10 - How to Cultivate the Spirit’s Companionship

I plan to follow last night’s topic by speaking tonight on “How can I cultivate the Spirit’s companionship?” The text is found in Amos, a little-known and appreciated book, the third chapter, the third verse. It says, “Can two walk together except they be agreed?” This is a rhetorical question. The answer is implied, and the question is the answer. It is equivalent to a positive declaration that two cannot walk together except they be agreed.

For two people to walk together there must be agreement on at least a few major points. They must be agreed on the direction. If one man is going north and one is going south it is a physical impossibility that they could walk together. They must also be agreed on their destination. If they were aiming for two different cities, they would have to separate somewhere on their journey. They are going to have to agree on what path they want to take. There might be a dozen paths to where they are going, and if they are going to stay together they are going to have to take the same path. They will have to agree on the rate of speed. If one of them is a Theodore Roosevelt and believes in the strenuous life, he will walk very rapidly. Another man might saunter along. While they would ultimately get to the same place, they could not go together because they would have to agree upon the rate of speed. Then they will have to agree whether they want to walk together. I know lots of people that, if I were going somewhere, I would like to walk with them. Then I know others that for certain reasons I could not be comfortable with, because when I would rather look at the trees they would want to talk and talk. In brief, people have to agree that there would be advantage in their walking together. There would have to be some kind of compatibility. I cannot conceive of a man who was utterly absorbed in photography—who would pull out a light meter at the drop of a hat—walking very far with a baseball fan who knows all the batting averages of the sixteen clubs. They would make it a while, but pretty soon it would get tiresome. They would have to have some common ground upon which they could agree, or their walk would be one long boredom. You see what I mean. For two to walk together voluntarily, they must in some sense be one. The point here bears on the message of “How to walk with God in the Spirit and have fellowship with Jesus Christ.” I might also say that some people are not ready for this. Our Lord said that there were certain things He could not tell them (John 16:12). Paul said, “I could not talk to you as unto grownups, I had to talk to you as unto children” and he further noted that, “You are even now children” to a certain church to which he wrote (1 Corinthians 3:1-2). Nevertheless, I have discovered that if I focus my talk on the immature Christians, those who are eager to grow fail to get any place. We are just going to have to write off to breakage some people. We must simply say, “Well, the eggs were delivered; there were a certain number of them that were spoiled. Hatch the ones that will hatch.” There are some of you, God bless you, who will never go out and settle down. Unfortunately, you will become just one more church member. I am sorry, but a crowd like this always has a bunch of fringe hanger-oners like that. I do not know who you are but I know you are here. Thank God there are not very many like that, I trust, in an audience such as Wheaton can assemble. For those who are not ready, I would further say that they want Christianity for its insurance value. What they get out of it is insurance against hell-fire and a home in heaven at last. They are willing to inconvenience themselves twice a Sunday for that kind of insurance. They will put some money into it and abstain from certain grosser pleasures. They will also endure certain minor inconveniences in order to keep up their insurance, so they will know that when they die at last they will go to heaven an make it in. The conception of religion for some is social, not spiritual. They water down the word of God and the long line of New Testament truths with their own easy-going opinions, mixing them up together. These people are not ready to hear what I have to say. Judging from the people who have spoken to me, I think there is a vast number here ready to hear what I have to say about how we can cultivate the Spirit’s companionship. The Holy Spirit is a living Person. We must get that straight. He is a living Person. I bought a big, monstrous book of religious poetry here this week and had it over in my room. When I had nothing better to do I took a look in it, and I will say there is some religious poetry that I cannot figure at all. The man or woman who wrote it must have been busy at the time. The poem having neither arms nor legs, nor hands nor feet, is a vacuum. It is the spirit of the universe or some such thing, and I cannot figure it out. But whenever God is known as a person, I can get my teeth in it because I know what they are talking about. We must not allow our religious life to peter out into poetic fancies. We must start by bringing it to the Bible and believing biblical truth and what it says about God. This Holy Spirit which I preached last night and have mentioned and emphasized a lot during my talks is a Person, One with the Father and the Son. Again I say that if we are going to walk with Him in agreement, we are going to have to honor and be engrossed with the Lord Jesus Christ. “For the Holy Ghost was not yet given,” it said, “because that Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:39). It is the office and present work of the Holy Ghost to glorify and honor the Person of Jesus Christ our Lord. The Holy Spirit must speak about Himself or the Bible could not have been written. But He speaks, not on His authority, but on the authority of the Savior from which He proceeds. The more we know of the Holy Ghost the better we will know Jesus, and we cannot know Christ at all, really, except we know Him by the Holy Ghost. “No man can say that Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 12:3). The Holy Spirit is here to show us the lovely face of Jesus. The more I glorify Jesus Christ, love Him, make much of Him, obey Him, pray to Him and read His Book, the more the Holy Spirit will manifest Him to me and the closer I will know this Holy One who is the Holy Ghost. He will relax, lull, and commune with us and then indeed we can say, “Oh, Invisible, we see Thee; Intangible, we feel Thee; Inaudible, we hear Thee.” It will not be a polite fancy but a sharp reality. It will be as real to us as the trees out upon the campus and the hand we put before our face. If we talk to Him and cultivate His knowledge, we must make our thoughts a clean sanctuary. There is an amplified psychology school of thought that is always working on their brain cells and saying that every day in every way we are getting better and better. I reject all that. I will not monkey with my own head. I do not know what I would find, and I am not too much interested, but your total religious thoughts are to a large degree under your control. God has made your thoughts a part of you. “Thoughts,” said somebody, “are things.” The Spirit of God is in the world, and He is all-seeing, all-hearing and all-loving, but He knows your thoughts. A thought that enters the mind furtively, a fugitive thought that flies in and out, does not matter. But the thought you agree with and nurture and allow to perch and live within your mind becomes a part of you after a while. God reckons you for what your thoughts are. Your thoughts must be a sanctuary, a holy place, for God cannot dwell in blood cells and nerve ends. He dwells in our thoughts, our will, our affections, and our intellect. He dwells in the personality of us, rather than in the flesh and blood of us. When He says He will come in and dwell with us, certainly He dwells in our bodies, because our personalities are in our bodies, but He dwells deeper than in our bodies. He dwells in our personalities. Therefore, if we are going to walk with Him and agree with Him, we are going to have to keep our personalities clean. He will not put up with malice, egotism, deceit, folly and sly, filthy talk. He will go silent on you and withdraw His sweet, sensitive presence. He will leave you on your own—He will be there but He will be there injured. If you are going to walk with Him, then you must agree with Him. He is a Holy Spirit and you must keep your mind clean and your thoughts clean. Whatever you muse upon has got to be pure and hallowed, for He wants a hallowed sanctuary. He will make the place of His feet glorious, and wherever His feet dwell, there is shining light and beauty and glory. Jesus Christ is that kind of Being; He will flee from the other kind of being. The profaned and polluted temple the Spirit will not dwell in. What about borderline worldliness and its effect? I cannot lay down a rule for you that you can do this and cannot do that. But I can say this: quit whatever hinders your spiritual progress. This is a good, general working rule for your spiritual life, and this is the general essence of what God’s Book says on this subject. Does this injure my heart? If it does, then it is not for me. You say, “I know somebody that practices that and thinks nothing of it.” All right, you are not responsible for your brother’s conscience. You are only responsible for your own. If this slows down my progress, then it is not for me, and I must get rid of it. For instance, a great many years ago, when I was first getting acquainted with the great literature of the world, I ran across Pepys’ Diary. ¹ I thought that because it came in an artificial leather binding and was called a classic I ought to get acquainted with the great literature of the world. I read Pepys’ Diary, but it bothered me. I liked it, but I did not like it. I would say to myself, “Now listen, you ought not to be a prude, nor a fanatic; you are going to have to get acquainted with what the great minds of the world have said.” Pepys’ mind was supposed to have been great, even though dirty, and so I went on reading Pepys’ Diary. Every time I came away from a session of Pepys’ Diary I would be less a Christian than I was before, so one day, like Luther when he threw the ink well at the devil, I grabbed Pepys’ Diary, ripped it to pieces, and hurled it in the wastebasket. I have never owned a copy since. I do not say you have to go to that extreme, but I say that is what I had to do. I found lots of other books beside Pepys’ Diary that were not dirty. People want to know if they ought to read John Steinbeck. ² If you like to wade knee-deep in obscenity, read John Steinbeck. But if you do not, then let Johnny alone, because he dipped his pen in the distilled essence of obscenity and wrote his books, and they have taken him on and made him a big shot in his own right. He is a filthy man, and I would not for the wide world be caught feeling my way through the obscene recesses of his brain, because I will not read him. I read one and that was enough. I have to read those things that minister to my own spiritual good. I will not filthy up my mind with things that are not good for me. Maybe I am off the track here, but I am here to talk to you about the things that are on my heart, and this is one of them. If it is hurting your spiritual life, drop it. There is no rule. Maybe John Steinbeck would not hurt you but he does not do me any good. Maybe old Pepys would not hurt you a peep, but he hurt me, and I dropped him. I got dizzy here some years ago. When I would get up quick, my head would go around and I would see spots and not know what had happened to me. So, I went to a doctor. He happened to be a crusty old fellow and he knew my dyspeptic kind as soon as he saw me. I said, “My head whirls and I am dizzy. I do not understand it; I have never had anything like this before.” “Have you been eating anything unusual lately?” “Well, to tell the truth I have,” I said. “A few days ago I got a run on bananas, and I have been eating bananas at every meal.” And he said, “You’ve got blind staggers from eating bananas. Quit your bananas.” I quit my bananas and in a few days my blind staggers were gone, too. I do not say you cannot eat bananas. I happen to know that I cannot. I can eat one, maybe, in a month, but I cannot eat them three times a day, because if I do I will get blind staggers. Up to that time I thought only mules got blind staggers, but I found preachers can get blind staggers too, on bananas, so I quit. That is just common sense. If they give me a dizzy head, quit them. It is the same with other things. If you find they are hurting your spiritual life, it is your business to drop them now. Others may do what you cannot. If you are going to walk with God in the sweet fellowship of the Spirit, then you are going to have to be obedient, and drop the things that displease God. “But Mr. Tozer,” you may say, “You mean to tell me I am going to have to give up things? Do you not think it is a bit unfair to demand of me that I give up things? And if I do not do the things others do I will be considered queer and laughed at.” Isn’t that too bad—they will laugh at you! Well, you can always cry in your handkerchief, you know—and I recommend a pink one with perfume on it! Dear God, what a bunch of sissies we are in this day! They crucified Jesus, ran a sword through James, cut off Paul’s head, and killed every one of the apostles except John, whom they exiled. The hot tongue, the cold shoulder, and the sword have followed the cross of Jesus down through the years. We can go knock our teeth out in a football game and go to war and fight in blood and mire, and then when somebody says, “Well, you have got to be different and stand for the cross of Jesus,” we whimper on our shoulder and say, “Can you not make it easier for us? It is just unfair that anybody should laugh at me.” Oh, how little do I care if they laugh at me! Paul Rader³ used to tell about the boy who stood on the sidewalk with his face against a fence and every once on a while would jump and scream and yell. Then he would get his place again, looking through the fence. Somebody came by and saw him. He could not see anything except the boy going off into explosions of excitement, and he thought, “What in the world is the matter with that boy? Is he a little off?” Then he found the boy was looking through a hole in the fence and watching a baseball game. Every time the home team would come to bat and whack a homer, he would let go. He was seeing what was invisible to the other man, and he did not care what anyone else thought of him. The man who walks with God truly walks with the invisible, and the world says he is crazy. But you see, a crazy person is one who reacts without any stimulus. Excuse my psychology, but he gets miserable or happy over something that does not exist. But a sane man is one whose reactions correspond to what is there. The Christian sees what is there, and his heart goes out to it. While the world does not see it and laughs at him, he sees it and knows what he sees. What do we care what they say about us? I hope I may never be caught whimpering, because it is certainly not worthy of the Christian. I will go on to say that if we are to walk with Him, we must seek Him in the Word, for He inspired the Word and will reveal Himself in the Word. We must meditate on His Word. I recommend a careful reading of the 119th Psalm. Our difficulty and danger is that we put study ahead of meditation. Study is absolutely necessary, but meditation is also necessary. We must not only go to the Bible head first; we must also go to the Bible heart first. I got a letter today from Brazil from somebody I had never seen who commented about something I had written. “You put the emphasis on the Christian life as well as Christian truth. And the difficulty now, “ said this person, “is that the emphasis falls on the Christian truth to the neglect of the Christian life.” If Christian truth does not produce Christian life, then there is something wrong with our finding that we call Christian truth. Christian truth must bring Christian life, and if we are going to have Christian life, we are going to have to nurture it with the dear old Book of God. I do not know how many times I have read it through, and I hardly ever try to really systematize. I have come heart first and found in it all that my heart desires. Lastly, cultivate the art of recognizing the presence of God everywhere. “Practice the presence,” to use the phrase made famous by old Nicholas Herman. ⁴ Steal every moment you can to shoot a little prayer to God and remind Him that you love Him and you are His child. You are busy—awfully busy—but you are still His child. Dr. A. B. Simpson⁵ gave us an illustration that I think is one of the finest in Christian literature. He said, “How can I pray without ceasing? It is obvious that I cannot kneel on my knees twenty four hours a day for my lifetime. It is obvious that I cannot pray in the sense of addressing God formally all the time. “But,” he said, “‘Pray without ceasing’ can be illustrated by the compass. The compass has a needle that has an affinity for the north magnetic pole, its home, and it wants to go that direction. It can be bumped, jostled, tossed and turned around artificially, but the main thing is, let it go and let it level off. It’ll find its way pointing straight toward the north magnetic pole. “So,” he said, “in this life in which we live we will be busy doing this and that—the mother with her baby, the student with his book, the truck driver with his huge truck—we will have a thousand things to take our minds off God in the turbulence of life. The point is, just as soon as our mind is free, it flies back to its home again, back to God. If you think on God, that is praying without ceasing, keeping your heart free in God so that as soon as the pressure of daily living and studying and all the rest is off, the heart goes instantly to its home and to its God.” So, my friends, let us cultivate God; let us cultivate the Holy Spirit. Let us not be just two-thirds Trinitarians—let us be Trinitarians. Let us believe that God is. He subsists in three Persons, co-existent and co-eternal. The Father sent the Son to be incarnated and to die, and the Son and the Father sent the Holy Ghost to make the Father and the Son real. We will never be alone, no matter where we are—never, never alone. The Christian will never be wholly lonely for he has the presence of the Father and the Son within whispering distance of his heart all the time, if he will agree to walk with God. To do so, he must agree to God’s terms and follow at least this simple outline that I have given you tonight.

[Tozer delivered this sermon at Pierce Chapel, Wheaton College, on the night of October 3, 1952.]