“The Church’s Greatest Need: Spirit-Filled Members“
The Church’s Greatest Need: Spirit-Filled Members
Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
November 4, 1956
This will be, tonight, the third and last in a series of three talks which I have been giving on the gifts of the Spirit. And I want to read some from the Scriptures, and if you will be so kind as to allow me to read the same scriptures again, because I want to keep refreshing your minds with the Scriptures.
You can turn to chapter 12 of 1 Corinthians, where the man of God says, there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are differences of administration, the same Lord, and there are diversities of operations but the same God which worketh all in all. The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal. For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge with the same Spirit, to another faith with the same Spirit, to another the gifts of healing with the same Spirit, to another the workings of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of spirits, to another diverse kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. But all these worketh that one in this self, same Spirit, dividing to every man several as he will. For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body being many, are one body, so also is Christ.
Now I think I’ll read another passage. Ephesians 4. There is one body and one Spirit, even as you are called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, the Father of all, who is above all and through all in you all. And unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore, he saith, when he ascended upon high, He led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men.
Then he shows that it’s Jesus in verses 9 and 10. And he says He gave some apostles and some prophets and some evangelists and some pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the Saints through the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, and to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. That we henceforth be no more children tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine by the slight of men and cunning craftiness whereby they lie in wait to deceive, but speak the truth in love, may grow up into Him in all things, who is the Head, even Christ, from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.
Then I want to read this also, just two verses, 1 Corinthians 12:31 and 14:1. 1 Corinthians 12:31 and 14:1 says, But covet earnestly the best gifts, and yet show I unto you a more excellent way. I realize that verse 31 has been a hiding place for a lot of carnel Christians. They say gifts, gifts, talk about gifts, love is better, but they don’t have love either. And then 14:1, follow after love and desire spiritual gifts.
Now, my method of dealing with any subject has been to tear right into it and say what has to be said. And so, I have been talking about the great need of the gifts of the Spirit back in the church. And what I have been saying is being echoed, not my voice, but it’s being echoed and re-echoed all over the world. I do not mean that they’re hearing me, but I mean that God is saying the same thing to many thousands of people around the world, every denomination. So that it seems to be that when God wants to do a thing, He doesn’t start only in one local place, but he says the same thing to various people in various parts of the world. And they find they know each other and harmonize.
When I was in Canada with the IFES, International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which is part of InterVarsity, I there met a man that I had known of and corresponded with for some time, Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, who is the pastor of the great cathedral, or chapel they call it, I think, Westminster Chapel. It’s a vast church right under the shadow of Westminster Abbey. They have there a very large church, and I’d heard of this man.
And when I heard him preach, and he heard me preach, it was an astonishing thing how we harmonized. He had been a great reader, has been down the years, of the Puritan divines. Now, of course, he’s, first of all, a great Bible student. He couldn’t be anything else and be in the church that Campbell Morgan founded. But he had been a great reader of the Puritan divines, and he had arrived at certain conclusions regarding the Holy Spirit as a result of his reading the Puritan divines.
Well, he’s in London and I’m in Chicago, and we had never met before. And I had not read the Puritan divines. I know who they are, Bunyan and Owen and the rest, but I had never taken to them very much. But I had taken very strongly to the mystical divines, the mystical theologians, Augustine and Julian and Eckhart and the great number that have come from Spain, Scopoli and Molinus and Fenelon and Towler, and many others, and the great Scotch divine who is the only mystical Calvinist that I know about, Samuel Rutherford.
And I had read those books and he had read over on the other side, but we had arrived from two different paths at exactly the same conclusions, so that when I heard him, I thought I was listening to myself preach, only he did it better. And when he heard me, he felt he was listening to himself preach.
Now this is unusual, but it is God saying the same thing to men who will have their hearts open. And so, what I have said about the gifts of the Spirit, and shall say tonight, is not a private view of a little man who doesn’t know his way home after midnight. But it is the conviction arrived at by vast numbers of persons of the evangelical persuasion in many parts of the world in many denominations.
I have said also, and want to say very carefully, that what I’m saying to you is not a result of any contact that I have had with those good people who are called the tongues people. I have told you at great length why I could not go in with that group of people. There are many, many of them, the Church of God this, and the Church of God that, and the Church of God this, all over the country.
And they’re losing their testimony. The holiness people have long ago lost theirs, and the tongues people have lost theirs because they’re keeping quiet on the one thing that made them stand out. And the fundamentalists are losing theirs and are looking around for something better. And God, I want to say, is not leading in any direction. I have not changed my mind, and this is not a fine way of saying it was nice to know you. I’m going among the tongues people. I couldn’t possibly do it for the five reasons I gave you two weeks ago. Or maybe it was only a week ago. Two weeks ago, I guess.
Now, having said that, I want to tell you why the gifts of the Spirit in the church of Christ are not only desirable, but they’re absolutely imperative. Let me, in my usual fashion, begin a way back and move up.
Now, let me show you why it is absolutely necessary that we should have the gifts of the Spirit in the Church, and in this church. Because one of the results of the fall is a twofold blight, which we call temporality and mortality. Now, man, however brilliant he may be, and however wise, all men everywhere, has written across their hearts these two sentences: You must go, and you must die.
Now, those two sentences are written by the great God Almighty. Temporality and mortality. Temporality says, you must go, you can’t stay. And mortality says, you must die, you can’t live. Now, because this is true, then all the works that man does partakes of what man is. And the same blight that rests upon sinful, fallen man, namely temporality and mortality, rests upon every work that he does.
All the work of a man’s hand, however noble it may be, however inspired by genius, however beautiful, however wonderful, and however useful, and however inspiring, all the work of fallen man has these two sentences written across it. You can’t stay, and you can’t live. You came to go, and you came to die.
So that everything from a sonnet to an oratorio, to a great bridge, to a great canal, to a great painting, to a great poem, to a great novel, everything has on it this temporality and mortality. It’s got to die, and it’s got to go. Perpetuity and eternity are not in men, and they cannot impart it to what they do.
But God is bringing into being a new order. God is bringing into being a new order, and a new order which shall have exactly the opposite of temporality and mortality. That new order is to be of eternal duration and to be infused with eternal life. And this new order, it’ll finally show itself in the new heaven and the new earth. It shall show itself in the city that comes down from heaven as a bride adorned for her husband. And all this has in it eternal duration. It does not come to go, it comes to stay. It does not come to die, it comes to live.
Now, my brethren, of this new creation, Christ Jesus is the head, and the Church is the body. And individual believers are the body’s members. Now there’s a simple picture, anybody can see it, but there it is. The old Adam fell down and all of which he was the head fell down with him, and God wrote across it, mortality and temporality, you must die and you must go.
But the new man came and died and went and rose and lives in order that he might be the head of a new creation which has not upon it temporality but perpetuity, which has not upon it the mark of death but the mark of life forevermore.
Now, these believers are yet in their unredeemed body. I want you to hear me. Every believer, I don’t care whether it be the sweetest saint that kneels in prayer tonight, redolent of sweet perfume and incense, or whether it be the newest convert that blundered into some mission somewhere tonight and was saved, every believer has an unredeemed body.
Now, it’s potentially redeemed, but it’s not actually redeemed. And in case any of you might worry about my orthodoxy, let me read it to you. It says, for the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption to it. What? The redemption of our body, so that the saints of God live in an unredeemed temple. They live in an old body, and upon their brain is written two words, it came to die, and it came to go.
And upon their mind, the mind of the saints, is written, it came to die, and it came to go. And upon their nerves and faculties and powers, even redeemed men and women, they have within them the seed of God and eternal life, but they dwell and express themselves through this unredeemed fallen body. And the result is that upon their brain and mind and nerves and faculties and powers and talents and gifts, there God is saying, it’s got to die and it’s got to go.
Therefore, God can’t use them to do a permanent and eternal work. God can’t use a man who is impermanent to do a permanent work, and He can’t use a man who’s got to die to do a deathless work. The Eternal Spirit alone can do an eternal work. I wish you could write this across your heart. The Eternal Spirit alone can do an eternal work.
Now let’s look at the illustration for just a little bit. You know, we think our eyes do a work. The artist thinks his hand and his eyes do the work. And the musician thinks his fingers do the work. And the singer thinks his throat does the work. And gifted people everywhere think that their feet do the work, or their hands or their ears or their tongue or their nose. They think that the members do the work.
Well, there could be a greater mistake made anywhere than to think that your hands ever did any work, my brother. Your brain does the work through your hands. And if the brain should suddenly be cut off or die, your hands would lie helpless. It is the brain of a man that does the work. It is the brain of a man that plays that piano and the brain of a man that paints a picture. It’s the brain of a man that smells a rose. It’s the brain of a man that hears musical sounds. It’s the brain of a man or woman. It’s the brain that does the work, not the hands. They are simply the instruments through which the brain works.
Now that’s common physiology. You’ll learn that in high school. Any doctor knows that. Any common person knows it. You and I know that it is not the man’s members that do the work. Nothing originates with your hand. You crochet or you paint or you cut or trim or glue up or fasten your work; nothing originates with your hand. It originates with your brain. And your hand is the organ through which it works. The eye doesn’t see anything. The brain sees the eye. You might as well say when you put a pair of binoculars to your eyes and look across on the other side of the hill, you might as well say the binoculars are seeing.
No, they’re not seeing. You’re seeing through the binoculars. Your intelligence is using the binoculars as an organ through which you can see.
And so your eyes never originate anything. It originates in your brain. Your ears never originate anything. It originates in your brain. And your ears bring the sound in mechanically and your brain says that’s flat, that’s sharp, that’s beautiful, that’s raucous, that’s sweet. Your ear, your brain tells you that.
Now that’s the illustration Paul gave. I didn’t give it. I’m only expatiating a little, as the brother would say, on what Paul said. That the brain works through the organs. And that if the brain is not there, or if it stops functioning, then all the organs stop functioning too.
And the Eternal Spirit alone can do an eternal work because the Holy Spirit must do the work through the members. He must himself do it. There is a sense in which you and I can’t do work at all. There is a sense in which we are unable to do any spiritual work of any kind. The Bible says, it is God that worketh in you to will and to do. So that instead of my doing it, God is doing it and using me as the organ. Instead of my eye doing the seeing, my brain is doing the seeing through two binoculars called eyes.
And so, the Holy Spirit takes men and uses them as organs through which He can express Himself in the body of Christ. It is Jesus that does it through the Holy Ghost operating through the members.
Now, my brother, He can’t operate through ungifted members. For instance, here I have a pair of hands. They’re about average and a little large for my size. I figure I got that working on a farm when I was a kid.
But there is something about these hands that I must tell you. I can’t play a violin. They’re ungifted hands. I can’t paint a picture. They’re ungifted hands. I can’t play that organ. They’re ungifted hands. I can barely hold a screwdriver and I’m getting worse as I get older if I have to screw a screw in somewhere at home to keep the place from falling apart. So, I have not any gifted hands.
And no matter how much genius might lie in that brain, there doesn’t, but supposing just a wild shot in the dark that there did, these two ungifted hands lie helpless. They can’t do anything. The brain can’t call them up, can’t call them up. The brain says, Tozer, go down and play something on the organ. I say, brain, I’d love to do it, but I have ungifted hands. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.
The brain says, Tozer, go paint a picture. And I say, I’d love to do it, but I haven’t a gift. There’s nothing in me that responds. Color, I don’t quite get it. Form and outline and perspective and all the artists talk, I can’t do it. I have a pair of ungifted hands.
All right, my brethren. Now, if we allow that in the body of Christ, there is such a thing as living members who are yet ungifted members, then you can see how we slow God down in His working for to bring into being this everlasting new thing that must stay and that must live. There must be the gifts of the Spirit present. They are the organs through which the Holy Ghost works to do His work.
Now, religious work can be done by ungifted man. Religious work, I repeat, can be done by ungifted man. But it is only the human mind doing a human work. It is only a mortal mind doing a mortal work.
And every work that a man does, whether he builds a church or writes a hymn or a book or promotes a movement or plays or sings or prays or organizes, no matter what he does, how early in the morning he may be or how late he may be up at night working on religious subjects, doing religious things, it is only a mortal brain doing a mortal job. And across all of it, God will write, it came to die and it came to go.
Mortality and temporality are written all over the church of Christ today because men are trying to do in the power of the flesh, that is the power of their own genius, what only the Holy Ghost can do. Genius cannot do an immortal work. Genius can only do a mortal work. And don’t be fooled by the loose use of the word immortal.
We say Michelangelo painted his immortal paintings. That’s only a careless use of the word. There are no immortal paintings. There are no immortal sonnets. There are no immortal musical compositions. There’s nothing immortal but what is in God and what God is in.
So, we can do work. And I would guess if you were to ask me, this would be maybe a rash guess, but since I’m in the mood, I’ll tell you that I think about 90% of the religious work in evangelical circles is done by ungifted men. That is, men who know how to do things but have not the gift of the Spirit. And they’re operating through the gifts of nature. And it is not grace operating but nature operating. It is not the eternal workings of the Eternal Spirit but the mortal workings of man’s mortal mind.
Now we are thrown back upon psychology and aesthetics. And that’s what we have. And this makes the gifts absolutely indispensable. In order that God might do His mighty and mysterious work with permanence and eternity in His heart, I would rather do one little work and have it live forever than to be the Pope and have what I’m doing die.
The Bible says in a rather cynical smile, better a living dog than a dead lion. And I’d rather work the littlest poodle that ever waddled along the sidewalk and have it alive than to have the biggest stuffed lion there is in the zoo. And I would rather do a tiny little bit of religious work and be unknown and live and die unheralded and unsung and yet have God Almighty right across my little bit of work, this came to live and last; than to have some great big work going on and have God right across it, this too shall pass.
Brother, when the Holy Spirit working through a man does a work, as the brain working through an eye or a hand does a work, when the Holy Spirit working through a gifted member does a work, then God will say of that work what the Psalmist said of God, thou remainest. Thou remainest. The heavens shall be folded up like a garment and as a mantle thou shalt change them, but thou remainest and thy years fail not.
Now, that man can’t do anything is a great shock, comes a great shock to a lot of carnal Christians, to a lot of saintlets. The saintlings, you know, if a gosling is a young goose, I suppose a saintling is a young saint and a very young saint.
And so these saintlings that believe in Jesus Christ and have their New Testament with them but have never discovered that you can’t do God’s work in man’s strength, that have never found out that an eternal work can’t be done by a mortal man, and that a lasting thing cannot be done by a man who can’t last, that somebody else has to do it, and that somebody else is the Holy Ghost. And when we get to this, it glorifies God and humbles man. We like to think we can do something.
There’s many a mother-in-law who’s praying that her handsome son-in-law might be called to preach because he has such a marvelous pulpit presence. This brother, the fact that the Holy Ghost has to do work or it can’t last, rules out all men’s boasted gifts.
For instance, charm. This is the day of charm, and there’s a lot of charm in religion, but I’ve been tough enough and cynical enough to see it and recognize it and had enough of the gift of the Holy Ghost to know this charm stuff, this Liberace business with its candelabras and its beautiful stage presence. Dear friends, I love you all. And brother, this charm stuff, and then this pulpit presence. They say, oh, he has such a charming pulpit presence. The greatest man that ever lived, the man that God Almighty works through.
Now, I say, He works through it, had this said about him, his letters are weighty and powerful, but his bodily presence is weak and his speech contemptible. The learned Corinthians said that man Paul, they said, you don’t want to listen to him. He writes tremendous letters. All right. They’d been reading first Corinthians, and they said, say, that’s got stuff.
They said that he writes tremendous letters, but they said he’s a disappointment. They said, when the people come in back to place to see the man that wrote that letter, here’s a man whose bodily presence is weak and whose speech is contemptible. And here was the Holy Ghost doing an everlasting work through a man that had no pulpit presence at all and had no golden qualities in his voice. He would have flunked out if he’d have tested out for a radio announcer, nobody would have had him because he didn’t have the golden seductive and delectable qualities that should be in a voice to get the ladies to buy what he wants them to buy.
Now a personality is another quality. They say, well the man, the man’s personality simply sparkles. Down the years I have watched those sparklers. Do you ever notice what a sparkler does? How it excites every kid for four blocks around for one minute, and then you hold a hot stick in your hand that soon cools off and that’s your sparkler. And these fellows with the sparkling personalities that have come up and gone. Here I am an old codger, and I have lived to see a positive, Gorgeous George parade of lover boyniks who have come up and sparkled and gone down and sparkled and gone down.
Well, the Holy Ghost, my brother, is going to rule out all this sparkle and charm and pulpit presence and magnetism. That’s another word, magnetism and dynamism. Those are lovely words. And talent, but they don’t mean anything because the man that God worked through was the man who had contemptible speech and a weak look. Now I don’t say that God couldn’t take a handsome man and work through him, but he would not work through his handsomeness.
I do not say God could not take a man with a dynamic personality and work through him, but he’d never use his dynamic personality. He would work through that, beneath that, and beyond that, but he’d never use that. The Holy Ghost doesn’t need it.
What does the mighty Holy Ghost, whose breath brought the world into being, what does He need of your bright eyes and curly hair? What does He need of your vibrant voice or mind? He doesn’t need it. This is awful humbling, and we’d like to be able, we’d like, when we retire, to have people come around and say, look at all this that this man did. If he did it, it’ll die. If he did it, it’ll pass.
But if he was a humble organ through which the Holy Ghost did it, it’ll live and it’ll last, and hell can’t burn it up, nor time can wear it out, because it’ll have the qualities of Deity in it. Thou remainest, O God, thou remainest.
And you’ll get a lot of religious people well-fed and coffeed up, and get them in a warm room with a lot of good-looking women and bald-headed men and a good musical instrument, and you get them to going, and brother, they can move into the flesh fast. You’d think to hear and look and see and behold and all the rest, that as a mouse eats his way into a cheese and thinks it’s heaven, so a lot of us Christians are eating our way into the kingdom of God. Come and believe on Christ and let’s go eat.
And so, we’re busy eating ourselves, eating ourselves into the work of God. My brother, we all have to eat. Some of us ought to eat more than we do, I suppose, and get a little flesh on, but the work of God is something else altogether.
The work of God doesn’t depend on good social spirits. It’s another thing. It is the Eternal Spirit working through gifts which He has imparted, which are also eternal, to do an eternal work. And anything that falls short of it is simply religion and nothing more.
So, God gets all the honor and man stands reverently with his head bowed and says, thine be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
Now I repeat the critical need in the church is the church should have these gifts, these organs through which the Spirit can do His work. Because the gifts are so rare, now don’t think the gifts are not present in the church. They are.
There’s never been a time when there weren’t a few of the gifts present somewhere in the church, or the church could not have clung together. The fact that there is a consecutive link upon link and link upon link in a chain of spiritual Christianity down the years shows that the Spirit’s gifts have always been present in the church, even sometimes among those who didn’t understand or didn’t believe.
Now what does the Scripture say? The Scripture says, ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost has come upon you. And it says, be filled with the Spirit. And it says, covet earnestly the best gifts. And it says, seek after love, but desire spiritual gifts.
Paul never meant to say to the Corinthians what a lot of fundamentalists have made him say. He never meant to say to the Corinthians that they were to choose between love and the gifts of the Spirit. He said, follow after love, but desire spiritual gifts.
And then he said, in case you want to know what gift I think is the most important, why rather that you might prophesy. And by prophesy he did not mean foretell events. He meant that God would put in the heart and the body and mind and throat and nerves of a man a strange, beautiful ability that would enable that man or perhaps that woman to speak with a strange quality of conviction and everlastingness.
Maybe it’s a housewife. Maybe it’s a man who sweeps the street. Maybe it’s a bishop. Maybe it’s an evangelist. Maybe it’s a humble pastor in a country parish unknown. Whoever it may be, he has a strange quality to speak with conviction and inspiration and lift that is not human, but divine. And the results, while they may not be best, for grace and size have a lot to do with it, they’ll be eternal and permanent.
So, it is not an either-or, either take Chapter 13, which is love, or 4:12, which is gifts. But the man of God said, both, both, covet earnestly the best gifts. And yet I show you a more excellent way, not another way to take in contradistinction to the way of gifts, but the way to make your gifts matter and mean something. That is love.
Now, somebody says, but what about, isn’t everybody, doesn’t everybody have the Spirit? Yes. And every Christian has. And in 1 Corinthians 12, we are told that. We’re all baptized into one body by one Spirit. And Paul says in Romans 8, that if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And Christ dwells in you, except ye be reprobate, so that every Christian does have a measure of the Spirit.
But the same chapter in which Paul explained this, he said, I don’t want you to be ignorant about spiritual gifts and covet earnestly the best gifts. So if the fact that we have a measure of the Spirit when we’re converted was all Paul wanted to us to know, he’d have said that and quit. But he went on to explain at great length.
And all this is the Christian’s birthright. It’s not alone for the great. It’s the birthright of the humblest Saint. 1 Corinthians 1:18-29 tells us that the people that were Christians in those early days were simple people. He said, where’s the wise, where’s the scribe, where’s the disputer of this world? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? But after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God. It pleased God for the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
For you see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty.
We were talking, and when we were having our prayer yesterday, we prayed three times a week here, we preachers. That is our times of prayer, along with all the other prayer meetings that are here and there in the church and on Sundays.
But we were discussing that little girl, that 16-year-old girl in Wales, during the revival with Evan Roberts. She would sing solos, and they weren’t much for singing solos. They were more choral people, those Welsh, as you know. And they sang the Metrical Psalter, which didn’t lend itself to solo work very much.
But this girl, and I’ve forgotten her name, she was 16 at the time, she would rise and sing. And as she sang, it was not the lyrical beauty of her voice. No doubt there are singers today, a Lily Pond, or a Toboli, or whoever it might be, maybe better singers. But she was a gifted soul, and the Holy Ghost was singing through that girl.
And the result was that audience would melt, melt. And Evan Roberts would rise to preach, and there was not much to do but quote the Scriptures and add a little. She had melted them, and wherever she would go, it was the same.
Thank God they didn’t know enough over there to put her on the radio and spoil her. Thank God they didn’t start writing her life history. Thank God she didn’t write a tract, My Life, from the nursery to the pulpit. She didn’t know to do that. She was a simple spirit-possessed girl.
And when she sang, the Welsh people were melted like snow before the rising sun. And then it was an easy job for the preacher to preach. And not a music critic anywhere ever said she had a good voice. But she had something better than a good voice. God took the despised and weak things of the world to confound the mighty.
Now what shall we do about all this? Shall we freeze up and hide and say, I’m not going to go fanatical? Let me say to you, as far as I know you, brethren, you could move in the direction of fanaticism at sixty miles an hour for twenty-four hours and still be a hundred miles short of it. You hear me? There’s not much chance of anybody being fanatical around here. We’re stone cold, that’s our problem. We’re stone cold. It isn’t fanaticism we need to be afraid of, it’s frost.
What shall we do then? Now if you were in danger, I’d warn you. If there was anybody around here that would start back there and do handsprings down the aisle, I’d warn you and I’d say, watch that, that’s not God. Danger of fanaticism. But there is no danger of fanaticism here. I get a grunt now and then from McAfee and nothing from the rest of you. So there’s no danger of fanaticism around here.
What shall we do? We sang it, bring your empty earthen vessels. Now remember, you can’t all rush up here and stand around and look embarrassed and sing bring your empty earthen vessels and go out and say it wasn’t that wonderful. You might just as well have stayed at home.
To be filled with the Spirit is a most solemn and most searching and most sometimes at first painful experience to go through. The actual Holy Ghost is not painful, He’s the Gentle Dove of God. But getting ourselves ready, getting cleaned up, getting poured out, getting confessed out, getting forgiven out, getting straightened out with people, getting restitution made, that can be pretty painful.
So, I’m going to give you three D’s. I’m not an alliterative preacher, but I’m going to give you three D’s. And I’m going to tell you that the first two D’s won’t do you any good, except as the first two steps will take you to the third, so these two first steps will take you to the third. They are desire, determination, and desperation. Now you put those down back of your mind. Now you sleek, well-ordered, well-taught toters of big Bibles, you’ll never be filled with the Holy Ghost until you desire to be.
Second, you’ll never be filled with the Holy Ghost even if you do desire to be, until you become determined to be. And though you should be determined that you are going to go through, you will not be filled until in desperation you throw yourselves into the arms of God.
I wrote something and I preached something here a few weeks ago, in which I said, around the shining light which is God, there’s a zone of obscurity, and we can’t think our way into it. We have to close our eyes and make the leap of faith into the arms of Jesus. After they’ve been through instructing you, after the last verse you can remember hasn’t done their work, after every trick and every thing you know to move toward God has failed, and yet your desperate heart cries, fill me now, fill me now. And then you move into that zone of obscurity where the human reason has to be suspended for a moment and the human heart leaps across into the arms of God.
Then I say, man’s talents and man’s glory and man’s honor and man’s beauty and man’s favor all goes out into the darkness of yesterday and everything is God’s honor and God’s glory and God’s beauty and God’s favor from here on. We have been broken and melted. It will not do us any good to come down here and stand. It will not do us any good even to come down here and kneel.
I got a letter from old brother Nicholson. Remember the Irish evangelist that God used as he’s used probably no man in the last 200 years? I got a letter from him the other day. He said I had a good laugh when I read your editorial about the danger of personal workers coming down and using a text to try to get the seeker through, patting his back and saying amen and another convert’s been made.
He says it’s a trick of the devil, Brother Tozer. And he said, I’ve got to the place where I’ll scarcely even give an altar call anymore because that’s the way they handle the converts. He said they pat them on the back and give them a text and say, now tell it and the fellow gets up bewildered and confused and befuddled and goes out, and says, I’m a Christian because I wasn’t cast out and that’s that.
Brethren, we ought to have such holy conviction upon us that we’d leap into God’s arms past all personal workers and past all so-called helpers. Sometimes I think they’re Job’s comforters and find God and be filled with His mighty Spirit to such a degree that no man can change our minds.
When I was 19 years old kneeling in the front room of my mother-in-law’s home before I was married, I was baptized with a mighty infusion of the Holy Ghost and I’ve been up against everything: Jesus only, tongues-ism and holiness-ism and Calvinism and all the isms that there are. They’ve all tried to beat me down and some say I went too far and some say didn’t go far enough. But brother, I know what God did and any tiny work God ever did through me dates back to the hour when I was filled with His Spirit. And it’s for you.
Now it’s past the time to close and I’m simply going to pray and then we’ll close.
O Dear Lord, time is short, and the hour is late and we have such little time to go. And religion has gotten organized now, Thy religion, Lord Jesus, so that anybody can do it, anybody. We don’t have to have Thy gifts anymore, the tragedy and the terror of it all. But Lord, still men build their Babylon’s, call them by Thy name, but they go down and perish.
Oh, we want our work to last for soon we shall be where the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest and only what the Holy Ghost does will last. We would yield our earthly vessels, we would bring our empty vessels, we would, if need be, come and ask Thee to begin to scrub the rust and the filth until our hearts are shiny clean, repositories for the Blessed Spirit. God bless everybody that listened tonight.
Now make us all see this, make us all understand it Lord how tragic it is to peter out at last and be cobblers in the kingdom of God and fool around and put patches on the roof and prop up the temple with sticks.
O God, and it’s everywhere men are doing it. We confess Lord God that we feel like being sick when we read the pages of the Sunday papers and some of those religious magazines. Adam’s brain is busy trying to do God’s work. We wonder Lord if it isn’t offering strange fire on the altar of God. We wonder if it won’t bring judgment in that day.
O Lord, save us from offering strange fire. Any fire we offer we want to be off the altar, Thy fire. Bless us now as we separate. Please don’t let us eat our way through a yard of pizza tonight and forget all about this. Great God, we pray Thee, give us gravity. That boy in his early teens here tonight with exuberance and nervous energy make him brave and serious.
When we think of thy 16 year old handmaid who yielded herself to the Holy Ghost and was the instrument in some places of the revival. We don’t excuse our 16 year olds. We don’t excuse the parents who think that their children ought to be permitted to just play when actually Lord God the crisis is on, the world is on fire and the judgment is drawing near and the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. My God, will Thou send us out brave and thoughtful to meditate on Thy Word.
Give us, we pray Thee, desire and determination and then push us on till we’re pushed over the cliff in desperation. And then, as a mother eagle stirs up her nest and then dives down and catches her young, Thou will catch us and fill us and get this and the work we do though it may not be vast will have eternity in its heart. Let us stand please.