitted to the marketplace where men argue and debate and cheat. The man of God won’t cheat, but he’ll likely be cheated. The faith of our fathers is geared to the kitchen and the home where the Christian housewife answers the phone and the doorbell a dozen times every morning and the baby suddenly runs the temperature and the doctor is out of town and she’s in distress and then the doorbell rings again. And then the phone and it’s a wrong number. And that’s her life. She’s got to have something that’ll go down there. The classroom can’t help her there. Nothing abstract and theoretical can do her any good there. The faith of our fathers has to get into the kitchen, into the home, into the nursery, into the basement, and where people are engaged in the downright, tough business of living right in a wrong world. The faith of our father has to get into the cab of the truck as it bowls down the highway, around the curves until the arms ache. And out on the long straight away stretches until the monotony puts us to sleep, and trouble everywhere and angry horns honking from the rear, and blowouts and difficulties. There is no classroom there. There is no theory there. No ivory tower there. Christianity has to get into that cab and behind that wheel and into the heart of that man so that he can do that like a Christian and drive his big truck like a Christian. The faith of our fathers has to get into the machine shop, where the smell of hot oil and dirty gloves and dirty overalls and cursing men and hard to please customers; and it’s got to be there and it’s got to prove itself there and live right there and be right there.

And so, the 25th Psalm is an illustration of all this, a man in the midst of life, a good man living in a bad world, a right man living in a wrong world, God’s man living in the devil’s world. And he has to come through that; and has to live it through and suffer it out and come out all right. And that’s why I like the Bible. It’s a book of a high philosophy and lofty theology and brilliant metaphysics. But, it’s as practical as your shoes you wear around the house or your bedroom slippers right down where you live and get into it and it doesn’t fail you. And you don’t have to know a million things and you don’t have to rise in the scale of culture, nor study from Emily post where to put your spoon. Plain people that don’t know what to do with a spoon.

A man told me one time that he went to a banquet that was so ritzy that it was one o’clock in the morning before it was through, and he found at one o’clock in the morning all he had left was a tablespoon. He’d evidentially used up the wrong one at the wrong place and the snooty waiter wouldn’t take it away, so there he was. He said, at one o’clock and they were through eating and he had just a tablespoon lying by his plate. Well, that would chagrin some people and drive them to suicide. But, the plain fellow who lives in this bad world trying to live right with God isn’t so much worried, because he knows that Christianity meets all situations, social situations, political situations, industrial situations.

So, here was the man David engaged in living, a living man living in a bad world. It was H.G. Wells, you know who said that Buddhism was the best religion, but that it wouldn’t thrive except in a warm climate. Christianity will thrive in any climate at all. Just let Christ get into the heart of a man, and whether he is living in an igloo hut somewhere in the far Arctic, or whether he’s living with but a G-string on somewhere in Africa. If he’s a true sincere man, whether it’s his grass hut or his snow igloo, Christianity will work. It will work in the mountains and it will work on the plains and it will work in the midst of the great city where we never see real sunshine for the smoke and the fumes. The faith of our fathers will work anywhere.

And H.G. Wells didn’t mean to be funny, but it was a humorous thing to say that God Almighty should give the world a religion that will only work in a warm climate. If that was true, and that might be true of Buddhism, then what would we do in cold weather? Our spirituality would rise with the temperature. Every morning, you’d have to go out on the porch and say to your wife, I wonder how spiritual I can be today? And if it is a little too cold, you’d say, well, I’ll be a sinner this day. I can’t live for God today because it’s too cold. Christianity is found everywhere. And it’s found in the hearts of men.

You know, we’ve had some errors in the church, and one of them has been, of course, to make Christianity consist of theological dogma. Now, I’m a theological dogmatist, and I believe in theology. I believe in the faith of our fathers, and I can define it for you and put it down. And I could write a book of discipline if I had been forced to do it, telling what I believe and what people ought to believe. And I believe in doctrine. But what good is it going to do you to know that the Trinity is composed of three persons or that there are three persons in the Trinity is a better way of expressing it if you don’t live pleasing to the Trinity. I borrowed that from an old saint who lived centuries ago. What does it profit thee to be able to discourse learnedly about the Trinity if I live such a life as to be displeasing to the Trinity? What difference does it make that you know that God made the heaven in the earth if you will live an ungodly life. Doctrine doesn’t mean anything until it gets inside you until it seeps by osmosis into the bloodstream of your life. Leaks through the walls of your soul and gets into your bloodstream and gets out into the cells of your spirit and changes you. Any doctrine that doesn’t change a man has never reached that man.

Too often we have a Christianity that consists merely of a lot of creeds held; doctrines that are believed. That’s not Christianity. That is only the raw material of Christianity. Until the fire of the Holy Ghost comes upon that raw material, or changing the figure, that is but the food, that is but the meat of Christianity. But until that meat enters the soul of a man by faith and repentance, it can’t do the man any good. Objective Christianity is not the Christianity of the Bible. The faith of our fathers is objective truths having become subjective reality within the soul by pertinence and faith and prayer.

Old John Ruskin, the famous art critic and philosopher and Christian, who a century ago or so wrote very eloquently about the error of calling this a church service. I still use it because I know what I mean by the word. But he says, watch that we’re not mistaken about it. He said, we meet together and sing a few hymns and listen to moral or spiritual truth being expounded and go home and say we have been to a service. And he says that not necessarily true. For service is more than singing hymns and going home again. Service is living for God and serving your generation and living like a Christian after the church doors are locked and the janitor is asleep. And it is living for Christ between Sunday night and Sunday morning; all week long as well as on Sunday. I think Ruskin was right though I do not follow him in throwing out the word church service as a result. It can be a service.

We can with giving our money to the Lord, we can do a service. We can by expounding the Scriptures, do a service. We can by singing hymns, do a service. But the danger is that it’s possible to render that kind of service, aloof and in a vacuum all together unrelated to the rest of our lives. That’s where the danger lies. And I agree with Ruskin there. So, let’s watch it. If your Christianity, your Christian faith, does not affect every part of your being, you have a reason to wonder whether you have the faith of our fathers really in your heart or not.

Now, look at David. David here was a man in the midst of life. Here he was surrounded by, look at them: verse two to nineteen, enemies; verse nineteen, hatred; verse eighteen, affliction; verse seventeen, troubles; verse eighteen, pain; verse seventeen, distress; verse sixteen, desolation, and perplexities all the way through and sin mentioned three or four times. Now, there was a man, no ivory tower there. No monk sitting on top of a high pole letting somebody else feed him. No hermit hidden away in a cave going barefooted for a walk at sundown when the birds were singing. No impractical dreamer, but a man who lived in the midst of all of these enemies were surrounding him. Verses two to nineteen talk about his enemies.

Now, I might say that a man is known by his friends. I think that’s generally understood. But the opposite is also true, a man is known by his enemies. No man worth his salt but will have enemies. If he does not have enemies, then he’s not doing anything. If he does anything, he’ll have enemies. If he does anything, he will have 100 telling him that he could have done it better if he had done it his way. And then we say what have you done? And the answer is, well, nothing but I’ve been observing. He hasn’t done a thing, but he’s been watching somebody else. You’ll have kibitzers, fault finders, critics and enemies and opposers and ill-wishers no matter what you do, if you do something. The way to have no enemies is to have no convictions, and do nothing at all. The man without a conviction has only one enemy, and that’s God. But, the man of conviction is bound to have enemies. And you will now be known by your enemies.

You should never worry if you’ll get an enemy. But you should be very concerned with what kind of an enemy that is. If I knew that a communist lived down on Longwood Drive two doors from me. Now, I don’t think there are any down, that Republican territory. But, if I knew there was a communist living down there, and he should turn out to be my enemy, I’d thank God to have a communist for my enemy. But, if he’s a good man and full of the Holy Ghost and he’s my enemy, I ought to be distressed about that. If you have the wrong kind of enemies, woe be to you. But if you have the right kind of enemies, blessed art thou for so the prophets fared before thee.

I might digress, as the preachers call it, from my sermon long enough to say to you young people, watch out who your pals are. You may never have done anything wrong. Nobody would ever, could be able to charge you with having done anything wrong. But, if you fall in with, and make pals of young fellows who are borderline delinquents, you’ll be blamed for being a delinquent too and you will have a hard time proving you’re not. If I don’t know who you are, your name is John Doe, Jr. and somebody says, Pastor, do you know young John Doe, Jr., sixteen years old and I say I don’t think I know John Doe. Well, he comes to our church sometimes, attends Sunday school class and goes to the, plays baseball Tuesday nights during the summer. Well, what about John Doe Jr? What kind of fella is he? Well, my friend says, I can’t tell you I don’t want to commit myself, but I’ll tell you who his friends are. And then he names some cigarette sucking, dirty tongue, borderline hoodlums, and says he runs around with them. I’ve got my opinion of John Doe Jr. without ever having anybody telling me anything. Somebody says that’s guilt by association. Sure, it’s guilt by association and the addled-headed egghead whoever said we shouldn’t be able to attribute guilt by association, ought to go somewhere and have his head examined.

Birds of a feather flock together. And a bird that flocks with buzzards is bound to be a buzzard or smell like one. And if I see a necked creature flocking with buzzards and I go along and say stay away from that creature. What has he done? You can’t prove anything on him. You haven’t got a bit of proof he’s done anything wrong? No, I have never seen him do anything wrong, but I know his crowd. So watch it you young people. But you say how can I win them if I don’t go where they are? Did you ever hear of a fellow going to hell to win a man who wouldn’t go to heaven? No. There’s a place to stop. You can win them, but you don’t have to win them by running with them. And if you run with them, you will not win them, they’ll win you. If we had all the young people in this church now that have come to make some kind of Christian testimony, or at least been interested over the last twenty-five years, and then who’ve been lost to us through bad friendships, we couldn’t contain them. They would fill every room in the building. They’re gone. They do fall from churches because they get into wrong friendships. But that’s only a side. That really is not part of the sermon.

This man was surrounded by enemies. And he was surrounded by hatred. Now that’s an ugly thing. I don’t like the word hatred. There it is, verse nineteen, bitter hatred. And always remember sin hates righteousness. Always remember that. And the better you are, the more sin will hate you.

And then here was affliction. Now that’s verse eight and verse eighteen. Now, Job’s experience interprets the word affliction here. In James, we have it. If any man is afflicted, let him pray. That doesn’t mean sick. That means if anybody is in trouble, like Job was. He may be sick, but that’s only a part of his affliction. You can get afflicted without being sick and you can be sick without really being afflicted because affliction means loss or bereavement, or having Job’s comforters comfort you. That was the kind of trouble Job had. He had a sickness too temporarily. But that was affliction. Well, Job had it and here it was. You say, will faith operate? Is the faith of our fathers good at a time when we have enemies, at a time when there’s hatred, at a time when there’s affliction? The answer is yes. Here was a man living in the middle of it and triumphant.

And there’s troubles, verse seventeen. I don’t know all the troubles. And a man that isn’t significant enough in the universe for God to let him have troubles is too insignificant for God to find. If you’re significant, if you signify, if you mean anything in the world, you will have troubles all right. Paul’s experience shows that. Read Second Corinthians and see what a time of it Paul had. Poor old Paul, his brethren and his enemies and the Jews and the Gentiles and everybody was after him.

And then there’s pain, verse eighteen. Do you know what I would like to be able to do? I wish I could stand here and say, believe on Jesus Christ, live as a Christian should, and thou shalt be free from pain. I wish I could do that, but I can’t do that. As He was, so are we in this world. And as my Father has sent Me, so send I you. And in one sense, Jesus is living over again His life in each one of us. And He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with pain and He bore it and He knew it.

Now, you might as well brace yourself for it. You’re going to suffer some pain in your lifetime. And there never has been a place in the human body yet found that was convenient for pain to lodge. Wherever you’re hurt, you wish it was somewhere else. And you say that’s always the most inconvenient place, and I could stand it if it was somewhere else. And then if it got to the other place, you’d want it somewhere else. There is no place where you can bear pain conveniently. Pain is always a rude, uncouth, barbarian, sadistic thing. And it’ll come all right. You can figure on it.

It was Shakespeare that said, no man is a philosopher when he has a toothache. It’s alright to sit back in our ivory tower and philosophize about the heaven and earth and the things that are therein. But, when you get a toothache, you don’t have so much success in your ivory tower. But Christianity is good where there is pain. Oh, the pain of the people of God down the years. Read Foxes “Book of Martyrs.” Read any good biography and see if it’s not true that the people of God have known pain. And our Lord said oh so tenderly to His suffering church, fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer. He didn’t say pray to Me and I’ll deliver you from your suffering. He said fear none of those things which thou can suffer. Always remember, you can suffer. You can. And when the human organism won’t take it anymore, you’ll die. But you can suffer. So, brace yourself and thank God for the privilege of feeling a little bit of the sting and the gall and the bitterness that our Lord felt when He was on earth.

David had it. Verse eighteen talked about pain, verse seventeen talked about distress. Now, distress of course is pain, mental and physical, mainly psychological or mental. And you know how distressing mental pain is. It’s more distressing than physical pain. I think it can be proved that rarely does it happen that a man commits suicide because of physical pain. Almost always it’s because of mental distress.

And then there’s desolation, verse sixteen. Desolation, the grief of loneliness. I saw a picture in the newspaper here I think yesterday of a man being held back by policemen. And I’ll never, I think, for many long months, forget that face. Five of his children were just burned to death in the building. But, it was gone to a point where no living organism could exist a second in that awful furnace. And this man was going to rush in there and try to rescue at least one. And they were holding him, and that face I’ll never forget it, I think. Brother, when the fire was out, and the hashes were being raked and that man sat alone, you know what desolation meant.

Some of you had a husband that has walked out of the house and left you. Poor thing. The worst part about it was when he went. He took part of you along with him. He took the part that lives and vibrates. He took your heart with him. And you scolded yourself for it but you can’t help it. Like the mother whose son has been nothing but a rascal from the time he was ten years old, a scoundrel. Now, he’s in prison. She can’t help it. Her mind doesn’t function. It’s her emotions, her nerves, her heart. She loves that no-good boy until she’s in prison. When they walk lockstep, she’s walking. When the clank of the door goes shut and the great iron key turns, it’s turned on her. And when he wears the prison gray, she wears that prison gray. She can’t help it. Her heart has been so tied up with that no-good boy, and yet, I don’t know why I should use the word no-good. Jesus died for him. And so, Jesus died for him, he is worth praying for and maybe will be saved. But anyway, she loves that boy.

So, some of you have had that happen to you and you’ve been desolate. I’ve had them come to me like that and sit with gray faces and tell me in a voice that was not a normal voice that everything was gone. That the only one that meant anything to me in the world has forsaken me. And I’ve had men come to me and sit embarrassed and twist their gloves in their hands and tell me about the wife that had walked out. Poor guy, if he could do something if there was something there you could clip. If he had a pair of scissors he would clip the umbilical cord and cut himself loose but he can’t. He can’t and he sees the face and hears the voice and remembers the little things? He can’t. And so, we, he has a desolation. Desolation requires loneliness.

Then, there are perplexities and the uncertainties and the confusion and the fear that we’re not pleasing God in all this and then sin. David said here four times; I think that he said about sin and he prayed to God to deliver him from his sin. He said, O God, don’t remember my boyhood, my youth when I was wild and did these things. Remember not the sins of my youth nor my transgressions. According to thy mercy, remember me O God. For Thy goodness sake. His sin bothered him. David knew whatever an instructed person ought to know. That the only real enemy in the world is your sin. That’s the only real enemy. As long as you can lock the door on sin and will lock it out, you haven’t an enemy that you need to worry about it. Hell or earth, nothing can separate you from the love of God. It’s only sin that’s your enemy. And when sin gives the key to the enemy, in comes the invader and takes over, then it’s too bad for you.

Then there’s distress and heartache and grief and sorrow and loss of communion and loss of fruit and loss of joy. Sin does this. Let’s be sure there’s no sin any place, because sin weakened David and almost destroyed his confidence here in this Psalm and gave to his enemies their only real power. Because I repeat, the only real danger is within. If you keep anything outside, you’re alright. As soon as it gets inside, trouble starts.

And so, David began to destroy the enemy within. The only enemy really that he had, really, sin. So, he prayed and confessed and he admitted and he trusted God and he pleaded and he forced it on God. But, he made God listen. And he didn’t grab at every hope that everything was all right. He insisted on knowing it. He wanted God to deliver him completely. So, David began to hope in God. Verse six, remember O Lord, Thy tender mercies and Thy loving kindnesses.

I read a passage in a version, I forgot what version it was. I have just rearranged my books up here and I have translations that go clear across a bookcase and leak down over the other side, four or five of them and I don’t always remember which translation it was. But one of them said, O God, Thou art loyal to me. And immediately I got on my knees and thanked God He’s loyal. God is loyal to His people. The loyalty of love and the loyalty of wisdom. He’s loyal, and David knew it. And so David trusted God and say, Lord, you’re loyal. Your faithfulness and your tender mercies have been ever of old. Good and upright is the Lord. Verse nine, the meek, He will guide in judgment the meek. He will teach his way. Verse fourteen, the secret of the Lord is within the fearing. And verse fifteen, He shall pluck my feet out of the net. That’s one thing we didn’t remember, a net, a booby trap. They had set booby traps for David. And David said, I can’t see the booby traps. I don’t know where they are. And you know how David escaped them. He escaped them by not looking for them at all. He escaped them by looking to the Lord. And as he looked to the Lord, the Lord plucked his feet out of the net and he didn’t get into any booby traps.

A lot of you, dear people, you’re developing myopia of the soul. You’re always afraid. People are always calling me or writing me or coming to see me and there’s always some little pimple on the body. And they forget all about the cancer in the soul. It’s some little old thing, afraid of some booby trap. Can I do this? May I do that? What do you think I should do about this? Do you think I ought to take in a play? What do you think about the opera Mr. Tozer? What do you think about television? What do you think Mr. Tozer about baseball? Oh my, don’t bother me about such things. Those aren’t the things that matters sir. There’s something bigger than that. If they should pull booby traps through you, the way to escape them is look straight to the Lord Jesus Christ, straight to Him, straight to Him. And as you see Jesus, He will lead you out of the net, and you will escape the net.

So, here we have a man. We have a man living in the middle of life, a living man in a dead world, a good man in a bad world, a right man in a wrong world, a man of God in a world filled with men of flesh. And he was living in the middle of it. Living right in the middle of it, and thanking God in the middle of it, and fruitful and useful in the middle of it, serving his generation by the will of God. So, here was a living man believing and praying. After all, the old song “Trust and Obey” says it. He believed and he prayed. The devil can silence you so you can’t pray anymore. That’s one of the first things he has to do. When an enemy comes into a country, one of the first things he wants to do is to destroy communication. A burglar comes to your home, if he’s a wise burglar, that is, wise in the ways of the devil, he cuts the telephone wires before he comes in. If he can break communication with help, the source of help, then you are an easy victim.

So, prayer is the source of communication between you and help. And if the devil can cut the wires and discourage you so you don’t pray, you’re an easy victim after that. In God’s name, I beseech you, begin to pray. You’ve had a rough time of it. Maybe some of you have and I suppose I don’t even know how rough it’s been with you. You’ve been treated rough this last week. You’ve gone through hard things.

Well, if you’ve come through all right, then I say thank God and I wouldn’t have had it otherwise. But if you’re discouraged and your prayers are cut off, then woe be to you and watch out. You better get your communications established. You better get into God again. You say, I can’t pray. I’m blue and gloomy and I have failed and I can’t pray. Oh, you can say Abba. You can say that much can’t you? If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And He gives forth the Spirit of His Son saying, Abba Father. And Abba, you know, is the Arabic, and one Arabic word for father and various other languages have it, Abba. And they tell me that Abba is a word you can speak without teeth. You can take your teeth out and still say, Abba. But if it was a difficult thing, you’d have to get your teeth in. But you can say Alba before you have any teeth. A little fellow I see back there now, I can see through the glass. Somebody’s holding a little chap. He can’t talk yet probably, but he can say Abba. And so we can say that. If you feel so little and hopeless and useless that you can’t pray, if you can’t pray like a Baptist deacon, pray like a newborn babe and say Abba. Keep saying that and God will hear your prayer and know what you mean.

I always think of Sidney Smith, that great English writer of several generations ago. He never knew what to do with punctuation–never. He was a brilliant writer, a stylist to perfection, but he never knew how to punctuate. So, he wrote a manuscript and then he wrote one page. And on that page, he put all the punctuation marks that were in the English language, and said, note, sprinkle these around where they’ll do the most good. He didn’t know where they belonged, but he hoped somebody did. And so, I say to you this morning, just tell God, O God, I don’t know how to pray. I don’t know what to say, but hear my heart and sprinkle it around where it’ll do the most good. Make it fit where it ought to be. I’m too dumb. I don’t even know how to pray God. Ah, God loves people like that. The meek He will guide in judgment. The meek He will teach His way. And if you will simply and meekly say, Abba Father, for Jesus sake, pretty soon you will get help from above, and then, the communications are established and everything’s all right again.