07 - Five Keys to the Faithful Christian Life

The talk I want to give tonight is one I almost gave before. I was at Winona¹ last summer at the conference there, and I mentioned this at the conclusion of a sermon that I had preached on something else. A WMBI² brother over there asked me whether I would give it on the radio. With some changes I am going to give it tonight. This definitely will not be a sermon. I am going to do a Nixon on you tonight and just let down my hair, figuratively speaking, and talk to you out of my heart about something that is very real and very precious to me. ³

I hope that you will not be disappointed but rather you will be pleased because I have respected your right to make your own decisions and have not given you a welter of death-bed stories, neither have I stamped you with any evangelistic high-pressured methods. Instead, I have given the word as I know it and then have allowed you to make up your own mind. That is the only thing I believe in. I admit that I have an Irish streak that gets in me from somewhere, but I do not want to entertain you, I want to help you, and I am assuming that you are serious-minded, not gloomy. I have been reading something about the saints, and I find that they all have a sense of humor. One authority claims that in the canonization of a saint in the Roman Church the one factor that always has to be present before they will make him a saint is that it has to be proved that he has a sense of humor. They will not canonize long-face saints. But serious-mindedness is one thing, gloom is another. God is not gloomy, but He is serious. The church of Jesus is not a gloomy place, but it is a serious place, or it ought to be. So I am assuming tonight that you are serious-minded and then I am also assuming that you have been regenerated. I have not preached on regeneration because I have assumed that you are regenerated. Maybe you are not. Some of you may have gotten through the screen, and you only thought you were regenerated. You accepted Jesus somewhere in a kind of sickly way and got a tract and your name on something and here you are, but you are not sure of yourself, and I would have to give some other message to you. But tonight I am assuming that you are regenerated, and this is for regenerated people—though there would be no reason why hungry-hearted people who are not yet regenerated might not get something out of it. Assuming that we are regenerated people, that we have been renewed by a crisis—we did not ooze into it or leap into it or grow into it, but we hit a crisis and had a specific, identifiable encounter with the Almighty God at the cross and got up different—assuming that, then the next thing you will want to know is, now what from here? Must I simply grab a handle somewhere and begin to turn, grinding out my religious activities and waiting for the grand climax—or is there something for me better than I know? Is there a full satisfaction in the Gospel system? Can I have inward liberty, outward victory, a reasonable degree of delight, and a mystic and numinous sense of the presence of another world? Can I live like that, or must I settle down simply to live it out and grit my teeth? As one dear old lady said, she had learned to grin and bear it—that was all the testimony she had. A lot of Christians, from the looks on their faces, are just grinning and bearing it. They believe in walking by faith, and faith to them is a grim and bitter affair. But is there something better? I think there is. I believe that there is a better place for us within the framework of fundamental Christianity as you and I know it in the world, and we do not have to import it from somewhere, nor change our views, nor get converted from one “ism” to another. Let us just take what we have and go ahead. I think I can tell you how you can make remarkable and firm progress within a matter of hours, if you want to do it. I am going to give you five points—the five-point program for spiritual progress. First of all, could I say that I know what I am talking about here? A few years ago there came to my life a crisis—one that centered around what I have been speaking on tonight. I had been doing all right and getting along all right. Some people were getting helped, or they kindly said they were, but I was not satisfied. And then I came to the place where it was forced upon me by the good, kind hand of God to make some vows and reach a crisis, and I did. Actually only four of these points stood out solidly with me then, but I have prefixed one for the sake of new beginners. If you are going on with God and you are going to leave the dead level of dull Christianity and climb Jacob’s ladder and get into the rarefied air where the saints of the ages have lived, then you have got to take some vows. David vowed his vows, and he said he paid them. Remember, there is a lot about vows in the Old Testament. There is even something about vows in the New Testament. All I mean by vow is that you are going to go before God either here, in your room, out on a bench somewhere under a tree, or anywhere you can get quiet and silent to tell God that, as far as you are concerned, you are going to do these things. He will have to help you, that is all taken for granted, because there is no good in you. But He believes in vows, and He is going to work along with you in your vows. Here is the first one.

Vow #1: Deal Thoroughly with Sin

You have got to vow to deal with sin thoroughly. We have misunderstood grace in our day. According to some historians, one British preacher so preached grace as to lower the moral standards of the nation. If that is even half true, it is a terrible sentence, to so misunderstand the grace of God. Billy Graham said just a little while back, and I so fully agree with him, “It is a strange thing that in this hour there is more talk about religion than any time in American history and the moral standards of the nation are lower than they have ever been before.” It is a strange and confusing paradox that while there are more people talking about religion now than ever, we are in a worse moral mess than we have ever been since the days of Finney. It may have been that we are saved by grace, but we misunderstand that and believe that grace gives us a license to do as we please. I tell you there never could be a greater mistake. The Bible begins its work in a man’s soul (or God begins it, according to the Bible) by repentance. There must be a violent and aggressive repentance in the soul, and that individual, whether he is five years old or fifty must come to God and repent. I appreciate the fact that a child has not many external sins to repent of, but without some understanding of lostness I do not see how there can be any understanding of salvation. And so we must deal with it thoroughly. I do not say you are worse than others, but I do not say you are better. I say we are an average crowd, and I know how ever-present and insidious sin is, how brazen it is, how ubiquitous it is. It is everywhere, pushing and pressing in from all directions. It is all but omnipresent, and it is like trying to walk through a coal mine and come out clean to walk through this world of ours and keep our garments clean—and yet it is not an impossibility. If Jesus Christ is the Savior that He says He is, if He is the Savior God says He is, and if He is the Savior that the historic Church says He is, then He ought to be able to deliver us from the vilest contamination and sin here in this world. You do not have to believe in eradication to believe in this. I do not believe that myself; nevertheless, I do believe that there is such a thing as walking in the Spirit and not fulfilling the lusts of the flesh. If you are going to go on with God, you are going to have to start right there with that matter of sin. God told Israel to drive out all those that dwelled in the land that had sinned away their right to live. God said they had forfeited existence. Israel drove some of them out and let some of them stay, and the ones they allowed to stay unjudged, cursed them for all their history. The curses of those unholy nations are still upon Israel after the passing of the centuries. You are going to have to deal with sin. You have been fooling around and studying psychology. I have read bushels of books on it and still do not know any more about it than I did before, but if you have been fooling around with psychology that excuses sin, reject it. Anything that excuses sin is not of God and it is not for your welfare. Nowadays if biting conviction comes on a young soul he rushes off to a library and reads a book to prove he has got a guilt complex, or that it was the result of his mother’s scolding him when he was three months old, and so the poor fellow goes out feeling that sin is not sin. We have got to deal with the question of sin—it is basic, I say. Grace deals with sin, my friends, but grace deals with sin. That is point number one.

Vow #2: Do Not Own Anything

Point number two is, and this is going to be harder to understand, we have to vow never to own anything. I will tell you what I mean by that. This came to me at one of the critical moments in my life, and I will never cease to thank God that He wrought this in me. It is not a theory which I have gotten from somewhere, not something I read in an old book, or got off a wall motto, but it is a living, burning, blazing reality to my spirit, that before God can do much for His children, He’s got to detach them from earthly things. It is not that God does not want you to have things, but He does not want things to have you. It is not that He wants you to go barefoot and beg and live in a cave (as some ancient people did in a poor, misguided effort to be detached from things), but it is that He wants you to have a spiritual crisis that will detach you from things. I can testify that this is more than a possibility. It can be done. We can arrive at a place in God where we have an understanding with Him, an understanding that is just as valid and just as real as a marriage vow. Just as a young man stands before an altar and says that leaving all others, he takes this one, and it is a vow that remains, so we can go before our God and have an understanding. That young man can then get into the uniform of his country, go around the world and hide himself in some jungle somewhere, but still there is that happy and perfect assurance within him that the marriage vow holds. That is a real vow—a transaction, a crisis. That happened to me. She is mine, she belongs to me, and though she is thousands of miles away and though it is daylight here and night where she is, it does not change the fact that she still wears my ring and still bears my name. That is a crisis in a life, and there can be such a crisis in human life where the mind and the heart and all the mysterious depths of our being can go before the Lord Christ and hand it all over to Him and say, “From now on, Lord, nothing is mine—nothing. My reputation is not mine. I am all nothing—it is all Thine.” And God passes His hand all the way around us and cuts all the strings. We can then drive an automobile with a sweet detachment, knowing that it is God’s automobile. We can have a wife or a family with sweet knowledge that the family is not ours, really, it belongs to God. Everything we have, we can give to God. I said during the Second World War (for this crisis came to me before that time) that the only safe place to put a soldier boy was to put him in God’s hands. Many a mother imperiled the life of her boy by hanging on to him and tearfully wailing when he had to go. There is only one way to deal with that which is dear, my brethren, and that is to put the knife in it, and let it die. Die with it and rise again, and then God will let you keep it, but it will be so different now. It will not be in you now; it will be outside of you. Instead of being in you to weigh you down and change the direction of your look inward, it will be outside of you now, and you can look upward. We must get delivered from things. “All my ambitions, plans and wishes at His feet in ashes lay.” The woman who wrote that cried herself to sleep over it. I guess she had to give up her poor ambitions. You know what they are? They are treacherous, and they will let you down. The poet said that he wrote on high a name he deemed would never die, and there is not a boy with good sense and an IQ. above twenty-five anywhere in America who has not somewhere or sometime written his name somewhere or dreamed that it would be written and never die. Yet what percentage of people ever get in Who’s Who? So the thing for you to do is forget that ambition—stop driving and let God drive. You say, “You want me to relax, sit around, look dumb, and never go anywhere or be anything? Is not sanctified ambition a good thing?” You know, when we want to excuse a scoundrel we always put the qualifying adjective “sanctified” ahead of him and then we have got a saint made out of him. We say “sanctified anger,” “sanctified ambition” or “sanctified severity,” and by using the word “sanctified” we think we canonize wickedness. No, no, my friends, ambition is not for you. “Seek not these things,” God said to Spurgeon out of the Bible (see Luke 12:29-31). Did Charles Spurgeon sit down and look dumb? No, he was one of the greatest preachers of his generation and he is still preaching through his great books to this generation. But God took over. It is useless for you to drive yourself and say, “Now I have got to do this and this and this.” Forget it and relax. Get detached and say, “God, I have no ambitions. Show me what you want me to do.” And then out of your relaxed, consecrated, quiet heart will come rivers of living water and God will take over and guide you. Moses, we say, led the children of Israel through the wilderness. He did no such thing; Moses followed a cloud that was leading him. Moses was detached from things, and you and I must be, so there is point number two. Vow never to own anything and then maybe God will let you own a great deal, but it will be where it should be and will not hurt you.

Vow #3: Do Not Gossip

Then, vow never to pass on a rumor that is injurious to anybody. This may not seem quite important enough to fit in, but I have found it so. I have learned that gossip is a very deadly thing in the Church of Jesus and it certainly can be very injurious to your spiritual life. Let us let John Wesley define evil speaking. He says, “Evil speaking is any unnecessary or uncomplimentary remarks made about anybody.” Sometimes it is necessary to make uncomplimentary remarks about people, if you are a member of a committee or a head of some organization. If people look to you for leadership, then it is necessary sometimes that you tell the truth about a man or woman. But God will bless you graciously if you will vow to let your heart be as silent as the grave when it comes to passing on scurrilous stories about anybody. I will not tell, not even my closest companion on earth outside of my family, Mr. McAfee. I will not tell him evil things I have heard about men. If it comes out and gets around that is something else, but I do not discuss it. I never tell my wife when I hear that some fellow has gone wrong. I never tell her, never tell brother McAfee, never whisper it. I keep it in my heart. I will not pass on gossip that is injurious to the character of God’s people. That is not my virtue, it is common sense; it is Biblical; it is New Testament; it is charity. We gossip and whisper around about people, and rumors start. Men’s futures are wrecked because God’s people cannot keep their mouths shut and have not charity enough to just bear it in their hearts. I cannot prevent rumors from traveling, but I will never let them bounce off my empty skull and go on someplace, never while the world stands, so help me God. If, as a member of a conference, committee or ordaining council I have to sit and pass judgment on the moral fitness of a man for a job, then God will not bless me if I do not do it. That is necessary in the line of duty. Never anything that is not necessary will I pass on.

Vow #4: Do Not Defend Yourself

Then the fourth vow we must take is never to defend ourselves. I am not talking about the matter of war. I was in the Army during the First World War (not the Revolutionary War as you thought), and I had five sons in uniform in the Second World War, so I am not saying that it is not proper for us, when our country is threatened, to defend that country. We have all the benefits that this nation extends to us, why then should we not help take care of it when it gets in danger? But this is something else again. What I am talking about is that we, as individuals, are not to defend ourselves, but live in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1 - Matthew 7:29). You know, they have taken the Sermon on the Mount and given it to the Millennium; I am willing that the Millennium should have the Sermon on the Mount, but I want a bit of it now. I believe it is for us now, not only, as one man says, a beautiful moral application. I believe that it is binding upon the children of God, and one thing it teaches is that we’re not to fight back. And so I say take this vow: do not defend yourself. I got into a jam one time that was not my fault at all, that is, it came from another direction. I was just crushed by it, and I went to God. I was reading in Exodus, and the Lord spoke to me just as clearly as if He had never said it to anybody else. Did you ever have that happen? You go to some text, and some dispensationalist tells you it is not yours. Something in your heart leaps up and grabs it. You feel a sucking sound and a pop as your feet come out of the mud, and it got you out. Then you read a book that says it was not for you. I do not care about that. But anyhow, the 23rd chapter of Exodus (Exodus 23:20-24) said to me, Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Beware of him, and obey his voice, and provoke him not for he will not pardon your transgressions; for my name is in him. But if thou shalt indeed obey his voice and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries. For my Angel shall go before thee and bring thee unto the Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I will cut them off. Thou shalt not bow down to their gods. Do not run around apologizing, and asking people, “Please forgive me for living, or I will drop dead tomorrow.” Look at Exodus 23:24 : “But thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images.” Somebody called me an iconoclast, and I have biblical authority for it—the word means “destroyer of idols.” God says here, “Utterly overthrow them and quite break down their idols.” I thought I was going to die at about thirty—I am fifty-five and still percolating—but He said, “I will take sickness away from the midst of thee. There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land: the number of thy days I will fulfill” (Exodus 23:25-26). And that is as long as I want to live. Exodus 23:27 says, “I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.” God said that to me, and then He said this, and I am not sure but God may have a sense of humor too, because verse 28 cannot be explained unless there is just a wee little bit of humor in the heart of God. He said, “And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee.” Imagine the great God Almighty, who made the seven stars and rolled the Pleiades yonder, stooping to have a bee run interference for me. I stopped fighting right there. I stopped in principle. I admit I broke over sometimes, but every time I broke away I came back with a black eye, a bloody nose, and a hurt heart. I have a tongue like a rapier. God knows how long it has taken to sanctify it, and I am doubtful about it yet, but every time I have dared to use a hot tongue I have recoiled, and it took me days and months to get over it. God said He would do my fighting for me (Exodus 14:14). If you insist on fighting I warn you, you are up against a terrible enemy. So if you hear something that is said about you, do not run around trying to straighten it out. It is just like trying to pick soot off the front of your white shirt—you just smear it around. Let it go; God will blow it off for you. It will not hurt you. Do not say, “It is not fair.” The devil invented the term “It is not fair.” So take this vow before God, never to defend yourself.

Vow #5: Never Take God’s Glory

The fifth point is you must be sure never to take any of God’s glory for yourself. When I was writing Wingspread⁴, an old man told me some things about Dr. A. B. Simpson. Some of the things he told me about Dr. Simpson I did not put in the book because they were not complimentary to the dear man—that he had a changeable mind; that he could not remember where his money had gone and all that sort of thing. He was not a wax saint at all. He was a man of like passions. I said, “But brother, if Dr. Simpson was a man with such flaws in his makeup, why did God bless him so?” The old man straightened up like a prophet and said, “Mr. Tozer, God knew that His glory was safe in the hands of A. B. Simpson. He knew that He could trust A. B. Simpson never to filch any of the honor that belonged to God.” The result was that with all of his flaws, God not only blessed Simpson but blasted any man that opposed him. Those are solemn, wonderful words. It is not flawlessness God is looking for, it is consecration to a point where we will never allow ourselves to steal a percentage of the honor that belongs to the most holy God. “Not unto us, Oh God, but unto Thy name be the glory.” These five points are easy to remember. I promise you they are Biblical, and if you put them in practice, taking them one at a time and praying them through until they become part of your nerves and blood—oh, what God may do with you dear people in the next few weeks, months, and years! But remember, you will violate them at your peril. You will shrink and shrivel and be small, and your fruit will be wormy, and your usefulness will be handicapped if you violate or ignore these things I have given you.

[This message was delivered at Wheaton College’s Pierce Chapel on October 1, 1952.]