Message 4 of 4 on the Deeper Spiritual Life by A.W. Tozer
February 12, 1956
“Our Relationships to God”
Now, this morning again, I want to talk on the deeper live, what it is and how we may enter into it. This will be the fourth in a series. I have for a kind of a text, the first two verses of the sixth chapter of Hebrews. Therefore, leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, or the doctrine of baptisms and the laying on of hands and the resurrection of the dead and of eternal judgment. That exhortation, let us go on unto perfection.
Now, I had wanted to, and have been wanting to talk about the deeper life, but I find that the expression is used to cover almost anything and everything. I want it to be understood that by the words that I do not mean a live deeper than the Scripture indicates.
I have said many times and repeat, that I do not want anything that cannot be found within the framework of the revelation, the Christian revelation. I do not want anything added. I don’t need it. I do not want it. I’m not interested in it. That is why I never buy books nor go listen to lectures on how to wake up your solar plexus and tune in to the cosmic process. All that is extra scriptural and any of it that’s good is found in the Word of God and anything that isn’t in the Word of God isn’t good.
So, I let those fellas talk to people who don’t know the Word and I will stay by the Word. I have said in conversations with people in private conversations that I am a Bible Christian. That is, if an archangel with wingspread as broad as a constellation were to come and shining like the sun and offer me some new truth, I’d ask him for reference, and if he couldn’t give it to me, and couldn’t show me where it’s found in the Bible, I would bow him out and say, I’m awfully sorry, you don’t bring in references with you. So, what I’m talking about is not a life deeper than the scriptures indicate, but merely one that is, in fact, what it professes to be in name.
Now, a Christian isn’t one who has been baptized necessarily, though a Christian is likely to be baptized. A Christian is not one who receives the communion, either one or both of the elements. A Christian may receive communion and if he’s properly taught, will, but that is not necessarily a Christian. A Christian is not one who has been born into a Christian home, though the chances are more likely that you will be a Christian if he has a good Christian background. A Christian is not one who has memorized the New Testament or who is a great lover of Christian songs, or who goes to hear the Apollo club sing Messiah every year. Now a Christian may do all of those things, and I think it might be fine if he did. But that doesn’t make a Christian. A Christian is one who sustains a right relation to Jesus Christ.
Christians enjoy a kind of union with Jesus Christ, a right kind of union. Everybody sustains some relationship to Jesus Christ, just the same as everybody in America sustains some relation to both friends and enemies of the country. We all sustain some relation. My personal relation is one of active hostility so far as it can be within the framework of Christian possibility. We can’t hate people but we can hate everything they stand for and I want them to know that I do when they are enemies of our country.
Everybody has a relationship to everybody else and everybody has a relationship to Jesus Christ. It may be one of adoring, faith and love. It may be one of admiration. It may be one of hostility. It may be one of complete carelessness, but it’s an attitude of some sort. A relationship of some sort exists between every human being and Jesus Christ. That is, every human being that ever heard of Jesus Christ. A Christian is one who sustains a right and proper relation to Jesus Christ, a biblical relation to Christ, one that he is right. That Christian sustains two kinds or relationships, or rather the union is two kinds, its judicial and vital. I’ll explain those two words.
In Romans, the fifth chapter, we have the judicial relationship that everybody sustains toward Christ. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have access by faith, into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Then in the book of Ephesians, the first chapter that very oft-quoted passage, He has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ according as He has chosen as in Him before the foundation of the world, and so on.
Now, I only quote those, not to give them exposition, but only to point out the fact that we sustain, toward God in Christ, a certain judicial relationship. Just as your son in the home has toward you a certain legal, judicial relationship, being born into your family, of your wife, you have legal obligations, and you can get in trouble with the law if you deny them. All law recognizes a certain right, the courts recognize that right. A relationship that is there between you and your son. It is not only the relationship of father to son biologically, it is a judicial relationship. You’re accountable before the law not to neglect him, abuse him, starve him or runaway and leave him. You got to look after him. He is your son.
Now, there is a relationship which we sustain toward God in Christ. It is the relationship of some children to the Father. Yes, we are children of God. There are so many verses that deal with that, that I don’t need to quote any one of them. You as bible students know that. Then, there is a vital relationship, which is another matter altogether. It is possible for a man to adopt a son. A husband and wife have no children and after a lot of waiting around, they decide that they’re going to adopt a boy.
So, they adopt that boy. Now, under law, he has the exactly the same relationship to that man, as if he were his own son. As the legal father before the law, he has the judicial relationship that makes him responsible for the care of that boy. He is responsible to feed and educate and bring up and shelter and care for that boy until he comes of a certain age. So that the relationship is judicial, that of father and son. But he has no vital relationship with that boy. He did not come from the long, age old life stream of that father. He came from some other live stream and was adopted into the family. So, he has a judicial, but not a vital relationship to that son, but a Christian has a vital relationship to God and to Christ.
He said, as I shall show tonight again, I am the vine and ye are the branches and the branch is a branch because it sustains a vital relationship. The life of the vine is in the branch and the life of the branch comes from the vine, and the two are united. That’s a vital relationship. So that a Christian is one who has been judicially, legally made a brother of Jesus Christ and a child of God. But he is more than that. He is one who has been vitally united to Jesus Christ by the power and motions of life so that he is vitally, livingly related to Jesus Christ.
Now, that’s where we begin and my brothers and sisters, that’s where almost everybody ends, in our circles. That’s where almost everybody ends. And so, Bible schools and Bible conferences and books and printing houses, all are dedicated to the constant repetition of the fact that we’re judicially and vitally related to Christ in salvation. And that’s as far as we go.
But there are other relationships which we can also bear toward Christ. And that’s what the writer meant in the Hebrews when he said, let us go on unto perfection. And that’s what it meant in 1 Corinthians chapter three, when the man of God told them that they were carnal and that they ought to move on out of that carnal state into a spiritual state.
There are at least three other relationships that everybody ought to bear toward Jesus Christ, not only the one that you entered into when you believed on Christ, and were born again judicially, and not only the volitional one which you entered when you were born again. So that’s how you entered. But there are there are three others, volitional, intellectual and emotional. And I want to talk about these relationships, this kind of union with Christ.
Now I say that our union is judicial and vital. It’s that by the virtue of our faith in Christ, but there is a volitional relationship too. And what do I mean by that? Well, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I know we preachers have a way of making things awful and then take ten minutes to get the people’s minds back again.
By volitional I mean, that a relationship of our will to God, so that every known will of God should be mine, every known will of God. Everything that God wills I should will, so that I will not only be judicially, legally related to him, and not only vitally related to Him in life, but that I will in my mind, in my volitional life, be united to him by doing and knowing and willing exactly as he does. Now that’s what I mean by, let us go on.
Most Christians do not go on to make all the will of God their will. They sing very tenderly that pretty little ditty, you know, O sweet will of God still bind me closer. I like that too. Don’t get me wrong. I like to hear it once every year or so. But, will of God still bind me closer, we can sing that and have moist eyes, and yet be selfish, and self-willed and not make the will of God our own. The will of God must be known, and then must be adopted as my will. And then I began to sustain a relationship of will, a volitional relationship toward Jesus Christ.
How do I know the will of God? By listening to stories told by preachers? No. How do I know the will of God? I know by prayer, by the study of the Bible and by experience, I go to the scriptures and I read it with regularity. And I go to prayer and I ask God for grace to help me to understand it. You know that song, “Break Thou the Bread of Life?” We have it in three stanzas in our book, but I read it in the Baptist hymn book this morning. I had it propped up while I was eating my gruel.
And looking at it, I find there’s another verse in there. I do not recall the verbatim wording of it but the third or fourth stanza of that hymn, prays that the Holy Ghost might enlighten the Word so we can understand it. That’s the part we don’t sing. I don’t think there is anything sinister in that. They just have to make room so they chop verses or stanzas and they chopped off that one.
Well, my brethren, I believe that the writer of “Break Thou the Bread of Life,” knew what she was writing about when she said, give Thou the Spirit Lord, dear Lord to me, that the Lord might give the Holy Ghost as a light upon the scriptures. So, if we pray and have the Spirit of God give us illumination, and we read the Word of God with careful attention and relish, and then we watch our spiritual experiences, there will begin to crystallize within us, a will that is God’s will.
I wonder if that’s what Jesus meant when he said, but ye have the mind of Christ. There is a mind. There is a set of an infinite number of attitudes and relationships within the heart. And these are all wrong to start with and they don’t all get corrected when we get converted either. And they don’t all get corrected after we’ve been to Bible school. They get corrected only by working on them, by prayer, by study, by spiritual experience, by the illumination of the Holy Ghost. Those attitudes begin to become spiritual instead of carnal. They begin to get right and then get straightened out.
There is a second relationship that I would mention to go on to, and that is an intellectual relationship to Jesus Christ. Now of course there is a sense in which the volitional and the intellectual come as soon as we’re converted, but there is another sense in which they do not, but wait on development and growth.
So, by the intellectual I mean, that we should have, that we should think the way Jesus Christ thinks. That we should think scripturally. That we should see things the way the Lord Jesus sees them. That we should learn to feel the way the Lord Jesus feels about anything or anybody. That we should love what he loves and hate what he hates.
Now, some of your hackles will get up here and you will say, Mr. Tozer, do you think God hates anything? Sure I do. He says so. Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Therefore, my God has anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. It is a psychological impossibility to love anything without hating its opposite. If I love holiness, I hate sin. If I love truth, I hate lies. If I love honesty, I hate dishonesty. If I love purity, I hate filth. I can’t help that. Don’t think that’s bad. Hate is only bad when it’s aimed against people made in the image of God, or when it springs out of some unworthy or low motive, like jealousy, or envy, or anger. But we should learn to hate what Jesus hates. And I’m sure that if we had the mind of Christ intellectually, so that we judged things the way He judges them, there would be less need for preaching separation from the world than there is today among Christians.
Talking about getting the mind of Christ and having the intellect sanctified, I will talk again about two men. I think I gave this either on the air or here at the church within recent months, but you can open a window anytime to get light and this is a window of illustration.
They tell me that there were in England two men, both of them of course Englishman, Keats and Milton. In my earlier Christian life, I read them a great deal then I got away from Keats. I still admire him very greatly for the marvelous music of his poetry, but there’s nothing of God in it and nothing of Christ. So, I don’t find it very helpful anymore. Milton of course will be alright. I think we’ll read Milton in heaven. But here’s what they, the critics said about these two men. They said Keats was an Englishman, born of English stock, reared in England, and I think never left England and died when he was in his 20s, an Englishman of the Englishman. Keats had read Greek literature so much that he had developed a Greek mind, and that his mind was not an English mind. He had nothing of the restrictions and strengths and weaknesses of the British mind at all. It was a Greek mind. He thought like the Greeks.
Then they said of Milton. Milton was an Englishman born English, of the English. Lived in England all his life, perhaps a few trips abroad, but not many. He lived and died in England, and is one of the second of all the great English poets. Yet they said Milton read the Bible so much, memorized it so much and lived in it so much, that he was a Hebrew in his heart and that Milton had a Bible mind. And then it got into everything he wrote. He couldn’t knock off a common sonnet of fourteen lines, but what somewhere in it would be the lilt and rhythm of the Hebrew melodies in the Old or New Testament verse. I understand the New Testament was written in Greek, but I also understand it was Hebrew in its thought pattern.
Now there we have two minds, both of them English, living in the same country, and eating the same kind of foods and seeing the same scenery and having the same kind of basic education. And yet one of them became a Greek in everything but nationality, because he loved the Greeks so much. The other became Hebrew because he loved the Bible so much. No, that’s what I mean. That illustrates it at any rate.
You can have a Christian mind, a Bible mind. You can be Bible-minded in the sense that it is not George Washington or even Abraham Lincoln nor Benjamin Franklin or any of the rest of them. Not Longfellow and others and certainly not Whitman. But the New Testament, even though you’re an American, you have a New Testament mind. I believe that’s what the Holy Ghost wants to do for us.
I believe that he wants our intellectual relationship to Jesus Christ to become so close, so intimate, so all embracing, that we’ll think as Jesus thought. I say, love as he loved and hate what he hated and value what he valued and have the mind of Christ in us. And that doesn’t come by believing on Jesus Christ, or buying a Scofield Bible and singing choruses.
Brother, you’ve got to go beyond. Let us go on. Those things are all basically sound and right and good and I have no objection. Stick by your Scofield Bible. It’s good. And it did in the early part of this century, wonderful, yeoman service in helping us to stand against liberalism and modernism, but it has its limitations. Its limitations consist of an excessive emphasis upon the judicial relationship to Jesus Christ and very little about going on unto perfection. But that’s the same criticism that I bring against most of evangelicalism today. So, I say there’s a volitional and an intellectual relationship to Jesus Christ, which we Christians should go on to cultivate.
Then thirdly, there is an emotional relationship, that is, a love attachment to Christ. Do you love the Lord Jesus Christ? Really? Do you really love Him now. Now, I know we sing that. We do. We sing things that aren’t very true sometime. Do you really love Christ?
A half comical answer given to Moody one time when he inquired of a man on the street, do you love Jesus? He answered, I have nothing against him. I think that is about as far as a lot of people go. We have nothing against Jesus. But they say, we love Him. Ask the young mother, with a three-month-old baby, just maybe howling with his first little tooth and able to smile all over his face when it looks up at his parents. Ask the mother, do you love your baby? You know what will happen. She’ll break out and every inch of your face will wrinkle up into a smile. Of course, she does. Do you love your baby? Sure.
Ask the sick, weary boy, sitting in a foxhole somewhere, cold and hungry and tired and weary of life. Do you love your country? He won’t give you any cynical answer like some of our present politicians. I think he’ll break down and say, oh my God, if I only could go back home.
Could I tell you again of our Alliance missionary who’d been in China a long, long time? His name was Jacobson. He’s retired now. He’d been in China, oh, I don’t know how long, years ago. There, while in China, children were born to them. Then they were sent home. They came home by way of the
West Coast to San Francisco. And at every port of call, the children would say, is this America Daddy, is this America? No, this isn’t America. This isn’t America. After three or four such disappointing incidents, the boat came in to the harbor of San Francisco. There, they saw the Golden Gate. Some of you have seen the Golden Gate of San Francisco. He said, way over there was the shoreline and two peaks, with the sun shining down right on them.They stood on the deck and looked, and the little children said, is this America? As he responded, he went all the pieces and let himself go in a welter of homesickness and patriotism and love and memories and said through his sobs, yes, yes, children, this is America.
He didn’t know how much he loved her. He didn’t know how dear her rocks and rills, her woods and templed hills had been to his American heart until he’d been shut away from there so long. His first sight of his homeland, broke him all up, so he cried like the child that he was for a moment. Ask that man, do you love America? He’ll grin at you and sheepishly tell you that story. Yes, he loves America. Do you love Jesus? Really?
Well, I think it’s possible to be a Christian, that is, to have faith in His power and His work and His atonement. I think it’s possible even to have a vital relation to him in the new birth, and yet not have cultivated His fellowship to the point where we love Him very much. We’re not done yet. We’re not finished until the love attachment to Christ has become so strong that it burns and glows and consumes.
When I read the writings of the old mystics in the old devotional writings and hymn writers of the Middle Ages and later I get sick in my heart and I tell God. I tell him, God, I’m sorry. I apologize and I’m ashamed. I don’t love Thee the way these loved Thee. Read the writings, read the letters of Samuel Rutherford. If you haven’t, you should. Read those letters and then see how sick it will make you. You’ll fold that book shut and then get down on your knees very likely and say, Lord Jesus, do I love you at all considering that this was love. What am I? What have I got?
No, there should be an emotional relationship to Jesus Christ. A relationship of love. Thou hast left thy first love, said the Lord Jesus. Maybe that’s what it means, that you’ve allowed things to cool you off, so like the young husband, who really loves his bride, but he’s too busy making a living for, that he neglects her. I wonder if Jesus might not have had something like that in mind. You’re too busy for me. You’re busy dashing here and there in my service but you’ve left your first love.
Now, what is this Christian then, who has gone on until he sustains toward our Lord, a right, a scriptural, a Spirit-inspired, volitional and intellectual and emotional attitude toward the Savior. Well, he is one who has been freed from earthly loves and fears. I want you to put that down. He is one who has been released from earthly loves and fears. What do I mean by earthly love? I mean any love out of the will of God, that is, any love that we would not let God take away from us. If you have anything in this world or anybody in this world, that you would not let God take away from him, then you don’t love Him as you should and you don’t know anything about the deeper life in experience.
For the deeper, Spirit-filled Christian life, means that I am delivered from earthly loves to a point where there is no love that I would not allow Jesus Christ to take away, be it money, be it reputation, be it my home, be it my friends, be it my family, whatever it may be. There is nothing. The love of Jesus Christ has come in and swallowed up all other loves and sanctified them, purified them, made them holy, and put them in a right relationship to that all-consuming love of God, so that they’re secondary and never primary.
If there’s anything, now think with me a little bit, you believe and attend the Alliance church and you believe you know something about the deeper things of God. All right, I want to ask you this question, is there anything or anybody on earth that you love so much that you’d fight God, if God wants to take it? Then you’re not where you should be and we might as well face up to it and not pretend to be something we’re not.
Complete freedom means that I want the will of God only. And if it’s the will of God for me to have these things, then I love them for His sake. But I love them with a tentative and relative love, not with an all, poured out love, that binds me as a slave. It means that I love nothing outside the will of God. And that I love only what or who He wills that I should love. Then you can love everybody. I think Paul loved Timothy and Silas and Titus and the rest of them with a love that glowed like a furnace. But he didn’t love them to a point where he couldn’t separate from them or where he would fight God for them. He only loved them in the margin of his heart. He loved God at the center, and he loved them for God’s dear sake. This is Christianity.
You say, you mean to tell me that I’m not to love my baby? No, I mean to tell you that you’re to love God so much, that you love your baby in its right context. You mean to say I’m not to love my husband? No, you’re to love him, but you’re to love him in right context, in right relationship.
There was a very intelligent, brilliant woman and a writer of note, who laid beside her baby. The baby was very sick. She was trying to get a little sleep and trying to care and nurse the baby too and the little thing was suffering. It had a high fever and was really suffering and she knew it. She said she watched that little, suffering face. And after having done everything she could do to assuage his pains and sufferings, she turned away to think it over. She said, when I turned away, I saw the strain and the pain in the flesh of the baby’s face and it’s two bright eyes and I knew the baby was suffering. She said, I turned and said, God, I’m through with you. You let my baby suffer like that? I’m through. I can’t love a God who let my baby suffer. And she went out to become a rationalist, an unbeliever. Well, she was a poor fool. She didn’t understand. Unless she changed your mind, I don’t think she did, she knows more now than she did then. That’s been a century ago.
What happened there? She loved her baby more than she loved the God who created him. And if the God who created her will let her baby run a fever, she’d have nothing to do with Him. That kind of love isn’t love. That’s supreme selfishness. It’s the extension of her personality, the projection of her personality into that baby and its sheer, pure selfishness.
My own Mother in law had a baby that died. She went through fire and water and blood and tears and toil to come through to a wonderful spiritual experience. She had to sit up in bed, weak and weary as she was, made the baby’s coffin. The husband made it out of wood. She made the lining, not of silk, but of whatever she could get a hold of, to line it. So great was their poverty because they weren’t rich.
And when the funeral was held, she stood by the grave with the rest or the people. As they stood there they were expecting her to break down. Instead she said, shall we sing together? She led off in the Doxology. Some people went away and said Mrs. Fautz is insane. Others went away with moist eyes and said, there’s faith and love. There’s faith and love that can give her newborn to the grave, and sing praise to God from whom all blessings flow, beside that grave.
If you love anything enough, if there’s any question about whether God’s going to have it or not, you know nothing about the deeper life. You’re a slave. You’re a slave to that love, whatever it is. If we’ve been freed from every earthly love, then we will have no unsatisfied longings, and we’ll have no wishes and dreams.
I never use the word “wish,” never. Years ago, I quit it. If it ever breaks out in my speech or preaching, it’s only a colloquialism. I never mean it. Wish is something I never use. If God wants me to have it, I’ll pray for it. And if he doesn’t want me to have it, I don’t want it.
Now, earthly fears. The Christian who goes on, gets freed from earthly fears. I was thinking of this the other day. I still think of it a little at times. There are two chains that bind the whole human race–loves and fears. We love something and can’t get it, or we love something and we’re afraid we’re going to lose it. So, we’re bound to that chain or we’re afraid we’ll get something that we don’t want, or afraid we lose something that we have. We’re bound to that chain. Fear and love bind humanity in two golden chains. And the gospel of Jesus Christ is never finished until He sets us free from our loves and fears.
We love our family more than we ever loved them before. We love our country with cheerful devotion. We love every good thing there is in the world, but in its right context. And we love it for Jesus sake. And we love it and hold it this way so we can let go of it at any second for the Lord’s sake. That’s what it is to be free from earthly loves. Free from earthly fears means, that I choose the will of God now and forever. It’s my treasure. It’s my whole beatitude. The only fear I have, is the fear to get out of the will of God and for it not to bother me, that it won’t bother me! Outside of the will of God, there’s nothing I want. In the will of God, there’s nothing I fear, for God has sworn to keep me in his will. If I’m out of his will, that’s another matter. But if I’m in his will, He has sworn to keep me. He’s able to do. He’s wise enough to know how to do it and He’s kind enough to want to do it.
So really there’s nothing to fear. I get kidded around with my family and friends and brother McAfee, especially likes to do it, but I don’t really think I’m afraid of anything. Somebody says, but you’ll die of cancer. Maybe so, but it is going to have to hurry up though. I’ll die of old age first. But, I’m not too badly worried because a man who dies of cancer in the will of God, he isn’t injured. He’s just dead. He isn’t injured. You can’t harm a man in the will of God. If old Socrates, a heathen, a stoic, could die saying, no harm can come to a good man in this world or the next, if he could see it, a pagan, why should I tremble and walk softly through this world, looking over my shoulder?
Rather, should I not by the grace of God say, Lord, I believe at least as much as a pagan. I believe no harm can come to a good man in this world or the next. But, what if I lose my job? Well, you’ll lose your job then. You won’t lose your head. But, what if I lose my head? Well, if you lose your head, you won’t lose your Savior. You can’t harm a good man.
So, man gets free from fear. I pity the preacher that’s afraid of his congregation or afraid of his superiors and in his denomination. Maybe I’m a little abnormal on that, but I never, never knew up to now, so help me God, one single twinge of fear of my superiors. And only rarely do I ever get self-conscious before a congregation. If somebody who really, is a great teacher is present, and I know that my poor little sermon will sound rather amateurish by comparison, I feel like I am onstage singing before the great John Charles Thomas. I wouldn’t want to do it. And sometimes I don’t care to preach before great preachers, but I’m not afraid of it. I’m just what you would say, shy. Nothing can harm you if you’re in the will of God.
So, if you will do these two things, let the love of God burn and burn within you, until it consumes everything, and you will never be a slave to any earthly yearnings. You will have them and you will have earthly loves and you’ll have people you love and care for, and would weep to part with. Jesus wept beside the grave of his beloved friend Lazarus. There’s no harm in weeping when we must say goodbye. Our son Wendell bid goodbye last evening, flying throughout South America, flying out of this blizzard. I didn’t like it too well. He was breezy and tried to pretend he didn’t care.
You can have your own personal, loving feelings, but you’re not to be a slave to them. You can have your dislikes. I’d run a mile to keep from having a needle put in my arm. A fellow came clear out to the house one time from somewhere around the city. I don’t know who sent for him. I don’t know who, maybe McAfee. Well, he came out to see me. And he came upstairs to my room, sat down beside my bed. He was a heart specialist. And when he came in, he had this huge rocket in his hand with a long sucker affair and I saw it. And brother did I argued him down. And he said, now, I’ll give you this and you’ll sleep and you’ll be all right. It will just be a sedative. And I said, you won’t give me that. And he said, well, if you’re going to make so much of it, probably you’d be worse off if you took it. So, he said goodbye and left and I got all right.
So, I don’t say that the deeper life, the spiritual life, means that you won’t be normally human. If the lightning strikes near you, you will jump. And if somebody comes at you with a needle, you’ll shrink, you’re human. That’s one thing, it’s quite another thing to walk around chained by human fears, chained by the fears of death and the fear of sickness and the fear of poverty and the fear of friends and the fear of enemies. God never means that His children should thus be afraid.
Well, all that I’ve preached to you now isn’t a dream. It isn’t a misty ideal that nobody can reach. It’s the normal Christian life. Anything short of it is abnormal or subnormal. Shall we not obey God and go on to perfection? I believe you want to or I wouldn’t be preaching to you. May God grant, that together, we may press on, out into the deep waters. Yay, waters to swim. Alright.