“The Voice of the Soul”
The Voice of the Soul
Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
August 16, 1953
Now, next Lord’s Day, as Mr. McAfee has said, I will be, God willing, preaching in that part of the country they call the Land of the Sky, Ben Lippin, up on the hill above Asheville. Brother McAfee will be here, and our disorganized church will be back together next Sunday, too. We certainly came apart today, and the only service out of the whole 104 services during the year that we don’t have a choir. The choir will be here and rendering good music, and we hope you’ll be back and bringing your friends.
Now, let me read a passage familiar to you from the 12th chapter of Luke. And He spake a parable, verse 16, He spake a parable unto them, saying, the ground of a certain man, certain rich man, brought forth plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, what shall I do? Because I have no room where to bestow my fruits. And he said, this will I do. I will pull down my barns and build greater. And there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years. Take heed, take thy needs, eat, drink, and be merry. God said unto him, thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee. Then who shall these things be which thou hast provided? Then Jesus draws this conclusion from, So is he that layeth up treasures for himself and is not rich toward God.
Now, this passage gains meaning from its setting, that is, from what precedes it and from what follows it. What precedes it was that a man came to Jesus, very much disturbed because he was afraid, he wasn’t going to get his part of the inheritance, saying, Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me. And Jesus said to him, man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? And he said unto them, take heed and beware of covetousness. For a man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses.
That’s what preceded this. And to point it up, he gave them this parable which I have read. Then he followed it by saying, Therefore, I say unto you, take no thought for your life which ye shall eat, neither for the body what ye shall put on. For the life is more than meat and the body is more than raiment. Here, between the inheritance which this man was about to lose and the goods of the world, the very great treasures of the world, our Lord Jesus places a parable concerning the soul, and He teaches us the eternal worth of the human soul as compared with or to any other thing.
Now, I suppose this sounds like a religious bromide or a series of cliches, and I wouldn’t blame you too much if you went out saying as some have said, thou speakest an undisputed thing in such a solemn way.
I have claimed that much in fundamental circles is the solemn repetition of an undisputed thing, and I do not want to fall into that snare. But on the other hand, I know the age in which I live, and I’m quite sure that this is the hour when the soul of man is getting less attention, perhaps than ever it did since at least the beginning and rise of revealed religion. The eternal worth of the soul needs again to be declared, and it must be declared as having worth over against all other human values, that there is nothing else that is to be compared with the human soul.
Now, I wonder whether I might seem to be putting up a straw man to shoot him down or a straw lion to slay it if I said that man has a soul. Now, this is assumed in the Bible and declared in the Bible. There are two things you see. The Bible has two ways of teaching things. It teaches by blunt positive declaration, and it teaches by assumption. And you can learn almost as much from what the Bible takes for granted as you can by what it states, as a matter of fact. Not as much, but almost as much.
Now, that man has a soul is assumed in the Bible, and it appears throughout the Bible, not in one book or one chapter. If it was only taught in one book of the Bible, we might be tempted to wonder whether we understood it correctly. If it was only taught in one chapter of the Bible, we might be tempted to wonder whether we had properly understood that chapter.
But it is assumed in the Bible, it is a common coin of knowledge, that man has a soul, that you and I have souls, is taken for granted in the Scripture, just as we take the dollar for granted. The validity of the dollar in our American monetary system gives value to all other coins and all values, so that a dime is valuable because it’s tenth of a dollar, a quarter because it’s quarter of a dollar, ten-dollar bill because it’s ten dollars.
The dollar is the monetary unit, and you don’t run around always talking about a dollar being worth a dollar, a dollar being worth a hundred cents. You take it for granted, it’s a common coin. It circulates freely and unchallenged throughout all the borders and confines of the United States and over into Canada, because the dollar is the common coin, it’s taken for granted. When you see a dollar, you don’t say, what is this? You give back the change, if there’s any change, usually there isn’t any. But you find that the dollar is the common coin, or the common unit of value.
So the Bible, with the soul, takes it for granted. It is not everlastingly asserting it, though it does assert it, but it takes it for granted, assumes it, and goes on from there. And just as if you take out the dollar and its value, if you devaluate the dollar to zero, you have no monetary system left in the United States. Nothing is of any value until we find ourselves again and declare some value.
So when you read your Bible, you read it in the full light of the declared and assumed fact that man has a soul, that this that we have, we see, is not all that we are. We have souls. And if you take that away, then you devaluate the man. If you doubt it or deny it, then you no longer have a man, you have a sub-man. You have something less than a man. The assumption or the declaration or the belief that man has no soul devaluates the man and reduces him to less than a man.
For God blew into man’s body the breath of life, and man became a living soul. And Jesus here did not assert that man had a soul. He took it for granted, did you notice that? Jesus didn’t say a thing here about a man having a soul. He didn’t say, no, I speak this parable unto you in order to teach you that man has a soul. He thought within himself and he said, soul, and he said, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.
Just as I reach my pocket and hand out a dollar and assume its value and don’t argue about it and take it for granted, He reached into the treasure house of understood theology, took out the soul and handed it out and said, here, I’m talking about a soul. Nobody challenged that because it was a common coin of knowledge in the time of our Lord as it is today.
Now, I hardly need to say not only that the Bible assumes and takes for granted a soul and weaves it in and out of its truth, weaves it in and out as a golden thread through all the fabric of theology, but it also declares it as a hard tenet of truth. It is more than an assumption because you see, if it’s only an assumption, then some barbarian can come to you and say, prove to me from the Bible that man has a soul.
And then if you do not have a positive declaration of truth, well, you’re put to it to answer him with chapter and verse. But all through the Bible, it is declared that man has the soul. And not only is it assumed in the Bible and declared in the Bible, but it is believed by all peoples and all races and all religions since time began. That is something people do not argue about. And the great religions of the world have taken this for granted.
The Egyptians and the Indian and the Chinese and all of the religions of the world, however far they might have been from revealed truth, they nevertheless took it for granted as a matter that needed no proof that what you see is not the man, but that there is an essential something in the man of which this we see is only the tabernacle and the dwelling place.
I say it’s believed by all the races of the world. Now that is a large order, but I believe that the history and the findings of men who made it their business to find out will well back up what I say, that all the races of the world have assumed that man has a soul. Now they have not thought about it in the same way.
I read in the question-and-answer department of one of our newspapers recently, someone wrote in and said, how is it that Catholic priests sometimes anoint a dead body after it’s been dead for a long time? And the answer was given objectively. It was given as being a belief that the soul may inhabit the body yet a while after it seems to be dead. And they didn’t say this, but this is the fact that they believe that if it can get the oil on the body before the soul leaves it, that it has some value.
But the point is they assume the soul is there. The Egyptians have in their book of the dead a weird idea that a soul hovers around over the body for a while and that that soul is there for I think it’s three days and they have to do certain things in order to woo the soul and hold it for a while.
Now it’s error, it’s tragic blindness, but it assumes something and takes for granted that which I say is the common property of all the races and all the religions of the world since time began. And there is not a people anywhere in the world that doesn’t have some idea of this. Man has a soul. Even superstition supports it.
Even the superstitious and false beliefs that men have as when they look in a mirror, the soul goes from them. When they break a mirror, they have shattered the visual image of themselves and so on. All of that, of course, is superstition, and it has no value except for this, that it shows once more that what is openly taught in the Bible and tacitly assumed in the Bible also is carried over from the dim beginnings of things and man has always believed that he has a soul.
Not only is this true, but one might almost say that the belief in the fact of the human soul is a test of our humanity and the rare one who denies it. Now there are some people that are just plain pig-headed, there isn’t any other name for them, and some of them become philosophers. Pig-headed philosophers they are. That is, they don’t have any particularly good reason for anything, they were just pig-headed. We used to say on the farm, bull-headed. But I like the word pig-headed better.
And there were one now and again, a rare pig-headed individual who insisted man doesn’t have a soul. But do you know something? That the man who comes forth declaring or throwing doubts upon the soul or declaring that man doesn’t have a soul is always a strained man. He’s always suspect.
And he’s always looked upon as something of a monster in society. And while he may get some publicity while he lives, they shrink from him and pull away from him as from a three-headed man or some other abnormality in nature. So the man that dares declare man doesn’t have a soul, as John B. Watson did and some others, he’s always looked upon as a monstrosity and a deformity in nature.
He has dehumanized himself and has sold out the value of himself as a human being and insists upon being something less than a man. For a man leads a dog down the street, if the man doesn’t have a soul, then the dog’s better off because the dog’s built better than the man and gets along better and isn’t easily killed and he’ll stand up under worse conditions and doesn’t take so much to eat and doesn’t have so many responsibilities and doesn’t have to pay income tax and doesn’t worry about the dead and death and the future and judgment.
And I say a man leading his dog down the street, if the man stops and talks to his friend and says, I don’t believe in the soul, he dehumanizes himself, makes himself less than the dog that he leads on the chain by his side.
Now, our Lord Jesus Christ took the soul for granted. I do not know anywhere in the entire New Testament where He said in so many words, Verily I say unto you, man hath a soul. He didn’t need to say it. The whole Old Testament taught it. The book of Psalms teaches it. And the man is admonished to be still and talk to his own soul upon his bed.
And we read about the souls of the righteous being in the hands of God. We read about the soul all through the Old Testament. So Jesus, when he spoke in the New, did not need to say, Verily I say unto you, man hath a soul. He took it for granted, and the soul in the mouth of Jesus, the soul is the endless part of the man. Often as not in the Bible, it is used synonymously with the spirit.
Now if you have a razor blade, a Gillette blue blade in your hand, and are in the habit of slicing theology very, very thin, and getting the word of God rightly dissected, dissected, or vivisected, then I will have to explain to you that the word soul and the word spirit are sometimes used synonymously in the Scriptures.
There would be those who would rush out and prove to me that that is not so. But you can prove so many things and yet not arrive anywhere. Sometimes the word spirit and the word soul are used synonymously as being the interior part of the man, that part of the man which is endless.
Now the body isn’t endless. The body is mere matter. Man, I repeat, fades as the leaf. And your body isn’t endless. When you’re 16 years old, you think it’s going to be. When you’re twice 16, you’re beginning to worry about it. And when you’re three times 16, you know it’s not going to be. And when you’re four times 16, you’re wondering how soon it’s going to dissolve. That’s about the size of it.
But we imagine that the body is endless until we think a little about it and look around us and then we know that it is not. The body has no life in itself. I never can get mad at the human body, as some people can, and blame it for everything. The Bible never blames the human body for anything. It’s a tabernacle. You might as well blame these four walls for what I say in it as to blame the human body for what goes on in it.
The human body is amoral. It’s neither good nor bad. It has no moral quality attached to it. The body is simply the tabernacle, the dwelling place. You might as well blame a Packard automobile for committing a murder because a man buys a Packard automobile and gets behind the wheel and goes out somewhere to shoot down someone. An automobile is simply amoral.
The man who gets behind the wheel gives for the moment its moral quality to it. And a Packard automobile being driven by a good man on his way to church is a good thing. An automobile, the same car being driven by an evil man on his way to a gambling den is an evil thing, and yet it isn’t either good or bad. It’s whatever the man in it makes it to be for the moment.
So, the human body can do evil, and it’s capable of evil. And yet it’s not capable of evil at all. It is the humble and helpless servant of the man who lives in it. You live in that body of yours, sir, so don’t you blame your body for anything. It’s absolutely guiltless. It’s not to blame for anything. It is what you make it to be.
That is why a man, when he gets converted, his old body lives a better life. It’s the same old body. God converts a bald-headed man. He doesn’t put a new thatch of brown hair on top of his head. He’s still a bald-headed man. God converts a one-legged man. He doesn’t give him two legs. He’s still a one-legged man. He’ll get a new leg when the Lord comes.
The Lord converts a man who has some difficulties or troubles, chances are, he’ll let him pretty much go on the same. You’ll recognize him on the street. You’ll see him going down the street there. You say, isn’t that Mr. Jones that lives across the street from me? Why, he was always on his way to the saloon. And usually he was taking in the whole sidewalk when he came back. But he’s got a Bible under his arm. What’s the matter? Same old Jones. You recognize him, but there’s a new man living in there. And the wheel has been taken over by a new driver, the soul.
So, the soul is the central part of the man; is the endless part of the man. The body isn’t endless. It’s going to dissolve and go back to dust as soon as the soul withdraws. Just as soon as the soul leaves it, it goes back to dust.
Now a poor, ragged and imperfect illustration might be what happens to a house when you move out of it. You ever go out into the country and see a house that nobody lived in for six months? Always goes to rot and ruin. Way to keep a house up to live in it.
Now that’s a poor illustration of a glorious fact that as long as the soul is the tenant there, as Bryant said, the soul comes from afar, a royal guest, to live for a little while in this tenement of clay. As long as it lives in that tenement of clay, why, you have a live body. As soon as it withdraws, you have a dead body.
It’s a solemn and almost eerie thing that when a doctor is forced to decide whether or not a man’s dead, he’s deciding whether the soul is left or whether it hasn’t left. He doesn’t know it, he has other terms for it, but that’s what he’s deciding nevertheless. When he runs and puts a stethoscope on a man’s chest, he’s trying to find out whether the soul is still in the tenement house, or whether it’s packed up and gone and left the house to decay.
I say the body is the least essential part of a man. It is simply, as one man called it, a concatenation of atoms. Just a group of atoms and molecules that have gotten together for a while, and you put a hat on it and go down the street and say, what a big boy am I. But you’re just a walking concatenation of atoms, that’s all you are. That’s another man’s way of saying it.
But the soul is the essential part, and just as soon as the soul decides to wing away, there won’t be anything there for you to put a hat on. The body will decay, depart. It is in the soul that memory lodges.
I remember years ago I preached a sermon that I called Memory, Treasure or Terror. That must have been a good sermon, I’ve never dared to preach it since. You can do lots of things when you’re young that you never dared tackle when you get older, you know. You don’t know as much as you did then, and you’re not as wise.
But I said that memory was either a treasure or a terror to a man. To be suddenly called upon to remember the deeds done in the body would be a treasure to some men, but a terror to other men. And intelligence, and moral perception, and moral responsibility, and everlastingness, and the hope of heaven, and of endless peace, all these repose in the soul, and that’s the essential part of the man.
That’s why a man can be a four, an amputee four times, have all his arms, his legs, everything gone. That’s why he can be by the terrors of war chopped to pieces, and still if we can just patch him up and hold him together long enough, long enough that soul can remain there, he’s still the man that he was, though crippled and hindered by the failure of his body to respond to the impulses of the soul.
My friend, you have a soul, and that’s the essential part of you. It is that that speaks when you say, I. It is that that prays when you say, O God, come to me. It is that of which Jesus spoke when He said, into Thine hand I commit my spirit. It is the essential part of the man. Theologically, there may be a distinction between soul and body, but for all proper human purposes as I speak now, it is the same. So, you do have a soul.
Now, the New Testament teaches something else. The New Testament teaches that man’s soul must be saved. It teaches that if a man saves his soul, all his being is saved. But it teaches that if he loses his own soul, then everything else goes down in ruin.
And Jesus our Lord said, what does a man gain if he, profit if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? He didn’t stop to explain that a man had a soul. He knew he had, and He knew that everybody to whom He addressed himself knew he had. And He knew that everybody that would read that word down the centuries would know that he had, so He didn’t waste any time. And He taught that a man must save himself. That there is the essential you, the everlasting you, the endless you within you, and that must be saved.
Now, if you’re as critical as some of my hearers sometimes are, you will say, I knew he was giving up. He’s a liberal. He said a man must save himself. Well, if quoting an apostle makes me a liberal, and I’m a liberal, Peter said, save yourself from this untoward generation, didn’t he? Save is the verb. Yourself is the object. And you is the implied subject, right? You save yourself, he said.
But of course, Peter wasn’t so foolish as to think that a man has any anodyne for his grief, that he has any panacea for his ills. Peter was not so foolish as to think that a man can forgive his own soul, or wash his own spirit, cleanse his own heart, he knew better. What he meant was, I preach unto you Jesus, the Redeemer, now take advantage of the opportunity. Go unto Jesus as you are and save yourself. And that’s what he meant, and that’s what I mean.
So, the Bible teaches that a man must save himself, in the sense that he must take advantage of the fountain that was opened in the house of David, that royal fountain for sin and uncleanness, that flows from Emmanuel’s veins. A man can cause his own soul to perish by neglecting it.
Now the soul has enemies. It would be wonderful if everything was geared to the salvation of a man’s soul. But everything is geared exactly the opposite. Fallen nature is not geared to the saving of a man’s soul. Think of the millions of people there are, in parts of the world that work from sunup to sundown.
Brother King the missionary tells us of those who never know what it is to have enough in their stomach from the time they’re born till they die. The man with the hoe immortalized by the French painter, and the American poet, whose brow slopes back, and whose brutal jaw hangs down. The necessity of making a living has brutalized him.
I’ve seen the tired old woman come out of the factory, or come in off of the farm, so fatigued that she was staring straight ahead, old before her time. She had no interest in her soul. She had no time to sit down. If she sat down to read the Bible, she’d fall asleep.
Too tired to do anything but push herself till she died. Fallen nature is no friend of God’s. Fallen nature is no friend of grace.
And the winds that blow through the corridors of this world, do not blow heavenward, they blow hellward. The streams that flow through the riverbeds of this world, do not flow heavenward, they flow hellward. And the dead fish goes downstream. And the man without anchorage goes the way the wind blows. Nevertheless, you have a soul to save and a God to glorify. A soul to save.
A lot of these theologians who don’t like that song, they don’t like to sing it. The sure divine my trust betray; I shall forever die. It bothers their conscience and confuses their theology, so they run a blue editorial, blue pencil through that line, don’t sing it. A soul to save, a God to glorify, a never dying soul to save, and fitted for the sky. One of the greatest theologians of the last thousand years wrote that hymn. And I go along with him.
God has given you your soul as a ship owner entrusted to a captain, a noble ship laden with fabulous cargo. He said, now bring her in. Bring her in. She’s ticketed for Liverpool or Dakar or somewhere else. Take that ship through and discharge your cargo there. Get your receipts. I want to know you’ve taken her through. That’s why the tradition of the sea is that the captain stays by the ship until the last man, and if need be, goes down with the ship.
That’s why that fine Swede or Norwegian, Carlsen, stayed by that ship until he knew there was no chance. He was only doing what the masters of ships have done for centuries. Because when a man walks to the deck, a captain, he has a charge in his hand. All that fine, noble, proud ship is in his charge, plus all of the cargo and passengers, if any.
And God has said to us now, here, you’ve got a soul. You have a soul. I’ve given you a soul. I’ve given you that essential part of you, that which is a treasure house stored with memories and imaginations and rich treasures. That bank vault stored with all the gold of Ophir; it all belongs to you. You see to it that you make that shore at last.
My poor old Dad, I repeat, 64, 62 at that time, maybe, years of age, used to sing, when the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there. Used to shake his old head after he’d wasted 60 years of his time. Used to shake his head, and that tough hearted old man would cry like a baby and say, only that’ll be true of me.
Only that can be true, nothing else matters how wise he was. I think it was true of him. For he gave his heart to the Lord and lived four years. I believe he was saved and is in heaven tonight. God had given him that cargo. He said, now you discharge. You take it through because you’re accountable to me. And if in that day, when the roll is called, we can be there and answer to our name.
The old Song Camp meeting song says, I’ll be present when the roll is called. I’ll answer to my name. To be present and answer to your name. You say your body, no, no. Your body will long ago have been dissolved into dust. And will be rolled around in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and hills and trees. You’ll not take that body that you’ve got now with you. But there’s an essential part of you that you’ll take, all right. That’s the part I’m interested in tonight. You say, what about a body?
A man asked me tonight for a book on what we’ll be like after death. I didn’t have at the moment such a book. But the Bible does not teach us that we are going to take this particular body to heaven. I’ve always been disappointed with mine. I want to weigh 185 pounds in my sock feet. And the best I could do for up until I was about 40 was 135. I’m really a heavy weight now, 152. But I’ve always been interested in fine bodies. And always had more or less to limp around with this smiling imitation of one.
But that isn’t going to go to heaven with me. Thou fool that thou sowest isn’t going to come up, but a new body such as God giveth it. It’s going to be somewhat like this one, only perfect and wonderful. But it’s not going to be the same old one.
Got the rheumatism, Grandpa? You’re not going to take the rheumatism to heaven with you. Don’t worry about that. Rest peacefully. Arthritis don’t go to heaven. You’re going to leave that in a hole in the ground someplace. God Almighty is going to call you up with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God and the shout of the Lord Himself. And when that shout comes, you’ll leave all those old lined up joints of yours and old hard arteries, you’ll leave them in that hole in the ground.
Thank God for those holes in the ground. There’s someplace to crawl away to rest while the Lord gets your mansion ready. You’re going to leave it down here. We’ll all be good looking up there. As good looking as Him who is the Lily of the Valley and the Rose of Sharon.
When He walked the earth among men with His deity disguised and wore the common garment of the peasant of Palestine, there was no beauty in Him that one should desire Him. And when they pulled Him and plucked out His beard and slapped His holy face and bruised His cheeks, He was marred more than any man and His visage more than the sons of men. And they looked at Him and He was not beautiful then, but He was the beautiful Jesus, nevertheless. And He is the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley.
Not all the stars that shine in their splendor, shine like His face. And we saw Him with His face shining like the sun and the beauty of Jesus. The beauty of Jesus will be upon all of His people. If they’re redeemed and cleansed and have walked in faithfulness and in the light and His name shall be on their foreheads. Some people think that God will write His name like some fella puts a big sign on Jesus only or Jesus saves on his lapel. That’s all right, do it if you want to, but that’s not what it means.
God isn’t going to write across your forehead and tattoo you with His name. It doesn’t mean that at all. His name shall be on their foreheads. What’s the forehead? It’s the first seen part of a man. As he walks along upright on the earth, the first seen part of a man is his forehead. And the name, the nature of God will be on that forehead.
Let the beauty of Jesus be upon me. Let the beauty of God be upon me, prayed Moses. And so, it is the beauty of God’s nature upon the forehead of the man, upon the countenance of the man. There is no need of the sun for the Lamb is the light thereof, and the beautiful, redeemed bodies like equivalent to and commensurate with the glory of their souls.
A good man doesn’t have a body commensurate with what’s in the body. It would be like putting several million dollars in royal crown jewels in a pine box and then letting the worms eat holes in the pine box yet. Letting the weather beat it till it turns gray. And there’s nothing beautiful about it. And you look at it and you say, is that anything valuable there? And a man says, valuable, jewels like King Solomon never saw, that’s what’s there. And you smile and say that old gray weather-beaten pine box with worm holes in it. Yes, sir.
People look at Christians, I think a dear old brother Tom Hare that sits over there. He isn’t there tonight. And He sits over there, red face and Irish. Getting old. He’s as handsome as the average man. I don’t mean he isn’t. But who’d ever dream to look at that old fellow with the jewelry of God that accumulated in that soul? Who’d ever imagine? Who’d ever imagine that in that weather beaten old frame somewhere hidden away in the real man there is that which looks like God and is beautiful like God? I say who’d imagine it? But it’s true. And it’s true with every saint of God.
There used to be in this church a little old lady named Mrs. Smith. Not the little Mary Smith down here. She’s still living. But this little old bent over lady. Remember she used to walk like this all the time. And she had lots of money. She gave money to the church in large sums. She had lots of money. She didn’t need any help.
But she was all bent over from an accident. And the only thing about her that looked really all right was that happy little face looking up from that bent over frame. People used to see her and pity her and give her money. She’d take it and give it to the Lord and laugh. They thought she was a cripple on the street because she was all bent over. She never could straighten up. She’d always have to way over here look up at you and talk.
Who imagined that the wealth of the Indies could not compare with what was in that little old bent over body? Will you imagine it? I often tell and repeat I suppose ad nauseum the song that I heard once by a little crippled girl years ago in the Grace Methodist Church in the city of Akron, Ohio. I never saw her before. I never saw her since.
I don’t know where, I suppose she’s in heaven now. She could be still living. But she was a hunchback. A real hunchback. Only about that high. And had that thin, sallow, sick face that such people get. And I heard her singing. Oh, cigarette smoking song. Singers were singing bass solo. Choirs that were as worldly as the devil and were singing delightful songs. They were worldly and all the rest. And the pastor would get up with his white hands and preach on the top of a thousand streams. And there wasn’t enough religion around there, you know, to save a mosquito even granted that he was salvageable.
One night in our Epworth League, Epworth League we called it. This little girl got up. They had her singing. There she stood about as high as the desk, but all hunched down and came out behind here on her back. And her face sat down on her breast. And there she stood, and she sang, My soul is so happy in Jesus. For he is so precious to me.
How does it go? For it is music to hear it. His face it is heaven to see. For I am happy in him. And she stood there and sang it. And here I was in an old backslidden Methodist church, in a backslidden Epworth League. And she went on. They say I shall someday be like him, a little hunchback. I never saw her again. I don’t know who she was. I don’t know her name. She was not much to look at, deformed. But she’d heard that someday she’d be like Him. Her cross and her burden lay down.
You show me anything better than that, brother? What has University of Chicago got better than that? Show me anything better than that. Take a fine-tooth comb and comb the world and come up with a diamond that shines like that. The hunchback and the cripple, the body eaten with cancer, and the thick-lipped black man among the Zulus, the slant-eyed yellow man, all of us.
When we come and the soul gets a tabernacle worthy of it shall have a body like unto His glorified body. What do you got that’s any better than that? What do you got that’s even worthy of being compared with it? There’s nothing in the world that can be compared with it.
One of the greatest preachers that I ever heard used to preach in the Alliance. But he went modernistic. And as soon as they go modernistic in the Alliance, they get out. That’s why we never have a modernist in the Alliance. It’s just not healthy. Nobody bothers him. He just freezes out and goes away. Or he, I mean, gets out somehow. And he’s a great preacher, this young man. One of the greatest preachers from the standpoint of ability to preach that I’ve ever listened to.
It came through the other day that he had said that we who preach the full gospel are preaching only a mutilated gospel. This is only a mutilated thing. And he was saying all sorts of unpleasant things. He said we had social implications. And that we were to preach social meanings to our gospel. Maybe so, but I’ll settle for that glorious truth. Let a little hunchback girl raise a happy shining face to heaven and sing. They say I shall someday be like Him, and know, it’s true. Don’t let the devil rob you of the glory.
But I got off there because I was saying that fallen nature isn’t geared to save your soul. Neither is fallen human nature. All around about you. The fallen human nature is determined that your soul shall not be saved. The fallen society is not going to allow you to be too good a Christian. No, no. You want to join a church where you can do a new vena now and again and compact, compress your religion into certain hours. They’ll give you a place and they’ll say this is wonderful and they’ll invite you in. But if you want to be saved, they’ll reject you.
I say unto you that every Christian is a social spotted bird. And just as soon as he’s truly converted, he’s a spotted bird. I talk sometimes to liberals and men who hold other views. And I want you to tell it around, brother, if you ever happen to talk about me when you’re in company. I want you to talk it around. I want you to tell people, Tozer is an evangelical. No, no, no, no, a conservative. I am not a conservative.
I’m an evangelical. I not only believe in it all, but I believe that it ought to be activated and an engine put in the chassis and that it ought to be moving. I admit that my fundamentalist and evangelical friends sometimes make me ashamed. Just as there’s hardly a family that you don’t have a relative you’re ashamed of. You know, almost all.
We used to have somebody named Marianne in our family years ago. I never saw this old lady. But she must have been pretty bad because my father never would allow her name to be mentioned. There never, all the time that I was a young boy growing up until I was 15, I never heard my father mention my aunt or my great aunt, Marianne Tozer.
Now, she really must have been bad because her name was prohibited. Nobody mentioned it. And if the only reason I ever found out I had that great aunt or something, Marianne, was because they whispered to me, don’t ever mention her name. I don’t know what she’d ever done. I don’t know what she’s done, but she certainly must have been a tough one. She died and I don’t know where she is. By the grace of God, she might be in heaven, I don’t know.
But she was the member of the family everybody was ashamed of. She might not have been such a bad old soul if you’d get to know her. But my father and mother were going to see to it we didn’t get to know her. That’s all there was to that. Almost everybody’s got somebody in the family that you’re a bit ashamed of. And I have, you know, there are fundamentalists you’re ashamed of.
I heard somebody on the radio yesterday. I won’t tell you what radio or where it came from, but I was ashamed of him. What he was doing was just plain moronic, brother, that’s all. That fella like that drools at the chin and needs a kerchief 24 hours a day to keep from drowning. And you can’t tell me that he’s got any sense. Yet it came over a fundamentalist radio.
I’m ashamed of that. I’m just ashamed of the way some of God’s people act in the name of the Lord. But that isn’t going to scare me off, because I had an Aunt Marianne Tozer people didn’t like. I’m not going to change my name to Jones.
And because some fundamentalists insist upon having long ears and waggling them on slight provocation. I’m not going to stop saying that I’m an evangelical. I believe in the stream of Christianity that flowed from the wounded side of Jesus and comes down to this present day. The whole Bible for the whole world forever.
Now. I say society will make a speckled bird out of you just as soon as you start actually start telling the truth and living up to it.
Now the soul may be lost and about finished. The soul may be lost in numbers of ways. It may be lost by not knowing it can be lost. That’s some people’s fault. And some may lose the soul by not believing they can lose it. But most people lose the soul by neglecting it. Leaving it unplanned and unforgiven. There’s a word they used to use.
I don’t know they ever use it anymore. It’s the word shriven. S-H-R-I-V-E-N It’s the past perfect of the word, shrove. It’s an old Catholic expression. But I sort of like it somehow or other. A fellow went and got shriven.
Now I don’t know that it worked. I’m afraid some of these fellows that pretended to be shriven somebody, then it didn’t work, you know, and they left them, and they found them. But the point was, a man felt he wasn’t fit to die. And he had to have help. And he called in somebody to tell him the way. And he confessed his sins and posed to tell God what a sinner he was. And got assurance of sin forgiven. And got his soul cleansed. And his garments washed. And got ready to go. They call that being shriven.
Brother that’s a good word. I wouldn’t go to a priest to get shriven. But I’m willing to go to the high priest to get shriven. Take your poor old, battered soul. And your poor old, stained travel garments, covered with dust and torn by a thousand thorns. Take them to Jesus and get shriven. Go to Jesus and have Him cleanse your soul. And wash him and purify him and forgive the past and put it behind him. And say I’ll never remember it anymore. And get fixed up and ready. Ready to go.
The bride spends weeks getting ready for the wedding. Get ready. Many a man loses his soul because he doesn’t believe he can lose it. Or because he carelessly fails to get it shriven. Washed and cleansed and purified.
So, I believe in the purifying power of the blood of Jesus. I believe in the best and dearest Father. I believe in the power of the blood of the Lamb to make a bad man good and a dirty man clean and an evil man righteous and a sinful man pure. I believe in it.
And as Moody said, he believes in instantaneous conversion. So, you don’t have to work at it for three weeks or six weeks or ten weeks. Instantaneous conversion. A man can kneel down impure and rise pure. By the blood of the everlasting covenant. Man has a soul. And amid all the creature noises, and how many there are. All the creature noises. They’re multiplying. Noise is every place.
There is the thin still voice of the soul, saying, be reconciled to God. That voice is still sounding from within the depths of your being. That’s the real you, under the camouflage. That’s the real you. The depository for all that is everlasting and endless. That’s the real you. It’s that you that you will take to heaven or hell. It’s that you that will slip away and out of that body of yours.
Shriven or unshriven. Saved or lost. Redeemed or damned. What can we do but look up and say, Jesus lover of my soul. Let me to thy bosom fly. Charles Wesley wrote that. This sensitive, godly John Wesley. His brother said, Charlie. I don’t like your hymn. He said, why John? He said, oh it’s too intimate. He said, it’s intimate. Jesus lover of my soul. He said, how can the congregation sing it, Charlie? It’s too intimate.
But 150 years have proved the wisdom of Charles Wesley’s choice. John could be wrong, you know, and he was at that time. In most everything he was right. But his sensitive soul couldn’t quite bring himself to sing before the congregation. Jesus lover of my soul. I don’t see anything indelicate about it, do you?
Suppose we just sing it tonight. No other church in the whole United States, in the evening would sing Jesus, lover of my soul. Let’s sing it anyhow and be different. Jesus, lover of my soul. And if you hear the voice of your soul crying within you, why, Jesus is your friend and your lover. And he waits to welcome you. Let’s stand as we sing.