“From Wilderness to Victory“
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.