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  TOZER SPEAKS TO STUDENTS
  by Aw Tozer
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A.W. Tozer's addresses to students exploring the spiritual power promised by
Christ, emphasizing how the Holy Spirit transforms believers from beyond through
faith rather than mere human potential.

  Chapters: 13

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 01 - INTRODUCTION
    2. 02 - Spiritual Power
    3. 03 - Preparing the Way for the Lord
    4. 04 - Grieve Not the Holy Spirit
    5. 05 - The Enemy Within
    6. 06 - Wounds from God
    7. 07 - Five Keys to the Faithful Christian Life
    8. 08 - How to Be Filled with the Holy Spirit
    9. 09 - Be Filled with the Spirit
   10. 10 - How to Cultivate the Spirit’s Companionship
   11. 11 - The Danger of Being Almost Altogether
   12. 12 - Is God Enough?
   13. 13 - ENDNOTES

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  CHAPTER 1: 01 - INTRODUCTION
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As a historian I am always digging through library archives, searching for
documents in out-of-the-way places, and tracking down people who might remember
the times, events and people I intend to write about. Recently my attention has
been focused on A. W. Tozer. Except for C. S. Lewis and perhaps Oswald Chambers,
it is difficult to find a twentieth-century Protestant author who has a wider
audience than Tozer. Best known for such classics as The Knowledge of the Holy
and The Pursuit of God, Tozer wrote numerous books during his lifetime. Since
his death in 1963, many of his sermons, as well as editorials he wrote for The
Alliance Weekly (now Alliance Life), have been dusted off, transcribed and
published in book form. Indeed, a century after his birth—he was born in
1897—over forty titles bearing Tozer’s name are in print. These works are widely
circulated, frequently quoted from pulpits and platforms, and often used to
illustrate points made by countless writers of books, articles, and missionary
letters.

If it is rather common knowledge that A. W. Tozer wrote well and his books
continue to find a wide readership, it is less well known that he had a
particularly profound impact on college students. Like D.L. Moody, who
ministered in the late 19th century, Tozer had a keen sense of his calling to
encourage and equip young people to glorify God and fulfill the Great
Commission. The impetus for this concern can be traced to his own pilgrimage.
Tozer heard a call to ministry while a teenager. Converted at age eighteen, this
farm lad who had been educated in a country school house, immediately embarked
upon a rigorous program of Bible study and devotional reading. Along the path to
full time pastoral ministry, a few people encouraged young Tozer, pointed him to
good books, and taught him to seek an intensely deep and personal relationship
with the Lord Jesus Christ. The efforts of these saints were well directed.
Tozer took his first church—a small Christian and Missionary Alliance church—in
West Virginia when he was barely old enough to vote. A decade and three
pastorates later, Tozer arrived to fill the pulpit of Chicago’s South Side
Alliance Church. It was there, beginning in 1928, that this young minister
without the benefit of extensive formal schooling began to go out of his way to
encourage young people called to career ministry. From the late 1920’s until he
moved to Toronto in 1959, Tozer targeted students at Moody Bible Institute. He
frequently spoke at MBI, and his church was always open to students from the
Institute. Over the years a steady stream of young people made their way to
Tozer’s Alliance church—a place where they were welcomed, inspired and taught
biblical truth by a man whose preaching set them ablaze. By the 1940’s A. W.
Tozer had become close friends with Dr. V. Raymond Edman, a dedicated Alliance
man with a Ph. D. in History. Edman fully embraced the Alliance pillars of Jesus
Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King. Paying more than lip
service to these truths, this college professor who served as President of
Wheaton College from 1941 through 1964 stood committed to the deeper life. He
had personally experienced a transformational work of grace after his
conversion. He also knew from church history and personal experience that the
Spirit of Jesus Christ wants to work and flow through men and women in profound,
God-glorifying ways that are seldom realized by committed Christians. Tozer and
Edman became close friends. Among the consequences of this relationship were
regular invitations to Dr. Tozer to interact with Wheaton College students,
particularly as a chapel speaker. A year seldom passed during the post-World War
II years without Tozer speaking at Wheaton College’s chapel. There is no way to
measure Tozer’s influence on college students, but it must have been enormous.
Several sources I have uncovered reveal that next to Dr. Edman, the most popular
speaker at Wheaton College during the 1940’s and 1950’s was Tozer. “We loved to
hear him preach,” one former student recalled. “He enthralled us,” said another,
“because he spoke with a different voice.” Tozer seemed like a breath of fresh
air to these young people for several reasons. First, he avoided the stained
glass voice. He loathed pompous sounding God-talk, and he absolutely refused to
use hackneyed fundamentalist and evangelical jargon. Second, Tozer loved words.
He was a splendid communicator, and he excelled at presenting biblical truth in
clear ways replete with vivid illustrations. Tozer also intrigued his college
audiences because of his transparency. He admitted his shortcomings and he
preached on what he personally had experienced from biblical truth and his
intimate relationship with Christ. These discerning students knew the difference
between men who could exegete Scripture and those whose hearts had been truly
changed by the Bible. Another reason why Tozer’s words flowed with ease through
Wheaton chapel audiences can be attributed to his lack of a traditional
theological education. To be sure an ignorant speaker is apt to offend or bore a
congregation of college women and men. But Tozer’s mind was neither empty nor
undisciplined. Although he preached without the benefit of Bible school,
college, or seminary training, his head was full of years of self-directed
education. The man who only had about eleven years of formal schooling steeped
himself in history, theology, poetry, and philosophy. He drank deeply from the
rich nectar of the early church fathers, and his knowledge of deeper life
writers, whose works spanned centuries of church history, would have impressed
the finest historians of ancient and medieval church history. Tozer introduced
college people to writers they had never read. He likewise shared stories with
them of mystical experiences—stories that stirred young people’s hearts. In
brief, when Tozer set foot on the Wheaton College campus, student expectations
ran high. People expected to be intellectually stimulated and spiritually
inspired; and they were not disappointed. A. W. Tozer had properly diagnosed the
condition of the Church in post-war America. People cried out for spiritual food
but they were not being fed. Heads were full of doctrine and biblical truth, but
hearts were cold and spirits were comatose. We need a revival of “personal heart
religion,” he cried. The president of Wheaton College agreed, and so did the
students. To be sure there were critics. One faculty member at Wheaton College
confronted Tozer after a chapel with no intentions of complimenting the
preacher. He said: “Tozer, you’re a bit of a mystic aren’t you?” Tozer’s reply
delighted students: “Of course I’m a mystic. How else can you have a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ today?” In many ways Tozer’s messages are just as
timely now as they were a generation ago. In the following pages eleven of A. W.
Tozer’s messages to Wheaton College students are published for the first time
since he preached them in the early 1950’s. The first sermon was delivered in
chapel in spring, 1952. The next nine messages comprise a week of evangelistic
services given during autumn 1952. The concluding sermon was presented at the
college chapel on March 4, 1954. Upon discovering these sermons I was convinced
that Brother Tozer had spoken words that are as appropriate for college students
today as they were a half century ago. If he could speak to university men and
women today, I think he would want to convey the same timeless truths. It is my
prayer that he will speak to you with the same life-changing power that he spoke
to his generation.

Lyle W. Dorsett

Wheaton College Wheaton, Illinois


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  CHAPTER 2: 02 - SPIRITUAL POWER
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“Ye shall receive power” (Acts 1:8). Those four words are the promise our Lord
Jesus Christ gave to His waiting disciples. The word power, in our English
language, may mean a number of things; particularly, it may mean one of two:
authority to do or ability to do. When our Lord used the word power, He meant
“Ye shall receive ability to do.” So what our Lord actually promised to His
disciples was a spiritual potency enabling them to do something—He did not say
what. “Ye shall receive ability to do”—the sentence dangles; we have to piece it
out by the rest of the Scriptures and by the rest of the truth our Lord taught
us.

This spiritual potency, this supernatural visitation, which He said was to come
upon them, was to be an invasion from beyond them. It was to come into their
personalities from outside, from somewhere beyond and above, from a realm in
which they had not previously lived and with which they had not been previously
experientially acquainted. Here is the great gulf that separates Christianity
from every other quasi-religion. We have, God knows, a world of them: Bahaism,
New Thought, Unity, yoga, various forms of applied psychology, auto-suggestion,
and all the rest. And they all say the same thing, and attempt the same thing:
to wake up something, to tap the hidden powers inside of us. In their books they
popularize their doctrines by such silly phrases as “wake the sleeping giant
within you,” and “tune in to your hidden potentials.” Since nobody knows what
any of those things mean, they buy their books, of course, and join their
religions. They tell us also to “learn to think creatively.” All you have to do
these days in order to make a lot of money is to write a book on any of these
topics: “How to Quiet Your Mind,” “How to Wake Your Solar Plexus,” or “How to
Arouse the Giant That Lies Dormant Within You.” All these concepts are based
upon the assumption that man is all right to start with—he’s simply asleep; he
needs to be awakened. Somewhere there is a terrific reservoir of moral power;
and if he can only get that awake somehow, if he can tune into it, if he can
plug into his potentialities, he will be a wonderful fellow. I do not say that
these things do not help some. I suppose a poor little hen-pecked man on his way
home from work does need a bit of a jacking up like that. For a man who has been
pushed around all day, and is on his way home to get pushed around some more,
anything that will make that man feel he is somebody—I suppose it does him some
human good. But that is the great gulf that separates true Biblical Christianity
from any other teaching in the wide world. Christianity says, “Ye shall receive
power,” that is, moral ability to do. There is a potency to enter your nature
from another world; a moral and spiritual force which is to come to you through
faith. And it is to enable you to be, not what the books say you should be, but
what God says you should be, and to enable you to be what you want to be. This
invasion of our weakness from without is the beating heart of the moral side of
Christianity. And that is the reason that all forms of ethical Christianity are
inadequate. There are really many forms of ethical Christianity, humanism being
one of them; they all assume, I repeat, the same thing. The assumption is that
we are all right if we only think so. A man came to this country years ago, and
he got a lot of publicity and many followers by having a little sort of a
homemade rosary. This little string with knots on it was all you had to have,
and you woke in the morning and said five or ten times, “Every day in every way
I am getting better and better.” Christianity knows nothing about this at all.
We go beyond that, we go deeper than that. Jesus says, “Ye shall receive power”
— a potent force from another world, invading your life by your consent, getting
to the roots of your life and transforming you into His likeness. That is the
teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ. What is this power? “Ye shall receive power
when the Holy Ghost comes upon you.” This is the power of the Holy Spirit. This
is not like the occult. I wish I could make all of God’s children understand
that there is nothing weird or uncanny about the Holy Spirit, nothing strange,
nothing abnormal, nothing that sends shivers up your spine, or makes you feel
you’ve seen a ghost; nothing of that eeriness about the Holy Spirit. The Holy
Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus; the Holy Spirit is exactly like Jesus, for what
Jesus was, He was by the power of the Spirit, so that when we have the Holy
Spirit, we have Jesus Christ. I might say, claiming no theological or
metaphysical accuracy, that the Holy Ghost is deity in solution. All that God
the Father is, and all that God the Son is, the Holy Ghost is; He is nothing
more and nothing less. So that when Jesus said, “Ye shall receive power,” He
simply meant that “All that my Father is and all that I am, by spiritual
potency, is to be made available to you in the person of the Holy Ghost.” The
Spirit of God is greatly neglected in our times; He’s crowded into a paragraph
in the books on systematic theology, or He is carefully apologized for by people
who are afraid of fanaticism. That is a trick of the devil to frighten people
away from this potency which is the essence of Christianity. How does this power
operate? I do not know that I can tell you, but I might help you understand by
saying that the power of the Holy Spirit operating in the human heart is an
unmediating force applied directly to the spirit of the individual—the human
spirit. You and I are spirits. We are spirits that have bodies. We are different
from the beasts in that they just have bodies. We are different from angels in
that they are spirits without bodies (I presume they are; I know little about
them, but I have guessed that much). But you and I are spirits to whom God has
given a body. William Jennings Bryan, 1 in his great oration on the Prince of
Peace, referred to the fact that our souls are simply “guest royal come from
afar to inhabit a little while” what he called this “tenement of clay.” And
thus, we are spirits. Beyond your mentality, beyond your soul where aesthetic
beauty such as Bach and Beethoven are felt and appreciated, beyond all this and
even deeper is where the Spirit of God wants to go. It is my conviction that we
are overdue for a revival of inwardness. Not a revival of sitting around looking
at our thumbs, or sitting like a statue of Buddha, but a revival of appreciation
of the inwardness of true spiritual Christianity. The Spirit of power that comes
from God to redeemed men’s hearts is a power that operates directly and
unmediated upon us from Spirit to spirit. A wrestler achieves his success by
pressure of body upon body, and a teacher achieves his success by the pressure
of ideas on the mind. The moralist achieves his success by the pressure of
obligation upon conscience, but the Spirit of God achieves His end by the
pressure of Himself deep within the spirit of man. There is an old word used by
some of the writers of medieval times—you do not hear it anymore, although it is
still found in the dictionary—it is the word penetralia. They talked about God
in the penetralia. I do not know all the word means, but I would assume it would
mean that place which you must penetrate to —that deep place within you, deeper
even than the mind can go. And it is there that the Spirit of God works. He
works in the penetralia, in the sanctum deep within, that which is merely of our
bodies or souls or minds. I do not say that the Holy Ghost does not make use of
other means, because, after all, we are physical. I do not say that He does not
make use of our minds, because He most certainly does. God has equipped us with
minds, and I for one belong to that company of fundamentalists who are not
adverse to thinking. I do not believe that there is any basic incompatibility
between a good mind and a good heart. I do not believe that we must be dumb to
be happy. I do not mean, necessarily, that intellectuality makes you good, but
it does not hurt you any if you know what to do with it. But I do say that the
Spirit of God does use the human mind. I believe that one of the most beautiful
things in the world is a sanctified mentality, a good, sharp mind, broad and
high and noble and lofty and yet keen as a razor, that is anointed with the
Spirit of God to give it tenderness, love, purity, and fineness. Someone said
the other day in one of our newspapers, “Why is it that Alexander Pope is
unquestionably one of the most skillful of all the English poets, yet is one of
the least loved of all the English poets?” Then he answered his own question; he
said it is because he lacked that one essential element—love. He had a
tremendous intellect, but nobody liked the man somehow. You read and quote what
he has to say, sort of at arms length; there are never any pulsations there,
never any warm attraction because the man lacked love. An intellect without this
inward potency to lay hold of it may be a very destructive thing and something
that we do not take much pleasure in. The company of a fine mind may be a very
embarrassing matter unless that mind has been anointed with the soft sweet oil
of the Holy Ghost, so there is love and charity and understanding. So I do not
say that the Spirit of God never makes use of these means. I most assuredly say
that He does, but the deep inner sanctuary is beyond all means. When Jesus said,
“Ye shall receive power,” He meant you shall receive the pressure of the Spirit
of God upon the heart, upon the spirit. How the Spirit works, again I say I do
not know, I cannot tell you. I can only describe an experience, but I can never
explain it. There are those who shy away from Christianity because of what they
call its mystic element; they say it cannot be explained. My stock answer to all
such objectors is that all of us live habitually all the time. All of us—from
the horse meat manufacturers on up to the saints—we live by things that we do
not understand. Up and down the scale—every gangster, every mother, every simple
person in the woods of Kentucky—everybody lives by things we cannot understand.
We cannot understand life; we cannot understand love; we cannot understand
light. We just take it all for granted, and live by it. So when they tell me,
“Aw, get away with it; I do not believe in any mystic element in Christianity,
any of that mysterious power you are talking about, because I cannot understand
it,” I reply, “I cannot understand life, but I am alive. I cannot understand
love, but I love a lot of people. I cannot understand all this, but I can only
know how it works, and I can experience it.” This power that comes to the human
breast by faith does not create objects. That is where imagination and all sorts
of weird, occult religions come in. They create things that do not exist, but
the Holy Spirit never creates anything that does not exist. He simply lifts the
fog off it, and shows it to us. He does not create the mountain; He takes away
the shroud from the mountain, so that it stands clear and bright in the
sunshine. The Holy Spirit comes giving us inward understanding so that in one
sense, “Ye need not that any man should teach you: but as the same anointing
teacheth you of all things” (1 John 2:27). By that He does not exclude teachers;
that same Holy Ghost creates teachers, makes them, and sets them in the church.
But He did say that He was going to teach us at a deeper level than our human
intellect; He is going to inform us farther in than we can be informed by the
words of a man or by a book; He’s going into the penetralia. “Ye shall receive
power,” and that is ability to do and power to perform. Therein lies the
throbbing powerhouse of Christianity. It is the invasion; it is the Person that
has come in from beyond us, lost as we were in sin, and has brought that
potency, that ability to achieve moral ends, inside of us. After that,
Christianity ceases to be an ethical thing at all, and it becomes a spiritual
reality. Then it lays hold of ethics; it lays hold of these external things,
transforms them, and glorifies them. The Holy Ghost reveals objects present,
things unknown and unseen. Above all things the business of the Spirit of God in
its fullest effectiveness is to remove the veil from the soul and show us Jesus
Christ. “He shall take of mine and shall show it unto you” (John 16:15). Jesus
Christ may simply be an historical Jesus, a theological Jesus, or a
philosophical Jesus until the Holy Spirit, that potency that enables within,
reveals Him for what He is. Then we throw up our hands and cry, “My Lord and my
God!” He is the Jesus of history, most surely He is, but He is more than the
Jesus of history. He is the Jesus of my heart; He is the present Christ. But He
will never be known as that until it is by the power of the Spirit, for Paul
says that no man can even call Jesus Lord except by the power of the Holy Ghost
(1 Corinthians 12:3). I would suppose Paul means to call Jesus Lord so as to be
acceptable before God. Anybody can call Jesus “Lord” and not be saved—He said so
Himself. But the power to know Jesus Christ Himself, the second Person of the
Trinity, the divine Christ, depends upon the enabling of the Sprit of God within
us. It is my belief that the forgotten, or at least neglected, doctrine of our
day, the most important one of them all after atonement itself, is that we, as
God’s redeemed people, have a right to expect and receive from Him by faith, a
power that will do in us what all the poor religions of the world can never do.
This power will bring to us the shining face of Jesus, and make Him real within
us, so that not only the moral, theological, and ethical qualities are present,
but also the mystical quality—the sight of the face of Jesus Christ within the
human breast. There is not a lovelier sight. May God grant that we may
understand this, believe it, and enter into it.

[This message was delivered at a Wheaton College chapel service on February 28,
1952.]


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  CHAPTER 3: 03 - PREPARING THE WAY FOR THE LORD
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Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, being
governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee and his brother Philip,
tetrarch of Iturea, and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch
of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto
John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. And he came into all the country
about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. As
it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, saying, The voice
of one crying out in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of Lord, make His paths
straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be
brought low; and the crooked places shall be make straight, and the rough ways
shall be made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God. (Luke 3:1-6)

"Prepare ye the way of the Lord." These words were spoken by a man of God in a
particular time; it has a particular and specific historic setting, and it can
be understood that way.

God was preparing a people for the greatest event that ever took place in this
world—the manifestation of the Messiah. In order to do that He had to prepare
the people morally to understand Him and to receive Him. That is the historic
setting, but remember these words also have application for today because they
constitute a spiritual principle which God has laid down and from which He has
never varied during the centuries. It is always that way. If God is preparing to
bless a man, that man has to get ready. I know that will shock some people,
because there is a badly conceived theory abroad that God does it all; all you
and I have to do is be born. After that God just picks us up on eagle wings and
sweeps us irresistibly through to the crown at last. I cannot imagine how such a
notion could ever have lodged itself in heads as small as ours are, but it is
there. Consequently, it is necessary to point out that this is an error and that
the principle of God’s operation is that when He is about to do something
unusual for a nation, a church, an individual, He gets that individual, or
nation, or church morally ready. John was sent to do that very thing. God wills
certain things for people—spiritual prosperity, I might call it. Let me say that
it consists of about two things: first, clear forgiveness of sin and washing
from the same. God’s will for everyone who hears the gospel is that we should be
forgiven and thoroughly cleansed from sin. Second, we should be filled and walk
in the fullness of the Holy Ghost all the days of our life. That will eventuate
immediately, of course, fruitfulness, peace of heart, purity of life, and
general usefulness to our generation before we go hence to be no more. This is
not talk about a deluxe edition of a Christian. When I talk like this people
often say: “Well, that is simply your extreme view of it. That is a deluxe,
leather-bound edition, but do you not know that God has His paper-bound editions
too? The simple twenty five-cent editions make up the great mass of Christians.
They will get in; they are all right, too. It is all right for mystics, hermits,
and certain ones such as Dr. A. B. Simpson, 1 Charles Wesley, 2 or some other
saint to rise to spiritual heights, but for us that is all out. We are too busy;
we have too much to do and besides, we are living in a different generation.” If
you feel that way about it there is not much that I can say that will help you.
I hope you know better than that, because a Spirit-filled Christian is not a
deluxe edition; he is a normal Christian. If he is anything less he is sick. A
normal Christian is a person whose sins have been forgiven, who has not only a
theological knowledge that his sins have been forgiven, but has also a deep
consciousness of it. This is not an unusual Christian, or he ought not to be.
The old writers used to talk about “restored moral innocence.” They said there
are two ways to be innocent: one is never to have done it; the second is having
done it to be so forgiven of God that you have no sense of ever having done it
to the extent that you have restored moral innocence given to you by God. I
believe this. There are many of us that have gotten converted the hard way. We
got picked out of the shell, and our belief in our having salvation rests upon a
conclusion drawn from a text. We have been made to believe that that is faith. I
read a certain text, and I draw a certain conclusion from it. I say, "Well that
is it. Now, let us go have a soda." That is about as deep as many of us go. The
forgiveness in the blood of Jesus Christ is a profounder thing than that! It is
profounder than a conclusion drawn from Biblical promises. It goes in to the
depths of the spirit, it restores a sense of everlasting well-being, and it
gives to the heart restored moral innocence. God means it to be for every one of
us so that we can say, My God has reconciled, His pardoning voice I hear;

He owns me for His child, I need no longer fear. 3

My spirit answers and tells me I am born of God. God wills this condition for
every one of His children. But do you know there is a difference between one who
is forgiven theologically and one who is forgiven actually? There is a
difference in the whole lift of his spirit, his countenance, the quality and
tone of his testimony, his approach to life, others and God, and a difference in
his prayer life. God wills that we should be Spirit-filled Christians, walking
in the fullness of His Spirit. You do not have to coax God into a good humor; we
do not have to pray all night to get God coaxed up to do it for us. This is what
the old camp-meeting brethren called “the purchase of the blood.” All this is
ours by blood right! He died and rose again the third day and ascended to God
the Father Almighty. It was all done. We can add nothing to it. Utter spiritual
prosperity, the tree in full bloom, the field in full grain—this is the will of
God for His people. When we say we are going to have a revival, what do we mean?
We inadvertently admit that we are spiritually below par. We unintentionally
admit that we are badly in need of having brought to us these things which are
all ours by the grace of God which is in Christ Jesus. Let us remember that when
God prepares to bless a community, a church people or a group, first He has to
get us ready. How can we get ready? There is a great fallacy abroad that a lot
of talk will do it. I have never believed much in talk, though I have talked now
for thirty-five years. Talk is all right if you mean to walk along with your
talk, but I suppose that there is no organization in the world that has quite as
much talk associated with it as religion. Politics comes second. And very often
there is not much more reality in our religious talk than there is in political
talk. I trust God that it is not true that a word once spoken never is recalled.
I trust God that somewhere out in the waves of space all the words spoken in all
the churches of the world since the crucifixion are not being recorded. Would it
not be an unattractive universe to roam around in and be bumped into from all
sides by endless barrages of religious words? And we have spoken so many words
because we have done so few deeds. Great deeds require few words, and few deeds
require a great many words. So when we want to get ready we begin to talk. It is
part and parcel of our way of doing, I suppose, because we continue to do it.
There is also a notion that if we get very busy we will get blessed. I suppose
American people are the busiest people in the world. Someone from the Orient
once asked what American people do with the time they save. That question has
never been answered. We screech to a stop from forty-seven plus miles an hour at
a stale yellow light to go nowhere at all! We American people think we are
highly cultured and educated. Actually, we are often like a big bunch of fools,
for we do things that the Chinese would never do; we do things that the ancients
would have smiled at. Great people have always thought before they acted.
American people seldom think; we have our thinking done for us and put in digest
magazines so that we do not have to think. We have our religion dished out for
us in fiction form so we never have to grasp an abstract idea. Abstractions are
absolutely indispensable to any grasp of spiritual things, and yet we have it
all done for us. The writers and printing presses are busy printing things for
us “saintlets” who haven’t mentality enough or character enough to really
believe and meditate and contemplate and dream over high things until they get
ahold of us. These religious fiction writers always pick Shirley for the name of
the girl in the story. I have often wondered about Shirley—how did she get so
popular? And her boyfriend is always named Ned. I have seen so many of these
books of fiction—Ned and Shirley. They go to a ballgame and hold their
Testaments over their heads and say, "Praise the Lord! Hit a home run, Charles!"
It is always so neat, and so Victorian, and so completely unreal. But it takes
our minds off God, heaven and hell, reality and death, the Holy Ghost, moral
things and lost men. And that is the curse in the world and in the church. We
cannot talk our way out of this jam; we cannot talk our way into preparedness
for the mighty inmoving of God upon us, and we cannot work our way into it
either. We can run around the neighborhood giving out tracts, and that is a fine
thing to do. I have done it and hope I never get too old to do it, but that will
not help us either when it comes to this thing God wants to do for us. This
sudden restoration of moral innocence that gives the heart a sense of
forgiveness and cleansing, this fullness of the Spirit that walks in the Holy
Ghost and bears fruit unto righteousness—that is divine. Never by external
activities and talk will it ever come. And the reason it has not come sooner is
that there are certain moral blocks that prevent God from moving in. He wants to
come, He wills to come in, but there are certain moral blocks that prevent the
blessing—moral blocks in our hearts and in our conduct. These blocks must be
removed. Just as a blood clot gets into the heart and causes coronary thrombosis
by preventing the full flow of blood, so there gets into the veins and arteries
of Christians certain blocks. The Lord says, “You know better than this. You
have read your Bible, and you have it before you.” Indeed, the glory of the Lord
wants to break in upon you and show you what is wrong with you. But we are prone
to hunt somebody up and take up some of their time to have them tell us that we
are all right. We are always ready to overlook what we very obviously know is
wrong with us. This is a moral block—something that is blocking out the incoming
of God. I believe that the Holy Ghost comes into a person’s life, as Dr. A.B.
Simpson said, "like breathing in," without any effort on our part. If you were
to break a light bulb, there would be a pop; it is a vacuum, and the atmosphere
wants to rush in there. It cannot get in past the glass, but as soon as you
break it, the air rushes in. You do not have to get on your knees and cry, "Oh
atmosphere, please rush into this bulb!" Break it, and it will rush in. That is
all you have to do. You do not have to wait around and talk and talk and talk. I
believe that God wants to move in that very same way. He wants to move in an
unusual way—not unusual because it is strange, but unusual only because so few
of us are blessed in this way. "Prepare ye the way of the Lord." That sentence
is jostled around a bit. Usually the subject is first, but here it is
second—"You prepare the way of the Lord." The human heart is very deceitful and
desperately wicked apart from the good grace of God, and we can cheat ourselves,
living half a lifetime, growing old and gray, and cheating our own hearts unless
we become suddenly very, very honest. I pray that we might not try to play
tricks on our own hearts. We know what is bothering us. "Prepare YE the way of
the Lord." Why is it that you cannot control your temper? Why is it? No, it was
not your Irish mother. It was your devilish ancient ancestor who had that virus
injected into his veins and so we all have it. I had an English father and a
German mother, and I had a temper like blue lightning. I had to do something
about that temper or it most certainly would have done something about me. Why
can you not get victory over it? Why must it always upset you and make a fool of
you in company? And why must it spoil your testimony before your friends? These
blocks are in our hearts. They are what we call dispositional sins, but they may
also be in our conduct in external things. We have got to get rid of them. I
hope you do not want anybody to baby you, and say, "All right now, let us not
take this too seriously; all is well." Let us not think of it like that. If all
were well, you would not be half dead and you would not need the revival for
which you have been praying. The fact is, all is not well, and we must have help
here. We must have a visitation of God to individual hearts. I do not know that
I can tell you too much about mass revivals. When I was a very young man I used
to preach a great deal on mass revivals. I had read Finney and was quite an
expert on the subject of mass revivals, but as I have gotten older I know less
about it than I used to. But I can tell you how an individual can get revived. I
can tell you how an individual can have such a spiritual revival that it will
mean a growth and a bursting out in spiritual life as wonderful as when Jesus
healed the lame man (Matthew 9:2-8; Mark 2:3-12; Luke 5:17-26). You can come out
of sickness into health, out of weakness into power, out of heavy conscience
into a beautiful sense of forgiveness and innocence again. You do not have to
wait until so many sermons have been preached before this happens; it can happen
to you now. That I do know. I am not able to answer the question of whether
there will be a great world revival before Jesus comes, but I say that you can
have all that revival can bring within a matter of hours or less if you will
"Prepare ye the way of the Lord." Let us look at those things which may be
keeping us from individual revival. Let us just cruelly break them down, and
spare no horse flesh.

Personal Friendships

Let us look at personal friendships. Maybe the reason I cannot get victory over
my flesh and the reason I am not able to live a fruitful and victorious life is
because I habitually run around with the wrong people. It is my opinion, after
careful observation, that the greatest hindrance to the spiritual progress of
young people is bad friendships. After many years in the ministry, I have
observed it. Some bright-faced fellow who decides in a sudden impulse as he
hears the Word of God, "This is for me! I want to follow Christ! I want to
accept Him and believe Him!" You show him the way, and it looks all right. You
think, "Here is another disciple for the Savior." But he goes back to the same
crowd he has been with. Maybe he mumbles a testimony, and tries to compromise
it, but it is the same old crowd. It is not very long until he is all cooled
off. Instead of walking with the Lord, he is not, or if he is, he is making very
little spiritual progress. Bad friendships, I say, are a reason for our slowdown
in spiritual growth. Let us decide this. You say, "You would not have me turn my
back on my best friend!" Well, I will not answer that, but I will quote somebody
else. "If any man come to me, and is not willing to give up father, and mother
and friends and houses and homes and his life also, he cannot be my disciple"
(Matthew 10:37-39). Any friendship that slows you down is a bad friendship, and
you ought to give it up, whether it is by telephone, by mail, or in person.

Personal Habits

Then, let us look at personal habits. Do my habits honor God? I must search my
heart. "Search ye," says the Holy Ghost—in effect, "prepare ye" my personal
habits. Do they honor God? Do they help me or do they hinder me? As I look
myself over as we should, my common sense tells, "Now, wait a minute here, bud.
That habit you have just cannot help you in the kingdom of God." You can excuse
it, say it doesn’t occur in the Scriptures, challenge somebody to find the text,
but in your heart you know that it hinders you. “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”
by removing that hindrance. Take it out of your life, whatever it is.

Moral Habits

Then there are my moral habits. Here is a little rule to know whether they are
all right or not. Would I dare have them publicly known? Am I habitually
practicing anything that I would not have publicly known? There are lots of
things we do not do in public, common decency tells us that there are certain
things that are to be done in private, but could I have everybody know my moral
habits—what I am doing and how I am living, without embarrassment? If I cannot
answer “yes”—joyfully—to that question, then I know what is wrong with me. I do
not have to go ask somebody or write the question and answer department of some
Christian periodical. I have an answer on that—I know already. If I will not
admit it, I am simply being dishonest with my own heart. I have secret habits
that will not bear the light of the gospel. "My pastor does not dare know about
that! My teacher does not dare know about that! I would not want my friends to
know." Well, I cannot do a thing about that from here, because the Lord did not
say, "Tozer, prepare the way for these people." He said, "Prepare ye,"
individually, each of you, "the way of the Lord."

Past Life

I think about my past life. Are all my sins forgiven? Sins may be forgotten and
not forgiven. Some people have long memories, maybe, when it come to remembering
the wrongs of others, but when it comes to themselves they quickly forget, and
it falls into the lint and dust of things forgotten. Because they have forgotten
it, they think God has forgotten it. But they fail to take into account that
this is a moral universe run according to moral laws, and God is a holy, moral
God. He cannot sustain His own character and maintain His own reputation among
created beings, and let anything get by. If there is an unpardoned sin anywhere,
that unpardoned sin still stands against the perpetrator. You want all the
wrongs righted as far as possible. You say, "There he goes now, I knew he was a
legalist. He is preaching restitution." Yes, I am preaching restitution. You
see, it is so reasonable. Suppose that while brother McAfee4 slept over where he
and I stay, that I sneaked out of bed, and stole a ten-dollar bill out of his
wallet, and then said, "Forgive me, God, for stealing this ten-dollar bill. I am
sorry, and I take the blood for it, and I will never take another ten-dollar
bill." Then I go out and buy myself some things with his ten-dollar bill. I ask
you, do you think it is reasonable that I can go about preaching, praying,
looking pious, being happy in God and get my prayers answered without restoring
that ten dollars? Never! I have to take that back and say, "Ray, I am sorry, I
yielded to temptation and stole ten dollars from you. Here is the ten dollars."
Then after that I can smile again, and preach again. I used to steal when I was
a boy. I never robbed banks, but I stole things. After I got converted I went
around giving them all back. I suppose people thought I was plain crazy. I
remember once I stole a ride on a railroad train in a boxcar. One day I was
seeking God, and something said to me, "Now how about your riding around on the
B & O Railroad without paying?" "All right, all right, I’ve ridden on what they
called the ‘possum belly, on the old flat car," I said. "I suppose the only
thing to do is write in." That sounded silly, and it was I suppose, but I sat
down and wrote to the passenger traffic manager in Baltimore. I said,

Dear Sir,

Some years ago I rode one of your freight trains into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I do not know how much I owe you, but I am a Christian now and want to get this
off my conscience. I am writing to ask you how much I owe.

I got a letter back, but I am sure that the gentlemen dictated it with his
tongue in his cheek. He said,

Dear Sir,

I am very happy to know that you have become a Christian, and I am in receipt of
the letter that tells me that you have bummed around on my railroad without
paying. I appreciate your honesty in telling me so, but my answer is that you
probably did not get very good service, and we have no rates applying to
boxcars. Therefore, you may consider yourself forgiven.

I suppose there was a "ho-ho" that went up from the office when that letter went
into the basket, but when I opened that yellow envelope with B & O’s signature
upon the left corner and read that I was forgiven, I knew everything was all
right. You think that is carrying it too far? Maybe so, but in this day, when
folks do not carry things far enough, if I am going to be a fanatic I want to be
a fanatic in the right direction. Do you not also? If I am going too far, I want
to go too far toward Heaven instead of toward Hell. I believe in restitution,
and I believe that there are some things that need to be straightened out in our
past lives. When a thing has been forgiven by the blood of Christ, there are not
devils enough in all the lost creation to dig it up. But God is our Father and
we are His children, and in His household He wants a fair, honest, clean people.
Though that sin is now gone, there is a certain relationship between individuals
that ought to be straightened out, and that is where restitution comes in. It is
not to save us; it is to lift the weight off our hearts and get the right
relationships established between man and man. When a thing has once been
forgiven, it is forgiven, and that is the end of that as far as God is
concerned, but if you know that you can pay it back from man to man, do that.
David said this strange thing: "My goodness extendeth not to Thee, but the
saints which are in the earth" (Psalms 16:2-3). All this restitution of
straightening out with my friends and living right with my fellow man—it does
not endear me to God—"My goodness extendeth not to God, but the saints which are
on the earth." I have got to live right with people. I do not believe in
promiscuous confession. If it has been forgiven and I know that confessing it to
the public will not do any good, then I believe it ought to be put where God put
it, under the blood and left there, world without end. But if any good can be
done, if I can straighten it out, if I can put that ten dollars back in that
man’s wallet, then I ought to do it. A full confession must be made to God,
where I cannot make it to man. There are many sins that I have committed that I
cannot confess to people for various reasons. But God forgives it all, and
wherever it is possible we ought to maintain the right relationship, and that is
always possible between individuals.

Relationships with Others

If I have caused hard feelings anywhere, I ought to go get that straightened
out. You know this is the day of the smart-aleck, the quip-artist, and cynical
people. We have fed too long on the New Yorker and the radio commentators, and
we have become hard. I believe God wants His people to be tender people, quick
to forgive and ask forgiveness. Many of us, I suppose, are not blessed because
we owe an apology to somebody. We ought to go to somebody and say, "So-and-so, I
am sorry. I have said awfully mean things about you, and I have not liked you at
all." God has sent me around to a few people like that, including a man bigger
than I was. I was afraid of him, and I thought maybe if I told him how I felt
about him he would bowl me over, but he did not. He grabbed my hand and said,
"It is all right, I never had anything against you." If I had carried that down
in my heart all these years—it was thirty years ago—I would still have that down
in me festering. But I got it straightened out. So my relationship to other
people does matter.

Relationship to God

As well, my relationship to God certainly does matter. I wonder if God is
pleased with my service for Him, pleased with my worship, pleased with my
obedience, and pleased with my love of the Scriptures. Is God pleased? You see,
we live in a triangle, and we cannot get out of it. God and myself and
others—that is the everlasting triangle in which all God’s people live. I have
to maintain those three relationships and keep them right. It is an easy thing
to do if we will be obedient and trust in God. My relationship to God is
primary; my relationship to people is secondary; my relationship to myself comes
third. In conclusion, when the blocks are removed, when I have taken them away,
then, it says here in the grand, beautiful, poetic language of Luke, "The glory
of the Lord shall be revealed." And that is revival, when the glory of the Lord
is revealed. God will not debate this with you and me. If you do not like what I
am saying, I cannot help that. I hope you do, but if you do not I cannot help
it. Everybody has a monitor in his breast if he’s a Christian. The Holy Ghost
dwells there and draws the sharp line between right and wrong. Every man or
woman, if they listen to the Holy Ghost within them, will know whether they are
right or not. Everybody knows in his own heart whether his relationship to God
and his fellow man is right. Everyone can know whether his personal habits are
hindering him, whether his secret habits are pure enough to be known to the
world, whether his past life is forgiven, and whether he has straightened up, so
far as it is possible, his relationships to his fellow men. You cannot get God
over on our side at all on that; we have to come over to God’s side. There is no
such thing as coming to God, the Eternal One, and making terms. God makes the
terms and you accept them, that is all. God never changes. God is not
reconciled; rather, God is propitiated and man is reconciled because the change
is not in God, the change is in me. God always remains the same, like the sun
that shines, asking no questions, shining His Holy Grace upon mankind. If you
pull down the blinds, the sun cannot get in, and these blinds have been pulled
down long enough in our hearts. Why not now? Are you interested in this revival,
or is it just another thing you attend because it is interesting? Are you
concerned for your own soul? Do you want something new from God? Do you want to
enter in from the twilight into the sunlight? Do you want to move from
half-spirituality into the full-blazing light of God’s love and be a spiritual
man or woman? Then, let us be very frank and bold and honest. Let us look into
our own hearts and our own lives and our own conduct fairly with the light of
God’s Word. If you find there that there are hindrances and blocks, let us
courageously remove them. And without any urging on God’s part, God will move in
on your life and transform it wondrously.

[This sermon was an evangelistic message delivered at Wheaton College, Pierce
Chapel, September 29, 1952.]


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  CHAPTER 4: 04 - GRIEVE NOT THE HOLY SPIRIT
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And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of
redemption. (Ephesians 4:30) The Holy Spirit is a member of the Trinity, one of
the blessed Three, but He is the forgotten member in the day in which we live.
The Spirit of the Lord is present in the world. This is taught in the Bible. One
of the old wisdom books of the Apocrypha says, "The Spirit of the Lord fills the
world." Just as our souls permeate our bodies and just as the air fills all
space around the earth, so the blessed Holy Spirit is here.

You are never sinning alone; you are never grieving alone; you are never alone,
for the Spirit of the Lord is here. He is nearer to us than our bodies and our
breath—and He is God. He is not as ether, or gravitation, or energy, but He is
one of the holy Godhead three. It is so taught all through Scripture that the
divine Being consists of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes
last in our formula, but there is no last in the Godhead. The Athanasian creed
states, And in this Trinity there is none before after or; none is greater or
less than another; but the whole three Persons are co-eternal together and
co-equal, so that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the
Trinity in Unity is to be worshiped.

The creeds of the church have always taught that the Holy Ghost is God,
including the Apostle’s Creed. And if they did not, it is still all through the
Bible. The point is, we are not dealing with one another primarily, but we are
dealing with God’s Holy Spirit on earth. The Holy Spirit is here and has always
been here. It is inconceivable that there is any place where He could not be,
but when He came after fifty days (see Acts 2), He came in a sense that He had
not been before, manifesting Himself in a way that He had not before, and
carrying a commission that He had not had before. He is concerned with people;
the Holy Ghost is concerned with you. He is here earnestly, eagerly, and
intimately concerned, working in, for, toward and among, and He is in harmony
with the Father and Son. "Such as the Father is," says the Athanasian creed,
Such is the Son and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated, the Son
uncreated, and the Holy Ghost uncreated; the Father incomprehensible, the Son
incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible; the Father eternal, the
Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet there are not three Eternals,
but one Eternal, as also not three Uncreated nor three Incomprehensibles, but
one Uncreated and one Incomprehensible. So, likewise, the Father is almighty,
the Son almighty, and the Holy Ghost almighty.; and yet not three Almighties,
but one Almighty. So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is
God; and yet not three Gods, but one God. So likewise the Father is Lord, the
Son Lord, and the Holy Ghost Lord. And yet not three Lords, but one Lord. For
like as we are compelled by Christian truth to acknowledge every Person by
Himself to be God and Lord, so are we forbidden by the catholic religion to say,
There be three Gods or three Lords. So the Holy Spirit is here working in
harmony with the Book. He will maybe do things you have not yet discovered in
the Bible, for He wrote the Book. It is His book, and it is the Word of the
Father. It is the book in print which is the revealed will of God, not on every
subject, but on that pertaining to our salvation. There is much to learn that is
not in the Bible, but there is nothing to learn pertaining to my everlasting
welfare that is not in the Bible. The Holy Ghost will always teach according to
the Book in harmony with the Father and the Son and in pursuance of the eternal
purpose of God. The Holy Ghost has sovereign right over us. I believe in the
sovereignty of God. My definition of the sovereignty of God is simply God
Almighty’s freedom to do always all that He wills to do. This is the Holy
Ghost—He’s sovereign. He has the freedom and right to do all that He wills to
do, and He will not be hindered. He is the creative power of our being, and He
holds our life in being by His presence. It says in Hebrews 1:3 that all things
are held together by the Word of God, and the Holy Ghost, filling all space, is
the adhesive element in the universe that holds it together. If God were to
remove Himself from His creation, if that were possible, it would fall back into
chaos and cease to be. The Holy Ghost is here and He has priority—remember that.
The Holy Ghost has priority over your pastor, your church, your teachers,
priority over every human thing. He is God, and being God, His voice has
priority over all voices, His will over all wills, and His instruction over all
other instruction. The Holy Spirit can be intimate and personal, and He insists
upon being so. There is nothing that the Holy Spirit does not claim the right to
examine and decide. The Holy Spirit is not interfering with my habits, He is
doing His divine work when He deals with them. The Holy Ghost has the right to
examine and decide my conduct, the flow of habits, whatever they are. When it
becomes a chain of habits, it becomes conduct, so the Holy Spirit has the right
to examine the flow and chain of habits that become conduct. The Holy Ghost also
has the perfect Sovereign right to decide on my friendships. Of all things that
hinder Christian growth, I think bad friendships come close to the top. The Holy
Ghost has a perfect right to decide my love life and to deal with marriage,
ambitions, plans, possessions, destiny and all that I do. He claims and has the
right to deal with, examine and decide whatever I do and what I am. That is the
blessed Holy Spirit. He is here, but He is the forgotten person the Trinity. We
deal with Him as politicians deal with Abraham Lincoln—we fall back on Him for a
point or quote Him reverently, but we always think of Him as being somewhere
else at some remote time. But neither “somewhere-elseness” nor “former-timeness”
belongs to the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is now and here. The difference
between unbelief and faith is the difference between there and here, between now
and then. The unbeliever says, “I believe in God there.” The believer says, "I
believe in God here.” The unbeliever says, “I believe in the Holy Ghost then.”
The believer says, “I believe in the Holy Ghost now." It is a difference between
now and then, here and there. Anybody can believe in the God of the day of
Abraham. Anybody can believe in the Holy Ghost of the Millennium. But believers
believe in the Holy Ghost now. He is not just then, He is now; He is there, but
He is also here. We are in His hands whether we like it or not—whatever our
background or religious teaching might have been, whatever excesses might have
been clustered around the teaching and practice of the Holy Ghost, we cannot
escape the fact that we are in the hands of the Holy Spirit. This is the
dispensation of the Holy Spirit. You cannot know Jesus Christ except as the Holy
Ghost reveals Him unto you. You, by your fall in Adam, were altogether blind.
You can know about the history of Jesus, but you can never know Jesus except as
the Holy Spirit makes Him real to you. We cannot afford to ignore the Holy
Ghost. We cannot afford to let Him continue to be the forgotten member of the
Trinity. We must give Him the place our fathers gave Him, the place the Bible
gives Him, the place that He holds by virtue of the fact that He is one with the
Father and the Son, one in eternity, one in substance, one in glory and one in
majesty.

How We Treat the Holy Spirit

How do we treat this Holy Spirit? We can blaspheme the Holy Spirit. This is
extreme irreverence toward Him—scurrilous thoughts and scurrilous remarks, and
indignity offered to His holy Person. As far as I know, there are only two
passages in the Bible that tell us about this—one is Mark 3:29 and the other is
Matthew 12:31. 1 I doubt if any who read this has ever been guilty of this
tragic and unpardonable sin. But there is always danger. The Pharisees were
guilty of this tragic and deadly sin because of their pride, prejudice, bigotry
and unforgiving spirit. They betrayed the highest thing that was in them. They
grieved, and then finally blasphemed, the Holy Ghost. Jesus said they had not
forgiveness. Another way we treat the Spirit in our time is to resist Him.
Resisting the Holy Spirit is chronically disagreeing with God and persistently
disobeying the leadings of the Spirit. Disobedience has become the sin that we
shrug off. Someone will say in testimony, “I love the Lord. He is good to me,
and He is patient with me,” and then they will say, “I disobey Him, I admit it,
I disobey Him.” It was disobedience that wrought the fall. One act of
disobedience plunged us into this moral mess we are in now. Disobedience is not
a light sin to be shrugged off. If you looked me in the face and said, “Mr.
Tozer, I have just been to a doctor. I have cancer,” you would not chuckle and
shrug and say, “I am all right, I only have cancer.” Chronic disobedience breeds
cancer of the soul. Instead of resisting God, resisting what you know is true,
resisting the findings of your own conscience as enlightened in the Word, and
resisting the instructions of the Book, I recommend you cease to chortle over
that which brought the fall of man, made a devil out of a cherub and brings
grief to the Holy Ghost. If we persistently oppose His leadings, as known from
the Bible which the Holy Spirit wrote and as felt in our own hearts by the
indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, we are grieving the Holy Ghost. The very
fact that He can grieve proves that He loves. The psychological nature of grief
is such that it cannot be felt where there is not love. A father goes to the
police court and there he sees two boys. They have been caught red-handed in
some terrible crime. One of them is his own lad who grew up in his home, and the
other is a perfect stranger for whom he has no feeling at all. For one boy he
may have a sort of pity, but for the other boy he has bitter grief, because
grief can only be felt where there is love, and love breeds grief when the
object of our love displeases us and offers us affront. So the very fact that
the Holy Ghost can grieve is the proof that He is the Spirit of love. He is not
an angry Holy Spirit nor a flippant Holy Spirit. There is so much flippancy
among Christians these days. The evangelist tells a story, and he always sets it
up so there is a punch line—he, of course, is the hero of the punch line.
Everybody laughs and it sounds all right, but that is flippancy. But the Holy
Spirit never deals frivolously with anything. He deals with loving seriousness,
but He is never heavy. Heaviness comes from our flesh, or something we ate, or
from the bad air in a building, or whatever it might be, but the Holy Ghost
always has a sprightliness (if I may so express it), a moral sprightliness. He
has about Him something of the song of the birds and the beauty of the sunshine,
the loveliness of the landscape and the freshness of the baby’s voice. He has
about Him all the freshness, creativeness, and the beauty of God’s primal
creation for He made it.

God the Great Musician

The Holy Ghost is always fresh, and original, and loving, and yet He is always
serious. Heavy-heartedness and long-facedness are never borne of the Holy Ghost,
for the Holy Ghost is mirthful, and it is written in the Old Testament that God
sings over His children. He sings over them and rejoices over them. It is
written that in the creation the morning stars sang together (Job 38:7). The old
Greeks used to talk about “the music of the spheres.” They conceived the idea
that the heavenly bodies gave off music as they moved. I do not know whether
they do or not, but I think it would be quite expected that they would. God
Almighty is the musician of the universe, the great songleader of the world, who
dances through His universe like the beat of a baton, who brings music wherever
there is anything created, who put the chortle in the throat of the baby and the
song in the throat of the thrush, and who gave us hymnody and all the music of
the world. God sings over His people. If you will listen in your heart, you may
hear God rejoicing in His family. A father comes home at night tired, but not
too tired to sit down and take a baby or two on his lap and talk with them,
maybe even break out into a song? I sang our first baby to sleep the first year
of his life, and I do not know how he ever survived, but he is thirty-two years
old now and several inches taller than I, so God must have translated my bad
baritone into sweet music to my boy. It is perfectly normal for a father to sing
over his family. So God sings and the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of Love and of
music and of sweetness. He is here, and He is not angry or heavy-browed, but He
is serious, and He is loving, and He is grieved when He is resisted and we
quench Him by dimming His light and putting it out—damping the fire of His of
enthusiasm within our heart out of fear. He wants us to testify, and we don’t.
He wants us to pray, and we have got something else to do. He wants us to go to
a friend and talk quietly about Jesus to him, and we are too busy or
scared—plain scared. We quench the Holy Ghost. According to the text, all those
things grieve Him. But this is for Christians only. The world cannot grieve the
Holy Ghost, I suppose, in the sense a Christian can. The Hidden God

What are the consequences of a grieved Spirit? He hides Himself. “Thou art a God
that hideth thyself, O Lord God of Israel” (Psalms 89:46). God hidden is the
church’s woe; God revealed is the church’s glory. What is a revival but a sudden
revelation of God in the hearts of people? Now the preparation for that revival
is something else again, but the revival itself is nothing more than a sudden
flashing in of the consciousness of “Why, God was here all the time! And my God
in whom I live is now pressing in upon me like the air seeking to enter my
heart.” We throw our heart open and say, “Come, blessed Holy Ghost.” That is
revival, but this is the age of a grieved Holy Spirit. I do not hesitate to say
it. I have not long to go before I will meet my Savior, and I cannot afford to
fool around, so I want to say frankly that I could be extreme in my position.
There may be churches, schools, colleges, and groups here and there that are
better than I know, but I have been around quite a little, and I think I can say
that almost universally the Spirit of God is being quenched within His church.
He has not forsaken us. I do not believe in that. But He is grieved within us.
If you hurt the feelings of a friend, he doesn’t leave you, but he talks to you
with an obvious chilliness upon his heart. He is not angry; he is hurt. The Holy
Ghost is like that. He does not leave, but He tightens up. He ceases to be free,
homelike with us. He wants to be like a member of the family, but we grieve Him
by resisting Him and quenching Him by our habits. The Holy Ghost suggests in
Ephesians 4:31 how we can grieve Him. He mentions bitterness, anger, clamor,
evil-speaking and malice. He also mentions in Galatians 5:19-21 fornication,
uncleanness, covetousness, filthiness, foolish talking, improper jesting; those
things which the Holy Ghost says in a blessed understatement (in our English)—
“These things are not convenient.” Certainly they are not convenient. These are
the things that hinder revival. I am convinced there is not a college student
body in the world—in spite of all the hard work and study, burning the midnight
oil and hurrying to make classes and all the rest—that could not have a
glorious, high-level, sweet revival all the time. And I am sure there is not a
church in the whole world that could not have maintained within it a beautiful,
high-level, joyous revival all the time—if we would get honest with ourselves
and deal with the things that grieve the Holy Spirit. Bitterness, wrath,
uncleanness, impurity, dishonesty, cheating, failing to pay our bills,
complaining, lying, excessive exaggeration, levity and frivolity—these things
grieve the Holy Ghost and keep Him from working. You may have been praying for a
long time for your pal, and he is not saved yet. Maybe he could be, but he has
not seen in you that which makes him want what you have. A grieved Holy Ghost
keeps the light out of your countenance. Let us be serious. Let us cut
everything else to the bone, and let us deal with our relation to this Person
who is in our midst.

[This sermon was delivered at Wheaton College, Pierce Chapel, September 30,
1952.]


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 5: 05 - THE ENEMY WITHIN
========================================================================

To speak of the essence of sin, we must begin with God, otherwise we will not
know what we mean. From the book of Exodus, the third chapter, I break into a
wonderful story at verse 10. “Come now therefore,” God is saying to Moses, and I
will send thee unto Pharaoh that thou mayest bring forth my children the people
of Israel out of Egypt.

And Moses said unto God, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I
should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? And he said, Certainly I
will be with thee; and this shall be a token unto thee, that I have sent thee:
When thou has brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon
this mountain. And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of
Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers has sent me unto you;
and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say to them? God said
unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children
of Israel, I AM has sent me unto you. (Exodus 3:10-14) Certainly there is no
other thing of greater importance than the one behind all the phenomena that we
know as nature, behind all mind, spirit, matter, motion and law: God. This one
word gives meaning to life. If you were to rule out of human thought the word
God and all that clusters around that word, you would not have any valid reason
at all for existence; nobody could show why we ought to live. As soon as we
introduce the word God, then we have a reason for existence. God is the
foundation and the source of all there is. God is to the universe what our blood
is to our bodies, and what our souls are to our bodies. Many years ago in
England, there once gathered together a number of the great Christian leaders of
a certain Protestant group who were attempting to formulate a creed, or articles
of faith. They all agreed and did all right on most of it, but they had one word
that they could not define or get any proper description for: God. They got into
an impasse; no one seemed to be able to do it for reasons that are obvious to
the humblest of us. Then in order to break the deadlock and somehow get some
light on it, the moderator said to a young preacher sitting off to the side,
“Will you lead us in prayer? Let us pray once more for the light of God on
this.” And he got up and clutched the seat in front of him and prayed, “Oh, God,
Thou art a Spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in Thy being, wisdom, power,
holiness, justice, goodness and truth,” and someone cried out, “That’s it!
That’s it!” and they took it down. Ever since that we have had the famous
expression, “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in His being,
wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth”—I AM THAT I AM. It was an
archbishop who once said, God is over all things and under all things and
outside all things: within, but not enclosed; without, but not excluded; above,
but not raised up; below, but not depressed; wholly above presiding, wholly
beneath sustaining, wholly without embracing and wholly within filling.

It was one man’s conception of God. I have often quoted it and often walked
around thinking about it for it embraces so much that God is trying to say to us
about Himself. Another old Latin father said this about God: At the
contemplation of God’s majesty all eloquence is dumb, for God is always greater
than anything that can be said about Him, and no language is worthy of Him. He
is more sublime than all sublimity and loftier than all loftiness and profounder
than all profundity, more splendid than all splendor and more powerful than all
power, more majestic than all majesty, and more merciful than all mercy.

These men were simply trying to say what the Bible says all the time about God,
that God is. Moses knew that if he was going to go down into Egypt he would have
to be sent. Moses said unto God, “Behold, when I come unto the children of
Israel, and shall say unto them, the God of your fathers hath sent me unto you;
and they shall say to me ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say unto them?” And
God said, “You go tell them that I AM sent you. I AM THAT I AM.” That is the
sacred word, the Tetragrammaton, the incommunicable name, the name that is
covered up in the King James Version by the capital letters for Lord. The old
translators felt that it was too holy to use carelessly or even unnecessarily,
so they shielded it under the word LORD in places. To this day, they say that in
the Near East if a person who cannot read sees a piece of paper lying on the
floor, he or she will pick it up and reverently keep it high and say, “Perhaps
the name of God may be on that.” No one would want to be guilty of inadvertently
trampling the name of God down into the dust. God is Self-existent
Selfhood—that’s what He means here. You will excuse me, I hope, for attempting
to explain that which is beyond any man, but we are trying to blunder into it
the best we can and hoping that God will save the pieces. Here, out of the
expression I AM THAT I AM, we have stated Self-existing Selfhood. “God has no
origin,” said one of the church fathers. The very word “origin” is a creature
word and it means and testifies whether it is willed or not. It is applied to
everything that has breath or has existence because it indicates that it started
somewhere, originated somewhere. It is the one word that cannot be used for God.
God has no origin; He is the Creator. When we use the word “origin” it testifies
that all things that exist are dependent, that they are relative, that they came
out of something, that they are a reflection of some original, that they are
water out of some ancient fountain, that they do not exist in themselves, that
they cannot stand up in their own might, but that they flow from some invisible
source. One time a gentleman wrote me a nice, but very sharp letter, with a word
of rebuke because I had said something nice about Joseph Addison. He said,
“Don’t you know that Joseph Addison belonged to the school of 17th Century
rationalists? And all he could say about God was that the mighty heavens above
and all the sweep of the galaxy testify of their Great Original. The very word
‘original’ brands him as being a rationalist. He is not a Christian at all.” I
have no trouble with the term “Great Original”—none whatsoever in the wide
world. Addison tells us that the sun and the moon and the stars shout that the
hand that made them is divine. They can label Addison as they will; I still can
use the word the “Great Original” in capital letters for that is exactly what
God is. He is the original for which there is no origin. He has given meaning
and life and existence to all things that be. This God, the original Self, I AM
THAT I AM, underived, uncreated eternal self, is God. Let us look at the word
“self.” It went for a walk one night with a man named Adam, and it got in bad
company, so the word “self” is a bad word now in theological circles, as well it
ought to be. Somebody said, “Turn it around, tack an ‘h’ on it, and you have
‘flesh.’” That is true also, but God is the originating Self out of which all
other selves originate, and there is nothing sinful there. God is that holy
Being, unsupported, independent, and Self-existent. I preached a sermon one time
in which I said that God did not need us. It bothered some people because they
felt that that was carrying it just a little bit too far; they always felt
somehow, even though they were good believers, that God did secretly feel that
if we ran out on Him, His world would collapse. I never did think that, and I do
not think it now. My brethren, God does not need you, and God does not need a
broad-winged angel by the throne of light. God does not need any creature. The
poet said that creation has not set thee on a higher throne. Only God’s heart
needs us. God in His uncreated Being does not need us; He was before there was
anything, and if it were all to be beaten back out of existence, into ancient
nothingness, God would still be the same God forever and ever, unperturbed,
world without end. But God’s heart needs us. Let me bring it down a bit from the
stratosphere and illustrate it like this: There is a man who is a very rich
house-holder. He has three cars, two garages, life insurance, and everything
that an American businessman is supposed to have. He has a fine wife that thinks
he is the only man in the world. He is accepted every place socially, belongs to
the country club, and plays golf. In fact, his golf balls would not even look at
ordinary golf balls. He is way up there and does not need anybody at all; he is
self-sufficient. But do you know what he has not got? He has not got a baby
around the place, and his poor, hungry heart cannot live on golf balls and bank
accounts. Financially, he does not need any children around the place, he does
not need anything. But as he walks around trying to look tough, in that sissy
heart of his there is a longing to hold a baby in his arms. He does not need the
baby, but his heart needs the baby. So when one comes into the home, the woman
gets the credit for loving the baby, but the man is the one who really goes
crazy about the infant. That is because the man has a heart in him, and I say
God gave him that heart, the God of the Great Original, and the heart of man
came from the heart of God. God does not need anybody, for He is the
unsupported, independent, self-existent God. Self in God is no sin. A great
English poet named Faber1, one of the greatest God-lovers since Augustine, dared
this line: he said that God admired Himself and loved Himself, without sin. I
would cautiously use such an expression, but the poet had liberty and license,
and he did not go too far. It is proper and right to say that God loves Himself
because all love flows out of God and back into Him again, and the love of God
for Himself is the holiest thing that archangels can dream of. The old
theologians used to say there has to be three Persons in the Trinity because God
the Father is love, and He loves God the Son with all the uncreated love of His
Fatherhood, but there has to be a means of communication between the Father and
the Son, equal to both so that the outpoured love of the Father might be
received without being diminished by the Son, and that which linked the Father
and the Son is the Holy Ghost. Thus, they argue for the Trinity. I do not know
that their argument is waterproof. I do not know that if I did not believe in
the Trinity that I would accept it because of that argument—but I think it is a
delightful argument anyway. I believe that God loves Himself, and the Persons
love each other and honor each other because God is the uncreated Self in whom
there is no sin and could not sin because He is God. What is sin then? When a
creature made by God with moral perception, conscience, the knowledge of right
and wrong, an ego and a relative, essential self, goes into rebellion against
God and says, “I will arise”—there is the essence of sin. The first sin in the
Bible is not the sin of Eve. It went way back to the very storms of fire by the
throne of God when a created being dared to exalt his contingent and relevant
self against the great uncreated Self we call God. He dared to defy God through
his teeth and say, “I will arise.” The essence of all sin is the rebellion of
the creature against the Creator. Sin has many symptoms and many manifestations.
There are sins of the mind, will, affections, flesh, but they all flow out of
the liquid essence of the bottle containing the poisonous essence called self:
self-will, self-love, self-confidence, self-everything. There is nothing wrong
with self. God made me a self, and He distinguished me from my brother who is
also a self. But God, who spells his SELF in capital letters, spells my name in
lower-case letters. God, who puts my self in Roman letters, puts His own SELF in
italics. The God who had no origin made me. I had an origin; I come like the
sunbeam from the sun. If a sunbeam coming down from the sun at the speed of
186,000 miles a second, were suddenly to go into rebellion—if such a thing were
possible—and say, “I will not look to the sun anymore; I am on my own,” he would
cut himself off from the central sun, cease to be, and plunge into everlasting
darkness. That is exactly what happened to the human race. We are all here, and
we are all in one piece, and we have the self that God gave us, but we have
cruelly and sinfully wrenched ourselves loose from the originating Self, God the
Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, as it says so sweetly in the creeds.
We have said to God, “I will arise.” One text in the Bible that sums up all that
I could say or think on this subject, Isaiah 53:6, reads, “We have turned every
one to his own way.” That was Isaiah’s description of the sinner for whom Jesus
had to die in love. The difference between Christ and the antichrist is that
Jesus said, “Thy will be done,” and the antichrist says, “My will be done.” The
difference between the highest saint and the sinner is, “Not my will but thine,”
and “my will, my will.” The essence of all sin is setting up my stubborn will
against the will of God. Sometimes in our evangelistic meetings, particularly in
young people’s meetings, we unintentionally degrade this. We act as though we
could accept Jesus as our Savior and not accept Him as our Lord—as though we
could divorce His Saviourhood from His Lordship. I have heard men say, “Just
accept Jesus, that is all you have to do, and it is all right with you; you will
go right to heaven zooming through like jet propulsion! Just accept Jesus; take
this gospel and go.” So we send them out confused, bewildered, and wholly
without any proper concept of what the gospel really means. Jesus Christ is not
two, but one, and He cannot save whom He cannot control. His office cannot be
separated. If you will not have Him as your Lord then you do not have Him as
your Savior, and you are self-deceived. We tell them, “Come on, now, maybe in
fifteen or twenty years you can take Him as your Lord and maybe go to China.”
No! It is all wrong! I believe that Jesus Christ is one. All His glorious
offices are indivisible. If I take Him, I take all of Him, and He will not save
me if He cannot boss me. He will not deliver me from hell if He cannot deliver
me from self. Self is the essence of sin. The text says, “We have turned
everyone to his own way.” This is a lovely, poetic description of this devilish
rebellion of the human heart against God. We have turned, everybody, to our own
way. The ways are not all the same. They are as many as there are people, but we
have turned to our own way. It is not the way we have turned to but the fact
that it is our own way that curses us and puts the blight upon us forever. We
were not created to have our own way. We were created to stand and gaze at God
in delight and obey Him like the creatures that Ezekiel saw (Ezekiel 1), finding
all our delight in doing His holy will. One of these days God is all you are
going to have. Today you have other things, your ambitions and your great
dreams. I used to dream when I was in my middle teens that I was going to do
great deeds some day—be known around the world and all that. How I thank God
that I have been delivered from such delusions, dreams of youth. But if you
should gain all that you dream and plan, it will turn out to be the way of
despair, loss and woe. But the way of God—oh, what a gentle way! Heinrich Sousa,
the famous German devotional man of generations ago, said, “God does not want to
keep you from pleasure; He wants to give you all pleasure, which is Himself.”
God wants to deliver us from selfish pleasure that we might have selfless
pleasure forever. Self-will is the great sin, for it is rebellion against the
Lord of Creation. It is an insult to royalty and, in essence, a lethal sin.
There is the woe that lies upon the proud, untrusting, self-centered, and
self-preserving. We forget that Jesus said, “Except a kernel of wheat fall into
the ground and die, it abideth alone” (John 12:24), and we try to preserve
ourselves by self-feeding, self-loving, self-defending. “Oh, to be saved from
myself, dear Lord, Oh, to be lost in Thee.” That stubborn will is your trouble.
You say, “My trouble, Mr. Tozer, is that my temper gets in the way.” No—that is
bad enough, God knows, but that is not the essence of it. The root of your
trouble is that you are still in control of things. Your trouble is not impurity
nor dishonesty, and those are sins that fill the cup and bring the wrath of God,
but at the root of all these sins of the mind and flesh is that central, ancient
rebellion of the spirit of man against God. The essence of sin is rebellion.
When we preach consecration, when we preach that we ought to lay ourselves at
the cross of Jesus and die there with Him that we might rise to newness of life
(Romans 6:4), we are not preaching a fancy Christianity. We are preaching the
only Christianity the New Testament contains. He that would save his self shall
lose it, and he that will lose it for His sake shall keep it unto everlasting
life (see Matthew 16:25). Here is the eternal wisdom of Paul’s statement, “Not
I, but Christ” (Galatians 2:20). Do you ever feel so good you do not know what
to do with yourself? The old writers used to call that “animal spirits.” You can
live on that. You can live on ambitions and hopes. You can live on service
Christianity: you can teach, sing, play the Jew’s harp, and be soloist in the
choir back at home. You can do lots of things and still not actually know what
it means ever to have a cross like a sword go into your heart to slay the old
rebellious self, to rise again in newness of life free from its curse, to follow
Jesus and run the race set before you without hindrance and without weights that
you carry (Hebrews 12:1). When you are by yourself, stop and check up on
yourself and try to get in touch with God about all this. Are you examining your
life? I would like to make it easier, but I cannot. If I made it easier I would
be a liar and betrayer. Self is your trouble. Take up your cross and deny
yourself (Luke 9:23). I do not mean to deny your homeland and go to Africa, or
to deny some big paying job and become a pastor—that is not it. It is
profounder, more essential, and more basic than that. Jehovah’s Witnesses do
that. Soldiers leave America and go to Korea. Do you think you deserve a crown
as big as a washtub because you are willing to leave a job here in the United
States and go to China? Business people do that. That is not noble, necessarily.
There is a self that is deeper than all that, and it must die or it will keep
you down. Do you want to be saved from yourself, that unreconstructed rebel
within your spirit, that stubborn self-will that flings your head and says, “I
will”? Do you want to be saved from it? I only know one way. You cannot
discipline it out of you; that will help but will not kill it. You cannot
educate it out of you; that will refine you but it will not kill self. Only the
cross of Jesus can slay the enemy within my breast.

Oh cross, that lifteth up my head, I dare not ask to hide from thee;

I lay in dust, life’s glory dead, And from the ground there blossoms red, Life
that shall endless be.

[This sermon was delivered at Wheaton College, Pierce Chapel, September 30,
1952.]


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 6: 06 - WOUNDS FROM GOD
========================================================================

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
(Proverbs 27:6)

I want to talk to you about the faithful wounds of God. I have been thinking
about a woman who lived 600 years ago and what she said about wounds. She lived
before Luther’s time and of course never heard of the Protestants. Nevertheless,
I am sure that if she had ever met Luther she would have come out wholeheartedly
on the side of the Evangelicals, because she was Evangelical, born out of due
time.

She was an Englishwoman and has only written, so far as I know, one book, and it
is so small that you could tuck it into your pocket and hardly have a bulge. It
is called Revelations of Divine Love. I speak, of course, of Lady Julian. Lady
Julian was a Spirit-enlightened woman who met God without very much light and
put to shame the people of today who have lots of light and fail to meet Him
often. She met Him, God revealed His truth to her, and in this little book she
made a great deal of God. God was her all in all—the Blissful Trinity, as she
called God. She made a great deal of man’s terrible sin, and particularly her
terrible sin. She also emphasized with great joy what she called the making of
amends through Jesus’ dreadful suffering. She brought the atonement before our
gaze and held it in full focus until we could weep for the joy of knowing that
though we had sinned so against the Blissful Trinity, one of that Trinity had
come and in His hard suffering on the cross had canceled out all our demerit.
Jesus Christ made us acceptable to God so that we could be what she called in
her archaic English, “one with God,” that is, united with God. This little lady
lived a pretty cloistered life and probably never heard of the movements and
motions and currents of spiritual revival that were moving even then in England
and through Europe which finally culminated in the revival, or the Reformation
as we call it, under Martin Luther. Nevertheless, she was a part of the
Reformation long before it was ever born; she was herself a Roman Catholic, but
she was a happy Catholic. In all of her books she never talks about Mary except
to say that God was awfully good to Mary in letting her be the mother of her
Lord. She said something to the effect that it was all right to pray according
to their set forms, but she knew a better way—just talk to God through Jesus
Christ the Lord, and she did it and practiced it for a lifetime. She was a very
happy lady—she lived a very happy life and she gave out sunshine and spiritual
radiation to everybody around her. She would have been at home among the
Methodists, even though Wesley was not born for hundreds of years after that.
But one time she said she got to thinking about how high and lofty Jesus was and
yet how He made Himself so meek and lowly as to commune with her and she said,
“The delight of it swept over my soul ‘til I shouted out loud, ‘Praise the
Lord!’”

Then she apologized and said she did not know just quite why “me did it.” For
you know it was not quite proper for a staid English lady to let go like that,
but it was too big for her, the wonder of it.

Lady Julian lived and died like that, and I certainly expect to see her in
heaven when I get there. In the early part of her life she prayed to God for
three things. She said, “I conceived a mighty desire to receive three wounds in
my life,” and she named them. She said, “I want the wound of very contrition,
the wound of kind compassion, and the wound of earnest longing after God.” The
Wound of Contrition

First was the wound of very contrition. Her whole concept of sin was so pointed,
so sharp, so painful to her that she was afraid to take the goodness of God
without allowing the grief of sin to do its healing work in her heart. She
prayed that she might never get so far up that she would forget that she had
been a sinner and that sin had wounded the second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
She begged God to let her feel the sharp sword of sin. A great Danish preacher
[Soren Kierkegaard] 1 whom I do not follow in everything, but whom I believe
says many good things, has complained in one of his great sermons about what he
calls the light and superficial quality of repentance. He says that often we
mistake moral impatience for repentance. We are mad at ourselves. We sin, and we
are angry with ourselves because we had better hope for ourselves. He says we
mistake anger with ourselves for true repentance. Then he goes on to say that a
true Christian will be known by the depth of his repentance. Wherever you find a
true Christian man or woman—whatever their denomination—they will be known for
the depth and sincerity of their repentance. No man could believe in the grace
of God more than I, and he could not contain any more joy for the grace of God
than I. But while the grace of God redeems and salvation is by grace, I am not
going to allow myself to forget while I live in this world that I have sinned
against the Triune God. I want that thing to sting me sometimes, particularly if
I raise my head a little bit or tend to boast a little. I believe this healing
wound is good for the soul. Lady Julian prayed, “God, wound me with very
contrition. Make me sorry that I ever sinned, and keep me there.” Though Paul
was so joyous that he could write Philippians, the joy Epistle, from a prison,
throughout his Epistles there will recur occasionally indications that Paul had
never quite forgotten what a sinner he had been. I do not believe we will ever
have the expected revival in America until we have again a generation of
prophets that shall rise up and deal with sin. I will not preach against bobbed
hair and lipstick, the little incidental sins which may or may not be bad, but I
will deal with sin as it relates to the holy Trinity, and make us feel again
what our Calvinistic forebears made us feel until we crawled on our knees with
it. The exceeding sinfulness of sin (Romans 7:13), because it was an act done
against the exceedingly holy God, is wound number one—the wound of very
contrition. The Wound of Compassion

The second is the wound of kind compassion. Lady Julian wanted to suffer with
Jesus and feel as He felt about the world and grieve with the world. I think
that is the greatest hindrance to Christianity today—not modernism, nor
communism, but un-Christlike Christians. These people display a hard orthodoxy
that has never felt compassion. Instead they ram a crumpled tract into the fist
of the sinner and make him take it. They push John 3:16 down his throat with a
ramrod, look him in the eye, and make him feel that he is an uncircumcised
Philistine while they pretend to be God’s chosen people. A hard Christianity
never could have won me. My father was a high-tempered, blazing Englishman and
there is too much of that in me to ever be won by one of these mean-looking,
cocky soul-winners that read the book How to Win Souls in Seven Easy Lessons. I
would have turned my back on him, and though I only weigh 160 pounds, I think I
would have probably bowled him over. I never could take religion without
compassion. To me, it is a skeleton without meat and without life. I worry a
little about myself (probably more than I should) because I do not love people
more. You know, some people just spill all over you—their eyes are always wet
and they have a handkerchief handy continually because they just love you so
much, but sometimes they weigh me down. There used to be a fellow I knew that
always wanted to grab me and kiss me, and the trouble with the fellow was he
always had two days’ growth of beard, and I did not react well to that! I do not
mean that slobbery kind of compassion that drools around. I wonder and worry
because I have not loved more. But God is comforting my heart a little because
He is showing me that compassion is love, of a sort. It is another side of love.
I do not know that I love people so tremendously but I pity people until I
grieve in the night season. I pity the lad who has to go to Korea. 2 I pity the
boy who lies over there face up, not seeing the stars. I pity the poor mother
who is left here at home. I pity the little fellow who plays on Wednesday, gets
a sore throat on Thursday, and on Friday is crippled for life with polio. I pity
people until I am in misery most of the time, or at least a good part of the
time. This is the kind of wound that God has most graciously given me in my
heart, a wound I never want to heal. I want to feel with people—compassion,
suffering and co-suffering. I want to be able to suffer along with other people.
This is closest to my heart and the thing I feel that we need the most in this
awful hour—compassion. I have a little prayer book here which I got in the ten
cent store. It was blank when I bought it, and I have written my own prayers
into it and have carried it around for years. One of my prayers is, “Oh, Lord
Jesus, help me to feel exactly as you feel about people. Help me to love them
exactly as you love them and in the same way that you love them.” God may be
answering that prayer a little by letting me suffer compassion for the woes of
the world. I am afraid that even some of our soul winning is little more than
zeal to make proselytes, but there must be tears along with it. Moody is quoted
as saying a lot of things he never said, but Moody is quoted as having said that
no man had the right to preach on Hell except he preach with tears in his eyes.
3 He loved them and pitied them, and so this love and pity, down through the
years, has been a stream of Gospel sincerity; it has been the evidence of the
indwelling Jesus who wept over Jerusalem and who went out to die. The wound of
compassion is a faithful wound, my friend, and I ask that you seriously think
about this with me and when you can, pray to God about it. Let your prayer be,
“Oh God, give me and keep in my heart the wound of very compassion and the wound
of very contrition. Let me feel how bad I have been, but also, let me feel how
terribly distressful the world is, and let me suffer along with the poor
suffering world.” The Wound of Longing after God

Last, there is the wound of an earnest longing after God, as Lady Julian called
it. I do not want to go maudlin on you here. I am not one ever to introduce the
romantic sex-relationship, that we call “falling in love,” because sometimes I
just get embarrassed when I hear evangelists getting too intimate. It is proper
to stay within the bounds of Scripture when I say that love is a kind of wound.
When you are forced to read the old English poetry, you will find a great many
of those old boys celebrated the wound they had, carrying around a broken heart
because the lady to whom they wrote the sonnet was busy looking after somebody
else. Nowadays they moo; they stick their head over a fence and bellow over a
pair of hard tonsils. Usually they rhyme moon with soon and so on. It is not so
graceful, but it is the same old wound. I have seen men and women come to me
wounded, hurt as though they had been stabbed, bleeding at their heart, further
than their physical heart because they had been disappointed and deceived. I
have had them come to me when they could not cry anymore; they had cried until
there were no more tears. Their very longing was never satisfied because someone
upon whom they had set all their hopes had disappointed them. My friends, there
is such a thing as longing after God that is bigger than anything else in life.
David talked about it, and Paul told about it. He said, “I do not consider
myself yet to have attained but I press forward” (Php 3:13-14, paraphrased). We
see Paul in the home stretch, like a runner, straining forward to win the prize.
And the prize, to Paul, was God. Paul was never satisfied until the Roman sword
severed his head from his shoulders. Never? Maybe when he wrote Second Timothy
God had brought him satisfaction at last, but it was not long afterward that he
was beheaded. Lady Julian said, “Give me thyself, for Thou art enough to me. And
if I ever ask anything less than that, why I ever will be wanting, but only in
Thee I have all.” The quaint English makes it sweeter still— “Thou art enough to
me,” she said. And so she prayed, “Oh, God, wound me and keep me always
homesick.” Ray McAfee said to me that fourteen years ago he appeared here,
greener than lettuce, on these grounds. 4 He said, “I set my suitcase down in
the middle of the floor and prayed that I could die. I was the most homesick boy
in the whole wide world.” They say that American soldiers are the most homesick
boys of all the soldiers known any place. All other soldiers manage somehow to
toughen up and take it, but they say Americans are just homesick to the point
where they do not care. I was in the First World War, that is I was in the
service, but I never got into combat. After it was over and we knew we were
going home but did not know when, one of the fellows working there with me used
to sing “Home, Sweet Home.” I thought it was a joke, but it was not—the fellow
was so homesick he did not care if they laughed at him. He sang “Home, Sweet
Home” pretty much off key until he was released. Homesickness is the longing for
the old familiar streets and the old signs, the friendly dog that you know, the
familiar creaky steps, and all that you have come to associate with the people
you love. Longing can be a disease. It is not wrong when we call it
homesickness, for it certainly is that. This woman prayed, “Oh, God, wound me
with an incurable homesickness, so that I will never settle down in this world
and feel at home here.” Never feel at home. I do not care for many Negro
spirituals—I think white people have spoiled the music—but there is one Negro
spiritual I like to hear sometimes. That one says, “I cannot feel at home in
this world anymore.” That is what I meant—I just cannot feel at home anymore in
this world. The whole center of things has been shifted to another world from
this. You say, “That is fine for an old fellow who has lost half his hair and
the other half is turned gray, but what about me? Here I am young, full of zing
and all the rest—what about me?” Anything God can do for an old man, God can do
for a young man or a young woman. Don’t think age makes you spiritual; age
simply may make you intolerable, and it often does. I know what George Mueller5
meant when he prayed, “Oh, God, do not let me live to be a wicked old man.” I
have found people who knew God in their youth, and they are still Christians
because their names are written yonder. They are God’s children, but they are
terribly hard to live around; they are just nasty Christians. Thank God for
justification and imputed human righteousness because that is the only hope
those boys will ever have.

Clothed in His righteousness alone, Faultless to stand before the throne.

They will stand before the throne, but nobody wants to stand around them here
very much because growing age and increasing years has not sweetened but soured
them. They are critical of everybody and everything; they forget they were ever
born; they thought they were fifty years old when their mothers brought them
forth. They forget the mighty throbbings, yearnings, and dreams that belong to
youth. So age does not make you holy, but God makes you holy through Jesus
Christ, the blood of the Lamb, and the indwelling Spirit. So anything that the
Lady Julian can have you can have. She was thirty-two, incidentally, when she
prayed this famous prayer which God answered and made her simply a core of sweet
spiritual energy. I am not sure but what it was such as she, one hidden here and
one hidden there, that gave Luther and the rest of them the ground work which
later eventuated the Reformation. The rest of her prayer ran like this: “Oh,
God, all this I ask without any condition whatsoever.” Do you see what I mean?
She prayed, “Oh, God, wound me so that I will always know what a sinner I have
been. Even when I am rejoicing with such delight that I cannot keep from
shouting, ‘Glory to God!’ I will yet remember in the back of my heart that I
have been a sinner. “And then wound me, God, with compassion so that I can
suffer with all the poor sinful world, so my religion will never be service that
I take for granted, never be so joyful that the devils are subjected unto me and
I forget that the poor, suffering, bleeding, heartbroken world walking in the
twilight with no place to look, no hope of a sunrise, needs my compassion. “And
then, Oh God, wound me with love for Thyself until it becomes an incurable
homesickness, ‘til I thirst for Thee and spend all my life cultivating God, and
this I ask without condition.” She prayed without condition. “Do these things
for me and do not pay any attention to what it costs, for my will is Thine, and
I will take the cross and bear it on my shoulders and pay the price you enable
me here on earth, but give me these three wounds.” “Faithful are the wounds of a
friend” (Proverbs 27:6). The world will kiss you and then betray you, the flesh
will fondle you and then betray you, but the faithful God will wound you deep
and then heal you as deep as He wounds you. He will cleanse, purge, purify and
make you “one with God,” as the old lady said. Is that not what your heart longs
for?

[This message was delivered at Wheaton College, Pierce Chapel, date unknown.]


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 7: 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.]


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 8: 08 - HOW TO BE FILLED WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT
========================================================================

Conservative, fundamental Christians all over the world agree that we ought to
be Spirit-filled Christians. But there is very little counsel given, so far as I
can learn, on what it means and how we can be filled with the Spirit and walk in
the Spirit. Today I want to bring serious counsel on this topic, “How I might be
filled with the Spirit.” What I have to say is not a sermon, rather serious
spiritual counsel to Christians.

In Isaiah 8:13 are these words of God to the man of God, “Sanctify the Lord of
hosts Himself, and let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread. And He shall
be for you a sanctuary.” We can see from the earlier part of the chapter that an
invasion was threatening. Assyria was to come in like a mighty flood because the
people had turned away from God. Yet even with this invasion threatening they
were still turning away from God and trying to meet the invasion through an
alliance of several nations. Only Isaiah heard a voice—only Isaiah. Every age
has a few that hear the voice—God’s voice, and that alone. And only Isaiah saw
the vision of what could be. To this greatest of all prophets God spoke strongly
(Isaiah 8:11) and said, “Walk not in the ways of this people Israel.” He was
commanded to stand against the popular trend. I do not like to say this, and I
would not for the world say anything inadvertently that would make a rebel out
of me. We have too many rebels, but they are mostly all rebels out of their own
carnal heart. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as being a Protestant in the
right sense of the word. There is such a thing as a quiet but firm and
unshakable protest against the popular trend, even in religion. The man of God
was told that he could not afford to go along with the masses of Israel, to
follow the popular trend, but that he was to “sanctify the Lord God of hosts
Himself,” and God would be to him a sanctuary. This reveals that if we make God
our fear and our dread, then we have a secret sanctuary in the midst of a
violent and dangerous world; the result is a witness to all the world. It says
further on in the chapter, “I will wait upon the Lord. . . . I will look for
Him. . . . Behold, I and the children which the Lord has given me are for signs
and wonders in Israel from the Lord of hosts” (Isaiah 8:17-18). Isaiah’s name
lives on, and the names of these alliance chieftains, whoever they were, have
all been forgotten. Isaiah opens for us here the secret way to power. It is
secret, not in the esoteric sense, but it is secret because so few people know
anything about it or desire to follow. It is to sanctify the Lord Himself, that
is, to set God aside as being all in all, to throw ourselves over on God
Himself, to recognize God as our all-ness, and in personal experience make God
everything. I suspect that this may sound rather dry to some of you young people
whose blood runs hot and whose ambitions are high, but I must continue to say
(for it is the word of the Lord and is confirmed in tens of thousands of human
hearts through the years) that anything you seek outside of God is wrong. No
matter how shining it may seem to be, nor how utterly desirable, if it is
outside of God, it is wrong. Anything that comes to your attention that is
outside of God is wrong—only God is right, and only the will of God is safe, for
the will of God is the help of the universe, and this moral sickness, this
languishing sickness that is on the race is the result of the race getting out
of the will of God. We are ill because we have violated the law of life which is
the will of God.

Experiencing God

We can make God our personal experience. Again I will repeat, as I often do,
that we are not to apologize for the word experience. I grew up, I regret, in an
atmosphere where I was taught to be ashamed to use the word experience, because
some old lady once climbed a tent pole or some fellows rolled in the straw at a
camp meeting in some fanatical bush-whacking service somewhere. They said, “That
is experience—you must preach the Bible, not experience.” I preach the Bible in
order that we might have experience. Certainly experience that does not bring
out the Bible is invalid and will disappoint us, but the Bible without
experience confirmed to us individually is just so much theology, so much
learned lumber crammed into our heads out of which we can make no sanctuaries. I
stress personal experience. There is such a thing as knowing God personally,
having the experience yourself, having an encounter with God that is as bright
and shining as any other experience in life—and much more so, because it engages
a much more important Person. God will respond if we set Him aside in our heart.
God, the all-embracing One, who fills all the world, is easily accessible. He is
accessible to us in Christ. I got my fingers burned by some modernist on that
“in Christ” business, so I have another preposition. I say that God is not only
accessible to us in Christ but He is accessible to us as Christ. I know it is
possible to say I have found God in Christ, but I have read poems where a dear
lady said she found God in a butterfly’s wing or in a daisy, and I do not mean
that when I say that we find God in Christ. I mean that we find God as Christ
the Beloved. He is God acting the way God would act and doing what God would do
and feeling as God feels and being what God is. So in Jesus Christ I find God,
and He gives Himself to our faith as bread. For years I experienced
disappointment in the communion service. I could not understand and embrace
transubstantiation or con-substantiation or any substantiation I had heard
about. I just could not get hold of them somehow. Even our plain little
unbeautiful communion services bothered me as lacking luster and failing to feed
my heart Then one day in secret prayer God said to my heart, “Son, faith is
eating, and when you gaze at Jesus Christ in faith you are partaking of Jesus
Christ.” After that I never had any more trouble at all because communion to me
is partaking of Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, with the mouth of faith—gazing
upon Him and eating of Him, and having Him, and taking Him into my spiritual
system by faith. Faith is not something to be apologized for—it is a faculty of
the human spirit. Just as the mouth takes food into the stomach, so faith, and
the gaze of faith, takes in the Lord Jesus Christ. God Almighty is all to you
and me. So I say that we can have Him through faith and love, and we actually do
have God—not a shadow of God, not a picture of God, not an echo of God but God
Himself as Christ.

Fearing God

The Scripture says, “Make God your fear, and make God your dread, and He will be
to you a sanctuary.” In God is complete safety. Whoever fears God enough never
needs to fear anyone or anything else. One of the hardest words in the New
Testament is in First John. It says, “Perfect love casteth out fear” (1 John
4:18). I have been afraid of everything that moved (and a lot of things that did
not move) ever since I can remember. I have never been courageous, and I
wondered how, if I love, can it be possible that perfect love will cast out
fear? How can I ever get enough love to cast out fear? But I think I know now.
It means if I fear God enough—if I have that delighted reverent trembling holy
dread in the presence of the holy God—then I can, like Elijah, say, “I stand
before Jehovah” (1 Kings 17:1; 1 Kings 18:15; 2 Kings 3:14; 2 Kings 5:16).
Elijah was not afraid of King Ahab. Elijah was not dressed for a court, he had
never read an etiquette book, and he had never been briefed on how to act in the
presence of a king. He was a great big awkward fellow who walked flat-footed
and, I suppose, had all the characteristics of the mountains where he had been
bred, but he had absolutely no fear in the presence of Ahab. He said, “I stand
before Jehovah.” That explains why he was not afraid of a mere king. Elijah had
stood a lifetime in the presence of the mighty King. If I fear God enough I
never need to fear anything else. I need fear no one and no thing because no one
and no thing can finally injure me. I believe this with all that is inside of
me—nobody can harm me. Put me in jail, yes, but not harm me; cut off my head,
yes, but not harm me; rob me but not harm me; calumniate my name but not harm
me, for harm must be understood in the divine context. And only that which
finally harms me harms me at all. They can take my body and property and all the
rest, but if I wear the red mantle of His holy shielding blood, I am a man as
safe as if I had been in Heaven for millenniums. I want to say a word to young
Christians, especially those who shall be missionaries and preachers. I urge
you, take yourself out of the hands of men. God does not want us to be followers
of men. He wants us to love them and to appreciate them and to admire them. He
calls us to listen to them and to obey them if they have authority over us. God
calls us to work with them and be harmonious and not be a rebel or assert our
carnal individuality—He wants us to do all that. But He wants us to have a
secret understanding with God so that we are in His hands. I think one of the
most pitiful things in the wide world is a little, jittery, frightened preacher,
just out of seminary, trying to get himself a job—the best one available—and for
that reason taking the district superintendent or bishop out to lunch. I think
it is pathetic—absolutely pathetic. I find it hard to keep contempt out of my
heart and voice when I talk about a man like that. You do not have to do it,
young person, you do not have to do it. As soon as you get proper training and
get what you ought to know and get disciplined and taught how to think and learn
the Word, then you look to heaven and say, “Now God, I am ready.” And then take
the first thing God throws in your direction and go on from there. You never
need to run around and polish the apple for the person that is next over you. I
also urge you to ignore their threats and their flattery. Those are the two
sources of danger—flattery and abuse. I had a tough time getting over flattery,
and I am not yet quite over it, but I am getting there. My hide is getting
thicker year by year because I have discovered that only those who do not amount
to much criticize me. By that neat little trick of psychology I manage to get
along with everybody. I might be amazed to know how many good people criticize
me, but they never tell me. But we must take ourselves out of the hands of men.
You say, “That is all right for an old fellow, but for me it is different—I am a
young man.” No, it is not different for you. This is not for any age group. I
think we make a mistake in dividing up spiritual experiences for different ages.
Anything God can do for an older person He can do for a younger person, if the
young person will concentrate and get sharply focused on God. That is the
trouble with youth, they are all over the lot. Assemble yourselves sometime
before God; get together once and look into the face of God. God will do
anything for you that He did for anyone, regardless of age. Refuse to leave
yourself and your future in the hands of men. Seek advice, take counsel, work
with people, but have a secret understanding with God: “Oh, Lord God, thou art
my all. Thou art my tomorrow as thou art my yesterday and today. Thou art my
here and my there, my now and my then. Thou art all in all to me; time and space
converge upon Thee. All that I have or ever hope to be is Thine.” You know, that
works within a life; it gets within a life and works like a holy yeast within
your spirit.

Everything in Christ

Let us think about God in Christ for a few moments. “Sanctify the Lord God
Himself.” Sanctify Christ. Christ is the man-ward side of God. Christ is the
side of God that looks toward the human race, and Jesus Christ is the way to God
because He is Himself God. He is to our souls what our souls are to our bodies.
Far too often in our age, Jesus is confined to religion. Sometimes I feel like
saying, “They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him”
(John 20:13)! You go to conferences and hear about prophecy, baptism, Jewish
history, doctrines; you might even get a little Greek and Hebrew thrown in for
dessert. You will hear all about the shelves and scaffoldings of religion, and
they are good and necessary—you cannot have a sanctuary without walls, and you
cannot have the walls without the scaffolding while they are being built, but I
do not want to live on a scaffolding all my life. I want to get in where the
sanctuary is and kneel and adore. Christianity, my friend, is dedicated to the
adoration of Jesus Christ. It is not only to save you from the consequences of
your sin, but to give you that which you were created to enjoy. It is to give
you God. It is to break God down for you, so to speak, so that your created
heart can get hold of God, so that the love of Jesus Christ will be real to you.
If you glance back over church history you will find that almost all the mighty
men whose names have come down to us—whose names we give to our babies, chapels
and schools—were persons who had fallen delightfully in love with the person of
Jesus Christ the Lord. They did not all agree on every point of doctrine.
Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley would not have been caught dead in the same
building if they had lived at the same time because one was a strong Calvinist
and one was a happy Arminian. But they loved the same Savior, and so their
hearts glowed and they blessed their generation and left behind them a stream of
spiritual molten gold into which we dip down to this very day. God never asked
them what school of theology they belong to, He asked them, “What think ye of my
Son?” (Matthew 22:42). And they said, “Oh, God, we are in love with Him!” And
God said, “All right then, I am too, and so we are agreed.” God blessed them in
spite of their little aberrations, even as He will bless us despite our
shortcomings. The love of Christ, I say, is the core of everything in the
Christian faith. He is the complete solution—there is not a problem in your life
but what He can solve it. If we throw ourselves out upon the Lord Jesus Christ,
He is enough.

Christ Is Our Wisdom

Christ is made unto us wisdom for our pitiful ignorance. You know, friends, we
just do not know how ignorant we are—we really do not. Somebody said that
education is pushing back the frontiers of our ignorance—that is, the more we
know, the more we know that we do not know. Einstein (or whoever your hero is in
the intellectual world) only knows more than most of us just how little we do
know. When I go into a library, I always come out blue. It takes me an hour and
a half to get back up and get happy again. I see the books I have not read, the
things I do not know, the subjects I am completely ignorant of, and it bothers
me. It humbles me, and that is good for me. But nobody knows very much. Wisdom
can only do a few things. If it were what it should be it could teach us how to
live forever, how to be free from pain, how to keep our loved ones always by our
side and never lose them in death. But it cannot do any of those things. So it
just excites us and keeps us occupied and away we go. But when it is all over we
have not known what we really ought to know. Jesus Christ is God’s wisdom given
to His people. Jesus Christ will not teach you mathematics or biology; you will
have to learn that the hard way. But all the essential spiritual and moral
wisdom that makes saints, you will find in Jesus Christ, your Lord. You will
find how to overcome the grave and how to overcome mortality. In Him you will
gain immortality and all the dreams that every race has sought. All this you
will find in the person of Jesus Christ, God’s Son.

Christ Is Our Righteousness

Jesus Christ is made unto us righteousness for our innate wrong-headedness. I
suppose even more than our pitiful ignorance is our inexcusable wrong-headedness
and our evil because we are evil inherently and continually. “Jesus Christ,”
says Paul, “is made unto us . . . sanctification” (1 Corinthians 1:30) for our
innate evil. He is made to us courage for our paralyzing fear, strength for our
utter weakness, life for our helpless dying. Jesus Christ is life, even a better
life than we lost. He is that eternal life. We may say, “God gives me eternal
life, so now I have it.” But eternal life is not life that lasts always—it does
that too—but it is the life of the eternal. “This is eternal life, that we might
know [have correspondence with] thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom
Thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Eternal life is an everlasting right adjustment to
God through Jesus Christ, just as eternal death is to be cut off from God. When
God gives me eternal life, He does not give me a thing at all—He gives me a
Person. Jesus is that life, and He is our eternal life, wisdom, righteousness,
sanctification, courage, strength—our all in all. So I urge you to fall in love
with the Son of God. You will find in Jesus Christ power; you will find in Him
everything that those who do not understand this are seeking out of Him. The
fellow who has a particular hobby—what he is seeking out there on the fringes,
you have got right in the center. That which he is trying to do way out there in
the woods, you have here in the sanctuary. David said, “Then I understood when I
went into the sanctuary” (Psalms 73:17). You will have more understanding in the
sanctuary than anyplace else. There, in what the old writers call the
penetralia, the deep inner part of your spirit, Jesus Christ will reveal Himself
in all that God is to your soul, and you will find a treasure in Jesus Christ.
Sanctify Jesus Christ; set Him apart; attach yourself to Him; dedicate yourself
to Him; cut all the lines that bind you away from Him. Make Him your all in all,
and He will become to you all that your happiest dream could conceive of Him,
for Jesus Christ is wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

Oh Jesus, Jesus dearest Lord Forgive me if I say for very love Thy sacred name a
thousand times a day. 1

Jesus Christ is all and everything. Have you found Him? Is He yours? He is not a
church (and I believe in churches); not a religion (and I believe in the
Christian religion); He is Jesus Himself, the Bread of Life, the Sun, the Star,
your All-in-All. Will you now dedicate yourself to Him?

[This sermon was given at Wheaton College, Pierce Chapel, on October 2, 1952.]


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 9: 09 - BE FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT
========================================================================

I think I have never said anything to you as important as what I am planning on
saying tonight. I want to use this simple and very familiar text: “Be not drunk
with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18).

What I will say (outside of some notions I might import which can scarcely be
avoided as long as we are on earth and human) is nothing new, nothing strange,
nothing extreme, nothing fanatical, nothing that you cannot believe and
experience and stay in any gospel church in the world. It is nothing that is not
believed by every fundamentalist or conservative Bible Christian in the world.
The difference is that I insist, if it is true, then we ought to do something
about it. That is all. I just bring in from the perimeter, the outer edge of
things, a truth that is believed by everybody and hold it on me like a white
light and insist, “Let us make this work; let us do something about this!” “Be
filled with the Spirit.” You can call it “be getting filled,” or “be being
filled,” and it adds up to the same thing. It is the will of God that His people
should be Spirit-filled people—all of them, not only missionaries and preachers,
but all of God’s people, everywhere. I also have four other texts, and I am
going to give them at the close of this message. This will be the first time you
ever heard anybody preaching a sermon where there were four points in the
conclusion and only one in the body of the sermon. It may confuse the
homeletical department, but at least I will be getting across what I want to
say. I do not think that we are quite ready. I do not find Christians ready as a
rule—the rank and file, average, good Christians—to hear the simple biblical way
of being filled with the Spirit, because there are a number of things we need to
get settled. First, we need to be sure that we can be filled with the Spirit.
This would seem to be unnecessary since Paul commands us to be filled; and yet
this whole topic has been so confused by the devil and by weird and strange men
who let their flesh go that good honest Christians have been frightened and
driven away from the green pastures. The devil has frightened them and told them
there were serpents hidden the grass. You can be, as a Christian, filled with
the Holy Spirit. Every Christian has the Spirit or he could not be a Christian.
We are baptized into the body of Christ by the Holy Spirit and made members of
the body by the work of the Spirit uniting us to the body of Christ in
regeneration. “If any man has not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His”
(Romans 8:9), and Christ dwells in us unless we are reprobates (2 Corinthians
13:5). I think that ought to settle that. Every Christian does have a measure of
the Spirit. But you must be convinced that it is God’s will for you to be filled
with the Spirit—that it is a part of the total plan of redemption, that when He
said, “It is finished,” He included this. You have got to be convinced of this,
or you will have no faith concerning it. You must believe that this is not
abnormal or unusual; in fact, it is abnormal not to be Spirit-filled. God means
His people to be Spirit-filled and the abnormalities within the church are where
we are not Spirit-filled. We must also be sure, restfully sure, that there is
nothing strange or weird about all this, but that it is God Almighty’s plan for
all of His children to be filled with the Spirit and walk in the Spirit. We have
got to be sure to the point of conviction, because if we are not sure we cannot
possibly exercise faith. We must be sure that there is no need to persuade God.
We need not come to God and ask Him to do something that He has declared He is
willing to do, or try to coax God into a frame of mind that He has been in since
the beginning of the world. Unless we are restfully convinced of this, I
recommend that you do not do anything at all except search the Scriptures,
meditate on the Scriptures bearing this truth, remain calm and confident, and
put away fear and worry and irritation, because these are never of God. The Holy
Spirit is the Comforter; He comforts the heart. Where there is panic and
intimidation and great fear, we may be sure we are victims of an overheated
imagination or of the devil himself, because the blessed Lord Jesus never
irritated anybody except bad men. When willing, hungry people came, no matter
how sinful, no matter how far from the truth, no matter how far down in the
moral gutter, the Lord Jesus Christ tenderly helped them and never turned an
angry face to a seeking heart. He sent Pharisees, scribes, Saducees, and liars
away licking their wounds every time. But if your heart is tender toward God and
you only want the will of God, you will get the kind, courteous treatment that
our Lord Jesus Christ is famous for. Always you will get it from Him. You must
not only know and be sure that you can be filled with the Spirit as a Christian,
but you must desire to be. Here I will run into the first real question you will
have in your mind: “Mr. Tozer, would you waste our time and yours by saying that
we must be sure that we desire to be? Why, everybody desires to be filled with
the Spirit!” I am not sure of that at all. If they do, it is not a conclusive or
inclusive desire; it is a fugitive longing rather than a desire. Everybody is as
holy as he wants to be, and everybody is as full as he wants to be. It has to be
so, because our Lord said, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after
righteousness: for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6), and the filling is in
exact proportion to the hunger. So if we are not filled, it is because we are
not sufficiently hungry. One of the old saints of God, in generations gone by,
had the reputation for being a very godly man and for being able to help people
with the Word. Young folks and students and young preachers from afar would come
to him and he would just give them a word and send them away. It was a gift of
God to the man. One day two young preachers came to see him who had walked a
long way. He walked out to meet them, greeted them and said, “You are as holy as
you want to be; good-bye.” He turned away and closed the door. They looked at
each other, walked slowly down the steps and told it all around everywhere.
“This man, we went to him for help, and he just said, ‘You are as holy as you
want to be,’ and brought the interview to a conclusion.” Well, it worked all
right, and it is true. Everybody is as holy as he wants to be. When I say “want
to be” I mean “really want to be”—to a point where it burns in your heart. The
old devotional writers used to say that desiring and receiving are all one
piece. In God they were not separated. One end of a pencil is the desire, the
other end of the pencil is the receiving of the desire, and they are always
together. You cannot separate them because since Christ died on the cross and
the holy Comforter has come, all grace is to us-ward and all has been taken out
of the way by the blood of the Lamb. There is nothing standing in the way but
our lack of desire. Consequently, the desiring and the receiving are all one
piece. It is said, “You have some feeling of God or you would not want any more
of God. The fact that you desire God proves that you have some of God.” That is
good, Biblical teaching, brethren, and so I say you must desire to be filled.
Let us examine the extent of your desire. Do you want to be possessed by a
spirit who is like Jesus—pure, gentle, sane, wise, healing and loving—but who
will nevertheless be Lord of your life? Jesus exercises His lordship through the
Holy Ghost; He cannot exercise it any other way. Therefore, the Spirit of God
will demand to be Lord of your life. Do you truly want to be in gentle and
loving possession of an indwelling Spirit that will be Lord over you (that will
make Jesus be Lord over you, to be technically correct)? It seems to me that it
is here where some of us stick. We want to be saved, but we want to be lord over
our lives. That is at the threshold of life; we must be willing that the Holy
Spirit become, in Jesus’ stead, Lord over our lives. Next, are you sure you want
a personality to take possession of your personality? Let me describe Him and
what He will do: He will expect obedience to the written Word and to the living
Word in heaven—and this obedience will get no help from Him. He will expect
obedience from you, and He will not tolerate in you the self-sins. He will not
tolerate self-love. He will not tolerate self-righteousness. He will not
tolerate self-indulgence, not any of the hyphenated sins that have self in them.
He will deal with them, and He will bring you to repentance. He will chastise
and discipline until He gets your consent to take them out of your life. He will
not live with them. He will not move in where these self-sins are in fullness of
measure. Although, as I say, He certainly dwells somewhere in the recesses of
every believer’s heart or that person would not be a believer indeed. You will
find this blessed Holy Spirit in sharp opposition to the world’s easy ways. We
live in a degenerate hour when Christianity, it seems to me, needs a mighty
reviving from somewhere, for the business of the church now seems to be to get
along with the world and to go the world’s way with the least possible
opposition. But the Holy Ghost says, “Never mind the opposition of the world.”
He expects it, just as Jesus Christ in whom He dwells in fullness of perfection,
experienced opposition as long as He lived on earth, and just as the Church that
names His name has had it, wherever she has been a pure and holy Church. Instead
of your taking Christianity and molding it to fit the world, to avoid the
disgrace of the cross, the Holy Ghost will insist that you leave it as it is,
and walk with God in the light of New Testament truth, without caring what the
world says about you. Such a lifestyle will bring you in conflict with the
world, for the ways of God and the ways of man do not parallel each other. They
intersect each other, and where their intersection is there will be heat,
friction, opposition, trouble and maybe persecution. The Holy Spirit will not
allow you to boast or show off or strut or shine. Much of modern Christianity is
run by strutters and shiners and show-offers, but “we are persuaded better
things concerning you brethren, and things that accompany salvation” (Hebrews
6:9). I do not believe that you want it that way. God will not allow you to
boast. If you do catch yourself boasting, you will feel tough inside until you
have lifted your heart and said, “Forgive me, God.” He will not allow you to
seek a place in the sun, or show off, or seem to be somebody. He will put
humility in you and insist on keeping it there. The Holy Spirit will also take
the direction of your life away from you. I have practically said that before,
when I said that He would be Lord of your life. He will reserve the right to
discipline you and strip you, maybe, of some things you think are indispensable.
He might even hurt you a little in the process, as a father must a child for the
child’s everlasting good. I do not leave the impression that you will always be
standing in the corner under the discipline of God, but I do mean to say that
when it is necessary you will. When the Spirit deals with you, you will be a
disciple, and He may strip away from you many loved and dangerous things—things
that you think are harmless but that He knows are deadly. He will take them away
from you as He took Isaac away from Abraham, and yet purified their relationship
and gave Isaac back; that is always God’s way. The thing that you hold in your
own right may be dangerous, but once God has broken your heart and taken it away
from you He may give it back to you, and it’s perfectly harmless after God pulls
its sting. Ultimately, He does not care what you have, but He has to pull its
sting first. He has to pull the poison fangs out of it, and then He hands it
back and says, “Now use this for My glory.” Whatever it may be— a gift, a
girlfriend, an ambition, a desire for some kind of work, a possession. Whatever
it may be, as long as you hold it, it has got a poison tail on it, but God will
take it, purify it, hand it back, and say, “There, now you can have it because I
have disciplined out of you the thing that made it dangerous in you.” Not only
must you be sure that you can be filled with the Spirit, and sure that you
desire to be, but you must be sure that you need to be. Can you not get along
all right by yourself? Most Christians can; that is why we are in the fix we are
in now. That is why the world is laughing at us; that is why we are imitators
and not initiators. That is why we keep a weather eye on the latest from
Hollywood and Broadway and then create something religious—a weak imitation of
Frank Sinatra or somebody else. There was a day when the world followed the
church. She took the initiative; she was aggressive. But it has changed now, and
we are down on our knees imitating the world. The church is like a poor old
withered hag, rather than the beautiful, full-blooded bride of the Lamb we are
intended to be. That we should stand by the world’s highway and stretch out our
withered hand for a dime from the world is a disgrace. There was a day when the
church could say, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee .
. . rise up and walk.” (Acts 3:6). Today the church says, “Now, now, please do
not take me wrong: I think the same as you only I have Jesus; that is the
difference. I am just like you only I have Jesus.” That is the kind of unholy,
unscriptural, hybrid mongrel Christianity that we are propagating at great
expense and time and labor in our day. The Christianity of the cross never tries
to please the world, but dares to stand on its two legs, and let the world come
around. Emerson, down on a lower level, said, “Plant yourself on your instincts
and the world will come around to you.” The church of Jesus in the early days
never tried to please the world. The church planted itself on its spiritual
instincts, took God and the cross, and said, “Here we are; we can be nothing
else, so help us God,” and the world came around to them. Can you get along on
the dead level? If you can, then I have nothing much to say to you, only God
bless you, sleep well. But I wonder if you can really get along well the way you
are. If you can, then all right, pay no attention. If we cannot agree, then we
will not disagree. We will still nod and smile as we pass each other. But do you
feel you can go on the way you are and resist discouragement, obey the word,
understand the truth, bring forth fruit, live in victory, win men to God, die in
peace and meet Christ with joy? Do you think you can do that in the state you
are in now? I do not think you can, and I do not think you think you can. I
think we all have to say, “If thy presence go not with [us], carry us not up
hence” (Exodus 33:15). If God does not fill us, then please God, do not expect
anything of us, for You know us. You know that in our hearts “dwelleth no good
thing” (Romans 7:18). This desire, and I am assuming now you have it, must
become all-absorbing. It must be for the time the biggest thing in your life. If
there is anything bigger, then you will have very little satisfaction in the
realm of which I speak. I am not sure that anybody has ever been Spirit-filled
who did not first go through a time of disturbance and anxiety. That does not
contradict what I said before, for it is a holy, healing anxiety; at the same
time there is a sense of God’s being there. It is not despair, but it is
disturbance and disappointing emptiness. Perhaps you remember a classic
illustration of Moody, the self-assured man, who was out preaching and winning
souls. Then Mother Cook told him, “Son, what you need is to be filled with the
Spirit.” He had not had the idea that he could be filled educated out of him,
fought out of him or beaten out of him yet, so he believed her. “I never changed
a sermon,” he later said, “ but a wonderful new power came into the ones that I
had been preaching.” That, I say, is a classic example of a spiritual
experience. But there came that disappointing emptiness when he knew that the
man who was beginning to get the attention of the Christian world was not what
he should be. Disappointing emptiness, I say. Some people want to be blessed all
the time. If they cannot be blessed all the time, they are unhappy, bothering
God about it, worrying and saying, “Now, God, I do not feel as good today as I
did at four o’clock yesterday. What is the matter here?” We spend our time
chinning ourselves on religious bars, pulling ourselves up and letting ourselves
down all the time. Do not be afraid of feeling bad; do not be afraid of letting
God come into your soul and do some plowing. You cannot have fruit or grain
until you do some plowing. God may even send somebody to do the plowing whom you
do not like at all and think is unworthy to run a plow over you. David said,
“The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows” (Psalms 129:3).
God did not do it, He just sent a fellow that David did not like to do it. You
see, if God always came in royal dignity, waved His wand and allowed us to stand
there like we were having our picture taken, that would be all right—but we
would go to Heaven proud as Lucifer. So the Lord may let somebody come along
that is no good, some preacher (maybe like me) and just plow your back a little.
You think, “Why that fellow, he does not know as much as I know, and here you
are sending him, God, to plow me.” So humble yourself and let God plow you, and
do not be afraid of emptiness. The saints of God have all had to go through
those times of emptying out, those times of getting rid of that Adamic bounce.
You know, that Adamic bounce to the ounce that comes as standard equipment. We
have got it, we cut its hair differently and give it another name, but it is old
Adam, nonetheless. It is old self-confidence. Especially if he has read a book,
and he is so sure of himself, but he is old Adam, nevertheless, and God has been
finished with Adam ever since the day that He cast him out of the garden. God
said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before me” (Genesis 6:3). He slays
the flesh and raises the man up in newness of life. Dying is not easy. I have
not died in the physical sense, but I have been through some dying in the
interior sense, and I well know it is not easy. That is why I never could follow
this “happified” Christianity. There is “joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1
Peter 1:8); there is rapture and flights of spiritual delight; there is joy in
the Holy Ghost; there is sweet healing worship; there is all that in the church
of God. But it is on another level; it is a spiritual thing. It is something
that has gone into the grave and come out again. But the poor church in our day
does not know that, so she is importing her joy for ten cents a dozen from the
world and then tagging the name “Jesus” onto it, saying, “Now we’re religious.”
You are not religious—it is just old Adam with another tag on him. You can get
that same kind of thrill in a night club—they play certain music and say, “That
sends me.” I have seen religious meetings that were just “sent,” that was all.
But there is another kind of joy, the joy that seeks me through pain, “the joy
that was set before Him” that enabled Him to endure the cross (Hebrews 12:2).
Once you have tasted of that joy you’ll smile at any other kind of joy. You may
have to go through a time of skinning and of harming and injuring old Adam, but
Jesus Christ your Lord will be with you. He went through that way first and came
out, and now He is in glory forevermore, “bringing many sons unto glory”
(Hebrews 2:10) and teaching them obedience by the things they suffer (Hebrews
5:8). All this that I am talking about, the destruction of my natural and
boisterous life, my human confidence and all the rest, does not earn any gift
for me, and it does not make me dear to God. I have been dear to God since the
beginning of the world and before, but it does break up the plot of ground, and
it does empty the vessel. D. L. Moody, when he preached on these things, used to
take two glasses and a pitcher of water and he would try to pour water into a
full glass. He would say, “You cannot get water into a glass that is full.” Then
he would pour it out and say, “Now it can be filled!” You can only fill an empty
vessel. That rollicking camp meeting song we sing sometimes, “Bring your empty
earthen vessels,” is very true to the Scriptures. You have to be empty. If there
is anything hidden there, God cannot fill you very full, so empty your hearts.
To return to the question, how can I be filled with the Spirit? I give you four
texts. You can think them over and pray over them. First, Romans 12:1-2 : I
beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your
bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable
service. And be not conformed to this world: but be transformed by the renewing
of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect,
will of God. “Present your bodies”—that is, present an empty vessel. Do not
present a full vessel, or an unclean vessel. Present a vessel where the blood of
Jesus has cleansed away the stains, and you have said to Him, “Pardon, oh, Lord,
my transgressions and have mercy upon me according to Thy righteousness and wash
away all my sins.” Present a clean vessel. Second, Luke 11:9, Luke 11:11-13 :
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be
opened unto you. . . . If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father,
will he give him a stone? If he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a
serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children:
how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask
him? There are two ways to look at this text. The first is the way it is now
being interpreted so as to destroy all its meaning; the second is in the light
of Christian experience down through the centuries. Certain interpreters say
this cannot possibly be a spiritual principle laid down, so they dismiss it.
These interpreters, as a rule, seem to me to be more determined to prove a point
than to be Christ-like—more determined to interpret a verse in line with
preconceived theology than to be filled with the Holy Ghost. The lips that
usually speak against this are pretty cold lips. But over against men’s
interpretations which say this is not for us is the long line of superior
saints, prophets, reformers, missionaries, evangelists, pastors and holy people
of God down through the years who have not been told that it is wrong to open
your vessel and say, “Fill me, Lord.” But I have been hearing that it is wrong
to do it. I know better because I asked, and He gave me. Third, Acts 5:32 :

. . . the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey him.

He gives the Holy Spirit to them that obey Him. I have covered that, but it is
the third point in my little talk. Fourth, Galatians 3:2. Paul says, This only
would I learn of you. Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the
hearing of faith?

It is a rhetorical question. The answer is, “By the hearing of faith, of
course.” Faith alone is the vessel that can receive. Faith alone can open the
tap and fill with the Spirit. I want to watch my language for I do not want to
leave a sentence with you that Satan could twist or harm, so when I say receive
I do not mean receive in the sense that He is far away and must come to your
heart. I mean receive or be filled in the sense that He fills His people with
the Holy Spirit. Even after Pentecost it was written that “Peter, filled with
the Holy Ghost, said . . .” (Acts 4:8). There was nothing incompatible with
sound theology embraced by the apostles, surely, and they were filled,
sometimes, with the Holy Ghost. God wants to fill you. I give you this, and here
is the only place I expect to run into trouble with some of you good, careful
Bible expositors, but I give you this and I do not give you the text, so if you
want to disbelieve me, we will still be friends. I have not heard that anyone
ever was filled who did not know he had been, and I have never heard of anybody
being filled gradually. You think with me for a moment about the Old Testament
and the New Testament—do you ever remember of any place in the Old Testament
when the Holy Spirit came gradually? No place. Ever hear of any place in the New
Testament where He came gradually? No, He did not. I do not say that God never
did. But I do say He never recorded an instance where He did. Always the Holy
Spirit is self-announcing and self-validating; you do not have to be told. A
great man of God who is now in heaven and whom Dr. Edman1 and I greatly admire,
once preached from the text, “Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living
water” (John 7:38). And some dear brethren, careful expositors, took him to
lunch afterwards. After they had gotten him nicely settled, the soup had been
disposed of and they were ready for the main course, they said, “Now, dear
brother, we think that was a good sermon, but oh, you were woefully unbiblical
in your exegesis. That did not mean what you thought it meant at all.” (He had
taught that they would be filled with the Spirit, and out from within them would
flow rivers of living water.) They said, “That does not mean that. We will show
you what that means dispensationally.” They went along and dispensationalized a
while. Pretty soon one of them got honest with himself and came down off his
theological pedestal. He bowed his head, and the tears began to flow. He said,
“Brother, we have the right exegesis, but you have the rivers.” I would rather
have the rivers than the right exegesis. But I am not apologizing for bad
exegesis, either! I think I have given you a fair presentation. If we do not
believe this, let us stop singing, “Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove.” Let us stop
singing “Fill Me Now” and all those revival hymns and choruses. Let us stop it
and be honest with ourselves. If it is not biblical and the belief in it is
unscriptural, let us take it out of our hymnbooks. Why sing in our hymnbooks
what we deny in our lives? But if it is true, then let us begin to expect
wondrously that He will “Fill Me Now” with Himself. Are you with me on this? Is
not this more than anything else—that God should give you full increased
measures of His blessed Holy Spirit to be your Comforter, your Mentor, your
Inner Teacher, your Guide, to give you an unction from the Holy One? While your
teacher is teaching your intellect, this Holy One is teaching your heart, to
keep, rebuke, encourage and comfort you—that is what He is here for. Oh, we have
neglected Him so shamefully. We have forgotten Him days without end. Let us not
do it any more. Let us expect Him to fill us.

[This message was delivered at Pierce Chapel, Wheaton College, on the evening of
October 2, 1952.]


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  CHAPTER 10: 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.]


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 11: 11 - THE DANGER OF BEING ALMOST ALTOGETHER
========================================================================

How good God has been to me to allow me to have such good friends. They say a
friend is one who knows your faults and loves you anyway. When I comb over my
memory and think of the good and great men that have adopted me, taken me to
their hearts, and allowed me to minister to their churches and schools, I simply
do not know how I can thank God enough. It was most gracious for Dr. Edman to
think of me here and have me here, along with Brother McAfee. I thank him for
inviting me here. I have enjoyed myself and my preaching—I say that with no
intention of being funny. I have preached about those things dear to my heart.

Tonight I want to talk about the danger of being “almost, but not altogether.”
Since the twenty-sixth chapter of Acts, in which this occurs, is thirty-two
verses long and since I have a limited time, I shall not read the entire
chapter. It is the story of Paul’s defense before Agrippa. Let me break in at
the twenty-second verse:

Having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day, witnessing both
to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and
Moses did say should come: That Christ should suffer, and that He should be the
first that should rise from the dead, and should show light unto the people and
to the Gentiles. And as he thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud
voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad. But he
said, I am not mad, most noble Festus, but speak forth the words of truth and
soberness. For the king knoweth of these things, before whom I speak freely: for
I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him; for this thing was
not done in a corner. King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets? I know that
thou believest. Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a
Christian. And Paul said, I would to God that not only thou but also all that
hear me this day were both almost, and altogether, as I am, except these bonds.
(Acts 26:22-29) I would that you were not only almost, but altogether. The
living human scene here is one of almost ideal beauty and power. The witness of
Paul before Agrippa is one of the noblest chapters in the entire Bible—and
certainly in written literature. Here is a man in chains, a victim of the spite
and jealousies of Jews with connections. They had not the brass to charge him
with a real crime. There were robbers there, but not a man rose to accuse Paul
of robbery. There were murderers there, but no one charged this man with murder.
There were traitors to their country, but no one dared say he was a traitor.
There were arsonists there, but no one dared say, “This man burns down temples.”
Yet with one voice they cried against Paul. Here was a man of heaven among men
of earth. With characteristic violence the men of earth reacted against the man
of heaven. As it is written in the Bible, the once-born man will persecute the
twice-born man. Always it is Cain who will slay Abel. But here stands the man
Paul, to make his defense. I like to read this passage quietly and let it soak
into my heart. When Daniel Webster was holding audiences spellbound in this
country with his amazing oratory, someone said, “I like to sit up close when
Webster makes his speech. When I sit under that great brow and listen to the
outpouring of his mighty eloquence I always go away feeling that I am a greater
man than when I came in.” And I like to read this passage sometimes just to see
whether a bit of the wonder of it will not rub off on me—the superiority, the
excellence of the man. His whole bearing, his whole manner has no poor language
but clean and right and good. It comes to us in this English that is beautiful
and musical. His attitude, his diction—everything was sharp and clean and
gracious. Here was a superior man. As he stands before the king to tell why he
is there and defend himself, his argument is sound and learned and frank and
direct. Nothing of the tricks of rhetoric that men employ—no appealing to the
feeling of the man, but frankness and an honesty that goes straight through to
the heart of the man, Agrippa. The substance of his testimony was such that it
was, in itself, a tremendous argument for the message that he preached. Notice
he said that he had always been a strict religious Jew. He was no renegade, no
man who had been careless about his relationship to God. He had been living in
good conscience before God. Although, he admitted, blind on a point or two, he
had always been a strict religious Jew, deeply schooled in the Old Testament
itself and in the theology of the rabbis. He then said that he had followed this
Jewish religion that he had loved so much straight into the arms of Jesus. In
embracing Jesus, he was not forsaking the religion of his fathers, but was
helping to fulfill it. In coming to Jesus, he was coming to the One in whom all
the prophets from the beginning of the world talked about. Instead of
apologizing for his conversion from Judaism to Christianity, he said, “I have
never believed anything that is not believed by the fathers. I have never taught
anything that is not written in the Scriptures of the very Jews who are opposing
me and have me up here with chains on my wrists. The very religion my accusers
hold and in whose name they have me here is the religion that I followed
straight into the arms of Jesus Christ. So instead of apologizing for being a
renegade Jew, I am a Jew who has found the Messiah, and the fulfillment of the
prophesies of my fathers’ Scriptures, which God has given through Moses and all
the prophets.” He admitted frankly that at first, in his blindness, he had
persecuted Christ. He had more knowledge than love or faith, so at first, he
said, he had persecuted Christ. But he had met the Lord Jesus Christ on Damascus
Road, and a flash of heavenly light had come to his soul—so blinding in its
intensity he was sightless for three days. “But now,” he said, “I have a
commission from God. Since that hour when I met God yonder on the road and
stepped out from Judaism right straight on into Christianity and the arms of
Christ, I have been preaching everywhere, witnessing only what the prophets have
declared: that a Redeemer should suffer, die, and rise again to be the light of
the Gentiles and the Jews.” Then dramatically he said, “It is for this reason
that I have this chain on my wrist.” The man to whom he addressed these noble
remarks was deeply moved. He had come from his busy life doing what kings are
supposed to be doing, and now the sudden shock and wonder of it almost overcame
him. For you see, Paul had indirectly set forth the powerful proof of the truth
of Christianity, and he had also along with it indirectly set forth the reason
why Agrippa should turn to Christ. The argument was, “If Jesus Christ is for me,
He is also for you, O king. If I found Him by stepping over from Judaism into
Christ, then that is an argument as old as Moses and older, so you ought also to
be a Christian.” He did not say it quite like that, but the whole implication
and inference is there. Agrippa was deeply moved by the preaching of the gospel,
and he was not the only one. He said, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a
Christian” (Acts 26:28). The different translations toss those words around, but
they all add up to about the same thing. The man was profoundly touched, and he
said, “I am near to believing what you have to say, Paul. Almost thou persuadest
me.” Notice then that there was no quip in the mouth of Paul, and no flippant
remark. He said, so nobly and so beautifully, “I wish before my God tonight, oh
king, that you and all the others who are listening to me were not almost but
altogether a Christian.” That is the reply of the man of God, and that is what I
want to talk about—I would that thou were not almost but altogether a true
Christian. There is a woe in the word “almost.” When Agrippa used the word
“almost,” he did not know it at the time, but he had committed the greatest
moral blunder of his life. History shows that the man’s blunder was fatal.
Shipwrecks, earthquakes, tidal waves, epidemics and all the rest, nothing
compares in sheer unrelieved tragedy with the soul that has seen the cross and
turned away from it, that has heard the gospel and rejected it—maybe reluctantly
and with many tears, maybe promising his own heart that he would not always
reject it—but rejected it nevertheless. The moral tragedy of one who has finally
decided that Jesus Christ is not for him—not all the great dramatists in the
world, not Shakespeare nor Aeschylus nor any or all taken together could ever
have packed into a drama all the stark terror and tragedy that is in the single
word “almost” when it is not “altogether.” I think how this man had wiped out
with this one word “almost.” Kindly and friendly he was; I do not think there
was even a sarcasm in his voice. He was deeply moved by the persuasion of the
Word set before him. In refusing he wiped out forever all the dreams he ever had
of a better world than this. Regardless of our backgrounds I think there is
hardly one who breathes with mortal breath that has not somewhere down the years
said to himself, “This surely is not all there is to life. Surely these
Christians and Jews and all the others who have dreamed about heaven—the
American Indian with his “happy hunting ground,” the Greek and his Elysian
fields—surely there must be something beyond all this. I cannot feed my soul on
automobiles, television, bank accounts and good clothes and forget about it for
another month, another year, another ten years.” Then in some moment of darkness
or silence or at the graveside of a loved one, this feeling comes back again.
“Oh,” we say, “if there be a God, this must not be it. There must be something
real”—and then to sell out that feeling! That is what Agrippa did—he sold out.
Even that old king must have had his quiet moments there in the garden, when he
shooed away his servants and sat in the silence, listening to the night birds
and dreaming of another world, of a hope beyond the grave. Perhaps he felt his
pulse surging within him and said, “It cannot always be, and when it ends and
there is no pulse, then where do I go?” But he swept away all the hopes and the
dreams when he said, “almost.” All he had hoped for in the future—the dreams and
the longing for permanence—all went out from under him and suspended him in
immensity without a foundation or a place to rest or hide. Agrippa sold out
before God. I think of others not so noble as Agrippa, maybe simple people and
plainer people like you and me. I think of a man being tried for murder. All the
evidence is in and the jury retires as he plays with his lead pencil and tries
to keep up his spirits by talking to his lawyer. He is waiting, not knowing what
to expect. Behind those locked doors twelve men debate his future. You seldom
know what they say. Back there they toss the evidence around, one man talking,
then another. It looks as if the verdict is going to be “not guilty.” Then they
decide, “Oh, it cannot be. The evidence indicates guilt.” Then, like a top that
is spinning and slowly running down, at last it all goes one way and the vote is
taken. How near that man came to going out into the sunshine again, meeting his
family again, sitting on his own lawn, reading the newspaper with his slippers
on the floor! If he had only known his heart would have stopped with the
excitement of it. He was almost acquitted, but the vote was “guilty,” and after
months of waiting he pays the price. He walks into that room and sees the
electric chair. I once sat in that terrible chair. I walked up and allowed them
to strap me in, and something of the horror of that moment came to my
imagination. There he sits for one awful moment, and then it is over. He was
almost a free citizen again. I think of Judas Iscariot. I think that we overdo
our description of Judas Iscariot. He was not a total devil. He was the son of
perdition in the Hebrew sense, but it is an idiomatic expression, and it does
not mean that he was a veritable devil. He had a heart, too. I do not believe in
taking the heart out of people, not even the other political party, nor the
Communists nor anybody. No matter how much the devil may get in and wreck and
destroy and damn a man, he is still a human being. He may still love children,
and he may still be friendly and have the dreams that Adam’s sons have. Still he
may love to hear the birds sing there on the bough and stroke the kitty as she
goes by and call his dog and pat his head. He still may be a human being even
though he is a Stalin or a Hitler. I think Judas was a human being. We have made
him a whipping boy and piled upon him all the evil that we can think about, and
yet he was decent enough that nobody knew which one it was that betrayed Jesus
with a kiss. If he had been such a devil they certainly would have said, “Oh,
Judas did it,” but nobody thought of Judas. Judas was secretly a bad man.
Certainly, no doubt, he had his good moments. We know this is so because after
he betrayed Jesus with a kiss for thirty pieces of silver, and he found that
Jesus had not escaped as he may have figured He would, but that his friend was
actually going to die, he was overcome with remorse, not repentance. He rushed
back and dramatically hurled down the $18 at the feet of the cynical priest and
said, “I have betrayed innocent blood.” And in a paroxysm of self-accusation he
rushed out and hanged himself. But he almost became St. Judas. He was almost a
believer in Jesus, that is obvious. He loved that quiet tender man who did and
said such wonderfully strange and beautiful things, and though Judas did allow
the devil to tempt him, that poor son of perdition did allow the perdition in
his heart to damn him at last. He was not a damned man to start with, and he
might have been St. Judas instead of Judas Iscariot. The name whistles out of
our mouths like the voice of a serpent. Nobody ever named his son Judas Iscariot
Jones—nobody ever put that name upon an innocent brow of a baby, for he is
Judas, the accursed, upon whom the ages have placed their stern disapproval. But
it would have taken him only one minute to have become Judas, the tender
follower of Jesus, and maybe they would have put “Saint” before his name, but it
was almost, not altogether. So he died with the curse on his head, so sorry for
the way he had lived that he died of suicide. I think of the life-term
prisoners. For each one there must have been a time when they were almost all
right. I believe in theological total depravity, that we are all bad, hopelessly
bad, but I also believe that humanly there is a lot of good in folks. David
said, “My goodness extendeth not to Thee, but to the righteous which are in the
earth” (Psalms 16:2-3). There are two directions of righteousness. Not everybody
is a devil and has horns, though some evangelists try to make us think it so.
But everybody is lost, and has to be saved, or they will be lost forever. There
are lots of good, decent people that are not Christians, but that righteousness
extends not to God, it extends out to people. It is a social righteousness, but
that divine righteousness that makes us acceptable before the eyes of God must
be given to us by the blood of the Lamb. When He shall come with trumpet sound,
Oh may I then in Him be found;

Dressed in His righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne. 1 That
is the righteousness that admits me to the presence of God. There is a
righteousness that extends to my neighbor, a reputation I may get for being
honest, decent, courteous, paying my debts, taking back the lawn mower, and
being a nice fellow among men. There is nothing wrong with that. There is a lot
of modern preaching that sneers at righteousness and decency and good
citizenship as though it were an affront to God to love your wife and pay your
debts and bring your children up right. I think that is a tragic
misunderstanding of this whole business to place a premium upon sin and penalize
righteousness. No, the only problem is that this kind of righteousness is a
social righteousness, and it goes out to men but not up to God. There’s many a
life-term prisoner with the prison pallor upon his cheek who was once a decent
fellow back home. I have never been committed to prisons but I have held
meetings in prisons, and I have gone through and seen the men on death row
waiting to die, playing ball, trying to keep up their spirits a little. Those
fellows were not all born bad. They were good decent fellows around the house,
no doubt like some of you, in fact all of us. We loved our mothers, teased our
sisters and loved them to death though we would not let them know it. Many of
those boys who will die behind the dark prison walls at one time walked out of
the house and down the street whistling. It was Sunday evening, and mother said,
“Would you go to church with me tonight?” “Oh, maybe, Mother, I will be back.”
But he got out there, and a pal called him over with a whistle, and they went
somewhere else. Nothing wrong with that. They missed church, but they went
somewhere else. However, the next Sunday night they went still somewhere else,
and it kept getting worse. Sin always gets worse by degrees. Not all sins are
alike. Sin has intensity of guilt, pretty soon delinquency, then stolen cars,
and then murder. The life-term prisoner almost became a decent, respected
citizen with a house on a lot, a car, family, lawn, a job, friends, vacations,
fishing trips, ball games and fun. But tonight he is behind bars. It is not
enough to be almost all right. “Oh,” said the man of God, “I would that you
might not only be almost but altogether.” I think of the living dead, the
zombies and ghosts that walk. They may walk in expensive suits and drive luxury
automobiles, but they are living dead men. Way back there yonder somewhere they
had an opportunity. The gospel was preached, maybe by some simple man whose
language was not too eloquent, but an honest man who loved his Savior and
people. He heard it and walked away sober down the street, got in his car, and
as he drove, he said to himself, “That man was right. I am a big fool to live
the way I am living. He was right.” He was almost, but not altogether. He said,
“I will go back next Sunday night, that is what I will do,” but next Sunday
night his wife has a date for him someplace else and pretty soon he forgot his
little vow. Now, older, he is a walking dead man. He is a disillusioned,
embittered, defeated, lost man. Not a damned man yet, but a lost man. It is not
enough to be almost. I don’t like to talk about hell. I said before that no man
should preach about hell except with tears in his eyes. I trust there is
tenderness at least in my heart, but I just want to mention in passing, I
believe in hell. I had a very dear friend when I was a lad. He taught me
telegraphy, the old international Morse code, and this very dear friend and I
went to a meeting together. He lied and said he was a Christian when a personal
worker came and asked him if he was, because he did not want them to bother him.
Poor, miserable sinner that I was, at least I did not lie. I said, “No, I am
not.” Then they talked to me and pushed me around and massaged me and tried to
get me to go, and I did not go, but at least I had not lied to the Holy Ghost.
Shortly after that my friend, still in his twenties, was sitting, talking to his
sister. He looked at his watch when the train whistled (he was a railroad man)
and said, “Old Number Six is on time.” Then he stopped talking and she wondered
why for he was a friendly, jovial fellow. She walked over, and he had died
sitting there. He had evidently had some heart condition, and that was the last
thing he ever said. Well, that struck me. You know how fellows in their teens
get attached to some older man? Well, he was my hero. He was a railroad man, and
I always loved the moan of the trains. Trains and the sound of an old hound dog
on the horizon are sweeter to me than symphony music. I would wake up in the
night, and I knew the language of the whistle and knew what they were whistling
about, and I knew my friend was gone forever. I knew where he had gone, and I
myself was an unconverted sinner. I went to my room, got on my knees and prayed
the most awful and futile prayer that I think has ever been prayed, to my
knowledge. I prayed, “Oh God, please, if it is possible, get my friend Thurman
out of hell.” That is a terrible prayer. Of course God did not answer it. But
Thurman was a nice fellow, a decent companion, and a good man to be around, and
he was almost saved. Thurman is not here anymore. God is going to do something
to take the sadness and sting out of those friends and family members that you
wept over who died without Christ. In that great day when God wipes tears away,
He will wipe those tears away too (Revelation 21:4). I am sure of that. Yet down
on the human level, you still grieve for that nice brother whom you loved, who
used to baby-sit you before the term “baby-sitting” was heard of, who gave you
his clothes when he outgrew them, who let you ride his bicycle—and who died
suddenly, and died without Christ. You have grieved ever since. He was a decent
fellow and your loved brother, but he is gone; you know where he has gone and
not all the kindness of the preacher can ever get him out of there. God handles
men when they die. He was a good fellow, and there is many a man like that down
there. If we were to go to that terrible place (and I am as near to it as I ever
want to get), we would find lots of people who can quote Scripture. We would
find people who would astonish us preachers with the number of verses and texts
they could quote. If there would be such a thing as singing, though there could
not be, I am sure that there are tens of thousands there that could join us in
singing “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” though it would not apply to them.
The people who are there are not all pagans, Nazis and Communists. People that
are there, many of them, are people that almost did not go there. Almost they
escaped it. Almost they sought God. They planned, maybe, and promised. They
walked around a church two or three times, and started in, and then backed off
and did not go in. Maybe they sat through many a revival meeting and promised
themselves, but they did not do anything about it. Almost is not enough. Are you
a true Christian? Please do not take me wrongly and be hurt by this. I must
discharge my soul before God. Are you a true Christian? Some of us, particularly
young people, are being badly betrayed these days by our teachers, church people
and folks who preach and teach like myself. We do not mean to do it, but we are
so eager to make a convert that we sometimes rush people prematurely into a
decision which never goes deep enough. We get them to sign a tract, or sign a
New Testament. I do not mean that is not a good thing to do, but many times it
misfires and does not get the sinner in at all. Sometimes they stand and say,
“Yes, I take Him,” but they do not know what they have stood for. They go out
unchanged and do not know quite why. My listening friends, if this is the last
time you ever hear my voice, hear me say this to you, that unless you have been
changed by an inner working of God in your heart, in what we call regeneration,
you are still in your sins. No amount of baptizing or going to church or joining
religious groups or reading New Testaments—no amount of religious effort can
save your soul. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
heaven” (John 3:3). Being born again does not mean signing your name on a card,
though if you are born again you can sign your name on a card, thank God. Mail
it in and say, “I am born again.” I do not mean to speak against that, I only
say that many times that does not go far enough. In our eagerness to count noses
and say we had 40 conversions yesterday, we let people through when in honesty
to their soul we never should have done it. Come on, you young people, all of
you. God bless you! I have watched your faces, you have nodded and said “Hi” to
me as I walked around the campus, and I suppose you thought, “What an old fellow
that is.” Maybe you did not admire me, but oh, how I have admired you! A lot of
you remind me of my kids, my little girl and what she will be four or five years
from now when she comes to Wheaton. And I have loved you. Though our campaign
has been more of a deeper life conference than an evangelistic campaign, I
cannot close without saying to you, please do not ever let the devil fool you.
Do not rest with “almost.” Make it “altogether.” Be sure that you are all the
way in—that Jesus Christ is yours and you are His. You say, “How can you know,
Mr. Tozer?” Well, you meet all the biblical conditions there are and trust Him,
and your trust will be its own reward. His work within you will be
self-validating and self-witnessing, and you will know you have passed from
death unto life. And do not forget, you can know it! Do not let yourself be
cheated, please, because the man of God said, “It is not enough to be almost,
but you must be altogether.” I thank God my conversion was a real, transforming,
amazing conversion that turned me from being a careless sinner to being a
Christian and I knew that I was born again. I did not have to be told it—I knew.
It was not a conclusion I had drawn from a set of texts. It was partly that,
certainly, for faith cometh by hearing the Word of God (Romans 10:17), but it
became to me more than that. It became for me an inner witness—I am His and He
is mine. “Amazing love, how can it be?” You can know tonight. Think for a moment
about your own heart. Are you a true Christian—an “altogether” Christian? Or are
you almost converted? Will you not make this the time when you say, “I do not
care what anybody says, I am going to push my way through past all my fears and
doubts to Jesus Christ, and I am going to throw myself out on Him like I would
throw myself off a diving board into a swimming pool. I will trust Him tonight
to save me through and through. May it not be said of me in that terrible day,
‘You were almost in, but not altogether.’” No greater tragedy could visit
you—polio, the loss of arms or legs, blindness—nothing could be so starkly
frightful as your having been almost but never really born again by faith in
Jesus Christ.

[This sermon was delivered at Wheaton College’s Pierce Chapel on the evening of
October 5, 1952.]


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 12: 12 - IS GOD ENOUGH?
========================================================================

Here is an idea advanced by an old man of God 2,500 years ago, as recorded in
Jeremiah 6:16. “Thus saith the Lord, stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for
the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest
for your souls.” That is all but one line of the sixteenth verse. The other line
I wish were not there, but it is: “But they said, we will not walk therein.”

This text must be seen in its historic context. Israel was in grave physical
danger for moral reasons. They had left the old paths and the old ways and had
blasted out a shortcut for themselves that was rapidly taking them into
quicksand and death, and Jeremiah offered to come to their rescue. He said, “If
you want to escape what is ahead for you, ask for the old paths and turn onto
the old paved highway that God has made for you, and you will come out all
right.” But Israel did not listen. The reason Israel was in trouble was that she
had gotten tired of God. This had not been the first time. Once, on the mount,
Moses, their leader—whom they rallied to because he was trustworthy, visible and
exercised leadership—went out of their sight for a while. Because they could not
get their eyes on anything and could not touch anything, they had not the inward
stability and stamina enough to wait for God’s time. God was not enough for
them, so they made themselves a golden calf. It happened again in the wilderness
later, after they had eaten manna from heaven (“angels’ food” it says in Psalms
78:25) and got tired of that diet. Although manna had everything they needed,
they demanded to have something a bit more spicy. Consequently, God sent them
flesh, but He sent a blight along with it. This was the outcropping of a
natural, though sinful, tendency in humanity. It is a bad streak in human nature
which finds goodness boring. We get tired of it after a while, and the only way
we can endure it is to mix it with something highly spiced. I think I have
gotten to the bottom of the trouble today in modern conservative Christian
circles of which you and I, of course, are a part and would not be anything
else. But there are serious difficulties that some of us are seeing and I
believe the root and bottom of it all is that many of us have become bored with
God. We have not the courage of the atheist who bares his breast to the high
heavens and demands that if there be a God, He strike him dead. We want the
safety of the Cross, and yet we are not satisfied with the Cross. We want the
protecting wing of God, provided God will allow us a certain number of childish
toys that we may be able to play with to keep our juvenile minds occupied while
we go our way. We invent to ourselves instruments of music like David
(figuratively speaking). We have a multitude of trifles to make up for the fact
that God is not enough for us. For many Christians it is a fact that God is not
enough. Indeed, there is nobody quite so eloquent as one who is busy arguing in
favor of extras and additions that have no place either in the Old or New
Testaments or in the traditional church of Christ. Nobody can get quite so
eloquent as the man who has found that God is not enough and who has to have
something to add to God to satisfy his poor heart. Those who gaze homesick
toward the mount and desire a view of God in the fire, who wish to push into the
Presence of the Holy God and stand in awful silence there—satisfied as the
angels in heaven, as the cherubim before the throne and as the saints of the
ages, satisfied with what God is—are considered to be radicals, extremists,
fanatics, killjoys and a good many other names not quite so complimentary.
Nevertheless, I joyfully put myself over on their side and say that I believe
that we will not be where we ought to be until we get to a place where God is
enough for us. We all have to live in the world. We even have to live in the
twentieth century, believe it or not. There is no avenue of escape just yet. But
it is one thing to accept the twentieth century with its multitude of gadgets,
sanctifying and making them necessary for our spiritual happiness; it is quite
another to live as though we were not in the world at all. From this latter
perspective people live where thoughts of God are enough to nourish their minds
for days on end. A minute of experience with the Presence of God brings more
delight to them than all the invented gadgets in the world! Between those two
views there is a great gulf fixed, but a bored and blasJ generation does not
want to hear anything about the old paths. Scripture says, “Seek the old paths”
(Jeremiah 6:16). There are two errors that are pretty current with regard to old
things. The first is that everything old is good, and everything new is bad.
That idea, or course, is held by some people, and it harms progress and
discourages all thought. It also petrifies the imagination and digs a grave for
all expectation. I am afraid that in our evangelical circles, when it comes to
theology and spiritual thought, we have adopted the notion that the old is good
and that everything new is bad in the realm of theology and spiritual ideas. We
have to go back to John Bunyan or somewhere way back yonder to discover a man
who has spiritual imagination enough even to state things differently from that
which is current in his time. I will tell you what I would like to see for this
critical age. I would like to see come out of this student body (and others like
it all over the world) a number of persons committed to the everlastingness of
the truth as it is given from heaven, manifested in the inspiration of Scripture
and the faith of our fathers. I would like to see you committed to this truth,
world without end, with your bridges burnt behind you so that it is impossible
to go back theologically from this evangelical position. Then, before God
Almighty, I would hope to see you full of the Spirit, with a Spirit-filled
intellect immersed in the truth. The result would be the truth related in an
imaginative way for our time. Truth would have that purpose and imaginative
power that would enable us to show surprise and wonder when we talk about the
things of God. We have lost that in religious ideas. Consequently, we have had
to make up for our lack of wonder, surprise and “zing” by dragging in ten
thousand things that God never intended should be dragged in at all. Therefore,
it is often very difficult to tell whether we are in the church of God or at
some amusement park. The second error, which we also strangely enough embrace,
is that everything new is good and everything old is bad. That view has to do
with our practice of religion. When it comes to our beliefs, we accept the
doctrine that what our bearded fathers believed about a text is all there is to
it, and that there is not anything else that can be said on the subject. All we
have to do is have a good memory, remembering what Dr. So-and-so said about it
because memory is the only faculty of the religious mentality that is working
much now. We try to remember what the fathers said about a text, but we bring no
imagination, no fresh life, no fresh touch, to the development of it ourselves.
The error that everything new is good and everything old is bad takes place in
the realm of practice and worship and religious activity generally. This is a
view, if I can sanctify or dignify it with the word view, of the partly educated
or the badly educated (I do not know which would be worse), of the
intellectually vain and the worldly, of the carnal man who has not the Spirit.
Such are the unstable and the impatient, the bored and the contemptuous. It can
lead, of course, to great rebellion against the truth. If the idea that
everything new is good and everything old is bad gets into theology, it makes
modernists out of us. If this notion gets into fundamental circles, it makes
fools out of us, and there is a great deal of it throughout the country. What is
the way? The way is given to us here by the Holy Ghost: “Stand in the way, and
see for yourselves, and ask for the old paths, the good way, and you shall find
rest to your souls.” What shall we find in these good old paths? We will find
everlasting truths. We will find what may be called the primary grounds, the
irreducible elements, those things that are neither new nor old; they are
ancient and eternal and have no time quality attached to them at all. The great
doctrines of the Bible are not timely. When a man comes up to me and says, “Mr.
Tozer, that was a timely sermon,” I take it as a doubtful compliment, for the
truths of God are not timely (that is, geared into time). The truths of God are
eternal. They rise above time, and they were as true when Adam was in the garden
as they will be true in the millennium or in the ages that follow. There are
certain great truths: God, God’s creating us, our response and relation to God,
human sin, human redemption, the incarnation, the indwelling Christ, the union
of the soul with the Triune God. All these are great, eternal truths, true under
all kinds of conditions, among all people everywhere and in every age in the
world, no less true and no more true because they are absolutely true. Indeed,
we will never be where we should be until these become to us the source of
thrill. The entertainment of great spiritual concepts will lift us like a song
until, brooding upon the great ideas of the Triune God and all He means to us,
will thrill us like a stimulant from within. We will never be where we ought to
be until we go back to those old paths and learn to find God. We will cease to
be bored with God. We will cease to make His redemptive plan merely an escape
from hell and put the thought of hell and all that way behind us in the dim
disappearing past. Instead, we will center our affections upon God and Christ,
where Christ sits at the right hand of God, and become specialists and experts
in the realm of the spiritual life. It is amazing how little outside stimulus we
need if we have that inward stimulus. It is amazing how much God will meet our
needs. It will not be God and something else. It will be God everything. And
then, wisely, we will gear into our times, and we will gear into the gadgets
around us, and we will gear into the needs of others, and in a moment we will
become as practical as overshoes and as alert to the needs of the world around
us as the most keen sociologist. Nevertheless, at the same time our great anchor
will be God above. And if at any moment we should be cut off from our
environment so that we did not have the stimulation and comfort of what the
world provides, we would still be perfectly restful, for God would be enough.
This is where we should seek to be, and I do not think this is too heavy a
burden for you young people. I think youth will respond to the right leadership
if it is given them, so I deliberately turn your minds to the old paths—not the
old beards and the old clothes, nor the old ideas, but to the ancient and
eternal truths which our fathers have given and which the Scriptures contain.
Then, from there on we will know God and Christ in increasing intimacy as the
years go by, and we will find heaven drawn near and earth receding as we get
older. May God give us the courage to be obedient to His truths in this tragic,
critical and dangerous hour in which we live.

[Tozer preached this sermon in Wheaton College, Pierce Chapel, on the morning of
March 4, 1954.]


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  CHAPTER 13: 13 - ENDNOTES
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Chapter 1- Spiritual Power 1William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), a career
politician and leading Christian layman.

Chapter 2- Preparing the Way for the Lord 1A. B. Simpson (1843-1919). The
celebrated writer and founder of the Christian Missionary Alliance.

2 Charles Wesley (1707-1788). One of the greatest hymn writers of all time.

3Hymn by Charles Wesley, “Arise, my Soul, Arise! “, 1742 4Raymond McAfee,
Tozer’s associate pastor, music director, and long-time friend.

Chapter 3 - Grieve Not the Holy Spirit 1 Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is
also referred to in Luke 12:10 Chapter 4 - The Enemy Within 1Frederick William
Faber (1814-1863).

Chapter 5 - Wounds from God 1Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).

2The Korean War (1950-1952) was still raging on.

3Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899). The American evangelist did say this.

4Raymond McAfee was a close associate and friend of Dr. Tozer.

5George Mueller (1805-1898). A Christian leader who was best known for founding
orphanages and schools in England. His autobiography, A Life of Trust, was a
Christian best seller.

Chapter 6 -Five Keys to the Faithful Christian Life 1Most likely referring to
Winona Lake Bible Conference, Winona Lake, Indiana 2The radio station of Moody
Bible Institute, Chicago, Illinois.

3This is a reference to a speech delivered by Vice Presidential candidate
Richard M. Nixon during the 1952 Presidential campaign. Nixon was charged with
using campaign funds for personal use. In his famous “Checkers Speech” he told
the public he was going to set aside pretense and politics, and simply pour out
the truth from his heart.

4Wingspread (Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 1943), is a biography of A.
B. Simpson written by Tozer. It is still in print.

Chapter 7 - How to Be Filled with the Holy Spirit 1Hymn by Frederick W. Faber,
“O Jesus, Jesus.”

Chapter 8 - Be Filled with the Spirit

1Dr. V. Raymond Edman (1900-1967) was president of Wheaton College from 1941 to
1964. He was on the platform with Tozer when this message was delivered.

Chapter 9 - How to Cultivate the Spirit’s Companionship 1Samuel Pepys
(1633-1703), whose diary is a window on the last part of the 17th century in
England.

2John Steinbeck (1902-1968), winner of the 1962 Nobel prize for literature. He
is best known for his novel The Grapes of Wrath.

3Paul Rader (1879-1938), pastor of Chicago’s Moody Church and a well-known radio
evangelist.

4Nicholas Herman (c.1605-1691), better known as Brother Lawrence, author of The
Practice of the Presence of God.

5A.B. Simpson (1843-1919), author, hymn writer, evangelist and founder of The
Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Chapter 10 - The Danger of Being Almost Altogether 1Hymn, “My Hope is Built on
Nothing Less”, verse 4, text by Edward Mote, 1797-1874


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/tozer-aw-tozer-speaks-to-students/
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