In this sermon, the preacher emphasizes the importance of being a committed and worshiping people for God. He highlights the contrast between the world's pursuit of material wealth and the call of God to be a spiritual and godly people. The preacher encourages mothers to be fully committed to their children, even willing to sacrifice for them. He also reminds the audience that although believers have been redeemed, they are still in a battle and must remain faithful to God. The sermon references the book of Revelation and the apostle Paul's experiences to illustrate these points.

Sermons from the Book of Revelation by Dr. A. W. Tozer. Sermon number 16. The 10th chapter, beginning with verse 8 and going to verse 11. And the voice which I heard from heaven speak unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel, which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth. And I went unto the angel and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it and eat it up, and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little book out of the angel's hand and ate it up, and it was in my mouth sweet as honey. And as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter. And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples and nations and tongues. I sat two days and two evenings last week in an air-conditioned boardroom in New York, and not being very well protected on the top side of my personality, the cold air came down the wall on me. And the result is a little bit of laryngitis, which I trust won't prevent the sermon tonight. God has his treasure in earthen vessels, and if he'd asked me, I'd never have any trouble with my voice. But he doesn't, so I occasionally do, rarely but occasionally. I mention that so you'll know I don't sound like a man ninety all the time, just when I've been in an air-conditioned room. Thank God for such science. Now, you will notice that I have been, in the time that I have been preaching on the Book of Revelation, following a certain pattern. And that pattern has been this. I have held the Book of Revelation to be a prophetic outline of future events, prediction of things to come. But I have also held that the Book of Revelation contains a very wonderful amount of spiritual truth, which we can have for ourselves now. And while it is not unrelated to the prophetic events, it may be separated from it for our own devotional use and our own spiritual help. So tonight, there won't be as much about prophecy as there will be next Sunday night when we talk about who are the two witnesses. But tonight, I want to talk about the little book, this book of the angel had and gave to John, and told John to take it and eat it up. And he said, Now when you have it in your mouth, you will find it's very sweet. It's delicious in your mouth, but after you've swallowed it, it's gotten down into your system, it'll be a very bitter thing. Now, I don't know what this book is, but I assume that it is the Word of God, certain part of the Word of God, something that God particularly had in mind for the man, John. And this agrees with other passages of scripture. It agrees, for instance, with the book of Jeremiah, where we learn that Jeremiah, in the 15th chapter, took and thy words were found and I did eat them. And thy word was unto me, the joy and rejoicing of mine heart, for I am called by thy name, O Lord God of hosts. And if you turn on over to Ezekiel, you'll find a wonderful passage there. When I looked and behold, a hand was sent unto me, the 2nd chapter, and lo, a roll of a book was therein. And he spread it before me, and it was written within and without. And there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe. Moreover, he said unto me, Son of man, eat this thou findest, eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll. He said to me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat it, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it, and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness. And he said to me, Son of man, go get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with my words unto them. For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech, and of a hard language, but to the house of Israel. Not to many people of a strange speech, whose words thou canst not understand. Surely had I sent thee to them, they would have hearkened unto thee. But the house of Israel will not hearken unto me, for they will not hearken unto thee, the prophet, for they will not hearken unto me, God. For all the house of Israel are impudent and hard-hearted. We have this in the Old Testament, and then we have it in the New. Martin Luther said that if he could live long enough to do it, he had no doubt that he could find in the Old Testament every word of the New. And I am quite sure that in the prophetic scriptures of the New Testament, you will find very little more than a little advance upon the prophetic scriptures of the Old Testament. So we have a prophet here, Jeremiah, and another prophet, Ezekiel, eating the word of God. Then we go on over into the New Testament and come to the book of Revelation, and we find it again. There is a cause and effect relationship between the eating of the book and the testimony given, and the results, which he called having the belly bitter. When the word of the Lord is digested, that is, when it gets down into the life and becomes a part of the life, and when it dictates the witness and gives the prophet his position and the Christian his witness, then it becomes bitter. It becomes bitter to the flesh because of the attitude, the hostility of the world, and the weakness of the flesh, and the sinister hatred of the devil. The word of God is sweet to the taste and strong to deliver, but it also has a way of getting the people in trouble who live by it. Now, I would like to point out tonight that the human race is in a bad way. You will find lots of men who will say otherwise. They will spend an evening telling you what a wonderful bunch we are, and they will write books telling us how wonderful we are. In fact, I occasionally will get a letter from somebody reminding me that I must not take such a dark view of the world, because the world, after all, is pretty good if we only could look on the bright side. But there is in the world something that we have called a disaster, a major disaster. It has come by the fall of man and by man's sin, and the sin of man has brought an alienation from God. That is, it has broken off relationship with God, and it has brought what we call mortality, which of course is that we are subject to die, and it has brought death itself. But we have got to watch one thing. We have got to watch less when we are looking over the human race and seeing how they suffer, and how there is death and mortality and disease and insanity and crime and all these things, that we don't get sentimental about it and begin to pity people instead of realize that we are to blame. There are two ways of looking at this. Some say that sin is a disease. It is something like polio. You get it, you can't help if you have it, and it kills you, but you are not to blame for it. You are a poor fellow and you have no responsibility any more than a child has a responsibility that is born with a bad heart and is a blue baby. You can't help it, you were born into the world that way. But our Lord told us about a prodigal boy, the younger brother who went out into the world deliberately, and who engaged in riotous living deliberately, and who spent all that he had deliberately, and who was reduced to poverty and rags deliberately, and who got to work in the field working for the swine keepers deliberately, and all this was his own fault. It was not the result of something that he couldn't help, as polio might be, or a heart attack. It was his own doings, and the human race is in a bad way, but we're in a bad way by our own fault. And we have been redeemed potentially by Jesus Christ our Lord through the atonement which he made on the cross, through the propitiation which he made for us. And we have justification and regeneration, we who are Christians. We are justified, that is, declared righteous before God. We are regenerated, that is, generated a second time. And we have all this, we Christians, but we are not yet rescued. Now, this is the thing that's bothering the Church now. Whenever there's a revival in the Church, the Church always begins by acknowledging and making a part of her very lifeblood the belief that we're in a bad place, that there has been a major disaster, and that while through the Christian faith God saves, we're not yet rescued. We live in peril, we are sheep in the midst of wolves. You will find in the book of Romans, the book of Corinthians, you will find the earnest expectation of the creature awaited for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who has subjected the same in hope. Because the creature itself, that's creation, shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation, and not only they, groan and prevail, but we ourselves also, which have the fresh fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves, groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. And Paul, in 2 Corinthians 11, gives a long list of the troubles that he had, he was saved, but he wasn't yet rescued. He was redeemed, but he wasn't yet out of the fix. And that's where the Church finds herself today. The Church, the true Church of Christ, is a redeemed Church. She's been born of the Spirit and washed in the blood, and as far as judgment's concerned, her judgments are behind her, but she's not yet rescued. And Paul says, in stripes, I was above measure in prison. I went in prison more often than anybody else. I almost died, numbers of times, and deaths awp'd. I received of the Jews five times, forty stripes, save one, that's thirty-nine stripes, the famous cat-whipping. And thrice was I beaten with rods, and once I was stoned, and thrice I suffered shipwreck, and night and day I have been in the deep, and journeys oft, and weariness, and painfulness, and watching, and hunger, and thirst, and fasting, and nakedness. All these things came upon me, he said, plus the care of the Church which weighed me down all the time. So you see, the Church of Christ is redeemed, but not rescued. She has her name written in heaven, but she's on earth. And as long as she's on earth, she's going to be in trouble, as long as she acts like the Church. But when she doesn't want trouble, then she'll stop acting like the Church, and then she'll not have her troubles anymore, except, of course, those troubles which come to all men alike. And this, I think, is found here. Now, this is not prophetic, particularly as I've said. But this is found here. Here's truth, and you don't hear it often preached from the book of Revelation. But we're asked to eat the truth just the same as the prophets were, and as John was. We are ordered to eat the truth, take the book into our system, till it permeates every part of us. In the blunt Elizabethan days, they didn't hesitate to say, until it goes down into your belly, down into your whole digestive system, until it's taken up by your whole life, and it permeates every part of your life, and until there's no antidote for it and no escape and you can't get away from it, till there's total committal, till the truth takes full control, and until the cross becomes an instinct, a second nature, a mastering impulse. Always truth is very sweet. When we sing truth, it's always very sweet. And when we read it, it's very sweet. But when it takes over and begins to control us and determine our lives and becomes to us a reflex, second nature, a mastering impulse, then it becomes bitter as gall to the carnal nature. Truth has consequences, you see, my brother. And if we were in heaven, truth would be uniformly sweet. Nobody would ever complain about the bitterness of truth if we were all in heaven. But because we are not in heaven, but because we're halfway between heaven and hell, we're here in this world, we're not in hell, and thank God we're not going to be. We're not in heaven, and praise God, we are going to be. But we're halfway between heaven and hell in this world of good and bad, this world of saints and sinners, this world of joy and sorrow, and so truth sometimes is very harsh. And our difficulty, you know, my friends, is that we, God's people, won't allow truth to get down into our system. It is sharp, and we don't like its sharpness. It's painful, and we don't like its painfulness. It's bitter, and we don't like its bitterness. So we compromise. Now, judging from the lives of the people I see, I wonder how many of us have ever really eaten the book. I know we've memorized it in Sunday school, I know that we're going to read it through in sixty-two, and all that stuff. I know that we do read our chapter, and we do study Sunday school, and we even teach. But I wonder how many have eaten it and let it get down into your system until there's no antidote for it. Most people are ready to pray with their fingers crossed, and they're ready to start to follow the Lord with the understanding that if things get tough, they're going to go back. Like the Irishman I heard about called his friend in, and he said, Now, you and I have been fighting for half a lifetime, but I'm going to die. I'm dying. And he said, I'd like you to forgive me. I don't see, I don't want to die with anything on my conscience. He said, Here we are together now. We've lived farm by farm, and we've fought, and we've acted like enemies, but I want to get over that. Now I'm an old man, and I'm going, and I'd like to have you forgive me. And his neighbor wiped a tear out of his eyes and said, Sure, Pat, I'll forgive you. He said, I'll forgive you. And so they shook hands, and the neighbor started to the door, and Pat said, Now, just one minute. He said, If I get well, all this is off. And this is exactly where we stand, my brother and sister. It sounds funny, but it's tragically funny. It is tragically so. We always want to keep our fingers crossed. We get on our knees and say, O God, take all of me. But not quite. O God, make me a holy man, but not altogether so. O God, take everything I have, but not quite everything I have. And so we are putting this proviso in. Lord, not quite. This is off if I get in a tight spot. You see, we appear to have it wrong. We think that because we've been redeemed, we've been rescued. No, we're kept by the power of God through faith under salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. That's sure enough. But we've not yet been rescued. The battle is still on, the fight is still here, the enemy is still around us. We're still grasshoppers in the wilderness, we're still sheep in the desert, we are still children wandering through the earth, we are still good people in a bad world, we are still in a world that will crush us and destroy us if it can. And we want to use the cross to save us from the cross. This is one of the most ominous things I see in modern Christianity, that we want to use the cross to save us from the cross. We want to be saved by the cross from the cross. But you can't use the cross to save you from the cross. That is, Jesus our Lord dying on the cross and rising again will save you. But that same cross has to do something in you and to you and for you. We would have it, you know, that if we believe in Christ and join a pleasant fellowship and form regular religious habits and quit the dirtiest kind of iniquity and go to banquets and sing choruses and go to summer conventions. I do myself, you know, so I'm not against summer conventions. And adding the whole thing up, we're having a pretty nice time of it. Well, that doesn't sound to me like Paul, and it doesn't sound like the prophets, and it doesn't sound like John, and it doesn't sound like Noah, and it doesn't sound like Luther, and it doesn't sound like Knox, and it doesn't sound like any of them. Because they didn't look at it like that. They didn't say, I'm going to believe in Christ and join a pleasant fellowship and form regular religious habits, and then from here on, everything is going to be wonderful. Thereafter, I'm going to take it relatively easy and work for Christ, but be reasonable about it. I've listened to people tell me to relax and tell me to take it easy and tell me I ought to take a month off. You know, in my work with the Alliance, I could have a whole month if I wanted to take it, and with full pay, I could go wherever I wanted to go. If it was winter time or summer time, I could choose to come up here and fish in Canada. If it was winter time, I could choose to go down to the islands. I don't think I'd want to go down there now to let a fellow shave, but as long as he's down there. But I could go where I please, and everything would be lovely if I wanted to do it. But I don't do it. I don't take any of them. I said a fellow reminded me when I was down in New York last week, a man reminded me of what I'd said sometime. You know, your words come back to haunt you. And he said, You said once that no preacher ought to die of old age if hard work would kill him. And I said, Brother, I said it, and I'm going to stay right by it until I die. I don't believe that any man ought to rust out. I believe that if hard work will kill a preacher, that he ought not to want to be an old man. I even think it may be a reflection on a preacher if he gets too old. You know, if he takes life too easily, and he teaches that Christianity is a lovely bandwagon, or as my grandmother used to say, a band box. I don't know what it was, but it was some soft place you got into, like that duffel bag our brother's going to sleep in. And we, I don't know what it is, but I know it's easy. And we take Christianity like that. And we won't eat the roll. That's our trouble. You know, the trouble with having your old church, you listen to the roll, but you won't eat it. You nibble at it, but you won't swallow it. You won't let it get a hold of you. You're going to control it. You read the Bible, and you buy a new Bible every five years, and you read the Bible, but you're not going to let the Bible control you. You won't do that because it's bitter. It'll make your belly bitter. It'll be harsh and sharp and painful, and you won't have it. So you're going to manipulate the Word instead of letting the Word manipulate you. We won't get ourselves in trouble for Christ's sake. That is our difficulty. We just won't get ourselves in trouble for Christ's sake. A man says he loves a woman, he wants to marry her, but he won't get himself in trouble for it. If her father, for instance, says, You come around any more, I'm going to take a bull bat and drive you off. If he is willing to be driven off with a bull bat for her sake, I would say it's true love. But if he says, I love you truly, and then stays out of baseball bat reach and out of gunshot, and will not put himself in trouble for her, I doubt very much whether she's any more to him than a passing interest. For human nature is such that whatever is the greatest and most for us is what we'll put ourselves in trouble for. Now let me say to you mothers, you have your little children around you, your little babe, your half-grown little fellow with his bumpy knees and long legs and ears that won't stay in. He's still your baby, and yet he doesn't like to hear it. Well, you know, you're committed to him. You wouldn't hesitate to die for him at all. You're committed to him. If the doctor said to you, You've got to give him blood. You've got to give him not a pint, but a quart of your blood. You'd say, Well, I report. Where do you want me to go to? You wouldn't hesitate if you knew it, because you're committed. You're totally committed to that which you love the most. There are people that would die for others. Paul said that. Paul said in Romans 5 that some people would even dare to die for others. A few people would. It has been known to me of cases, a few cases anywhere, where some people simply died for somebody else. They loved them so much. I know. I know that I have people. I have loved ones and our children as they grew up. I know that God wouldn't have had to ask me twice. I'd have given my life for them, and it would have been all heroic on my part, and it's not anything heroic on the part of the mother. She loves that child a little more than she loves herself. But isn't it strange when we come to Christianity, we won't commit ourselves like that? We want to find a way out, a way back. We want to find a dodge, a parenthesis, somewhere we can duck into, to save going through the whole sense. We want some way to get around this total committal. I want to ask, are there any who have written the book? I know we nibble at the book. We teach the book here in Sunday school. I know that. And I teach the book on Sunday here, and teaches the book downstairs on Wednesdays. And I know all that. But have we swallowed the book? Have we chewed it down into our system until it permeates every part, until we're totally committed? Now, I wouldn't judge anybody because I couldn't be a judge. I don't know. I don't like to be judged by men. They may not know my circumstances. And therefore, I don't want to judge others. And our Lord tells us we are not to judge. So I would not stand to judge any individual. But I wonder how many of us have so eaten the book that our economic interests are jeopardized. We are jeopardizing our economic interests. I believe, and I would not hesitate to say this, all over the North American continent, from the Key West to the farthest north in Canada, and from coast to coast, I believe that there are evangelical Christians who believe all right, and they nibble the word, but they're not committed to a point where their economic interests are going to be jeopardized. They're going to look after their economic interests first. And they have somehow or other managed to compromise themselves before God. They have made their conscience amenable to them. They have tamed their conscience, as you might tame a house cat. And it lies down and purrs at their feet, and they have no trouble at all, because they have compromised between serving God and their economic interests. And while that doesn't mean they don't give their tenth, that doesn't mean that, but it just means that they're not going to jeopardize themselves. They're not going to put themselves in a place where they say, maybe I'll lose everything. No, they'll say, I don't believe God wants that. Then they'll begin to argue with themselves. And they will say, now listen, if you jeopardize, you don't have anything, and if you don't have anything, you can't give to missionaries, can you? And the compromise is made, and the book is spit out. It isn't swallowed, it's just chewed. And it's very sweet while you're chewing it, provided you don't swallow it. It's very sweet in your mouth, and it doesn't get down into your system. I wonder how many there are among the evangelicals everywhere. I go among Christian businessmen an awful lot, and I have Christian businessmen listening to me now. I preach for the Christian Businessmen International and other Christian businessmen groups, and I have never known exactly, but I wonder how many of them would put themselves on the spot where they would swallow the book down into their system, where their economic interest would go out and blow up in their face, for Christ's sake. I don't think there would be very many. The fact is, the philosophy of a good many of my dear friends in the money is that the Lord put them there, and therefore everything they have, the Lord gave them, and because he gave it to them, that's it. But I'll tell you, I'm not sure that's New Testament Christianity, brothers and sisters, I'm not sure of it. You pull up in big cars and have expensive dinners and all sit around and testify about how the Lord helped them to buy that big nine-roomed house, the same as you could have the five-roomed one. All right, maybe so, maybe so. But it seems to me that I remember a certain person saying, Oh, man who made me a judge and a divider over you. It seems to me that I remember a certain one, and he's nobody else but Jesus, who refused to have anything to do with the real estate deals of some people who wanted to follow him. He said, Let the dead bury their dead and come and follow me. Well, that's that. Now I wonder if we've eaten the book, have we swallowed the book? Then I wonder, and I don't judge again, I'm only asking questions and trusting the Holy Spirit to make the application. I wonder, are there any, and if so, how many, and where are they that would allow their total committal to Christ to jeopardize their blood tithes? Actually, it jeopardized their blood tithes. Separate them from their family if they had to do it, if they had had to be sold. Some parts of the world in our foreign fields, that happens. When somebody is converted, he has to say goodbye to his father and his mother and all of the taboos and all of the tithes of the tribe and go away. In some sections, if a Jew is converted to Christ and really believes on Christ and owns him as his Messiah, they have a funeral for him and count him dead and reckon him dead and never mention his name again, never communicate with him. They count him dead. He turns from the mother that gave him birth and the father whose gnarled hands worked to bring him up and says goodbye to them and walks out of the house, never to be known by them again. That's total committal, my brother. But we evangelical Christians of these days, we're not going to go so far as all that. We consider it to be a bit fanatical and quite ridiculous. We are going to believe on Christ and join a pleasant fellowship and form some good religious habits and then take things relatively easy. We're not going to jeopardize blood tithes. A man says, I'd give myself to Jesus Christ, but I can't. My wife, I couldn't even break up our home. I would give myself to Christ, but my husband was a brute and he wouldn't allow it. I'd give myself to Jesus Christ, but I'd have to leave my home if I did. They didn't eat, they didn't swallow the book, they just nibbled at it. Then I think about friendships. Friendships are beautiful things. Two men each wrote an essay on friendship. One was Henry David Thoreau and the other was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Somebody pointed to the fact that Emerson's concept of friendship was, your friend was somebody you could do something for. And Thoreau's concept of friendship was, your friend was somebody who could do something for you. So that's quite a different way of looking at friendship. The friendships are very beautiful. I've made friendships all over this world and they're to me very wonderful. I don't hesitate to say that they're closer than tithes of blood if those people of my blood are not Christian. I've made Christian friends all over the world that are to me so close. I like them and love them so much that they're nearer to me than some of my own blood relatives who are not Christian. I don't hesitate to say that. I believe that's part of the New Testament pattern. Then I wonder if there are any who would really give up their comforts for Christ's sake, and any who would commit themselves to a point where they jeopardize their health for Christ's sake. Most of us don't want to jeopardize our health. The world will jeopardize its health. A man will drink himself drunk and line the gutter. He will overeat until he's full of cholesterol and all the rest. But if it comes to religion, he says, No, you don't mean I'm to be a fanatic, do you? A fanatic is somebody that takes Jesus Christ seriously. That's some concept of a fanatic, somebody that believes what Jesus Christ said and follows him and follows him wherever he goes. Jesus Christ took his relation to God seriously. When they came to him and said, You know what's going to happen to you? They'll kill you if you don't look out. That old man Herod is looking for you now. He said, Go tell Herod, that old fox, that I'll be around a while yet. Tell him I'll still be here. He literally put not only his health but his life in jeopardy and finally gave himself to die just for the unjust that he might lead us to God. Eat the book, John. Eat the book, Jeremiah. Eat the book, Paul. Eat the book, Ezekiel. Eat the book, and when you've eaten it, swallow it down until it gets into your system, until it begins to permeate every part of you. When our oldest boy, Loa, came back from Africa after serving in the Second World War, he was all yellow. When he went over, he wasn't yellow, and I didn't think he had turned oriental. There he was yellow when he appeared. He was tan, but under the tan it was yellow. We asked why. Well, he had malaria. They had given him something and it had got into every part of his system and turned him yellow. He got over it, of course, and he turned back to his regular color again. But it had permeated him, every part of him, so that his pigmentation had changed. I believe that the people of God ought to be people who have chewed the book and swallowed the book and digested the book and absorbed the book until it colors them and gives them the right complexion, until you can't touch them anywhere but you touch the book. I don't know how many are like that. If we're like that, even our lives are in danger and our health is in danger. Oh, Reverend, don't work too hard now, don't work too hard, Reverend. I'd rather, I can't die young now, excuse me, that's hopeless, but I'd rather have died young for Christ's sake than to get old taking care of myself. An old guy coddled in himself, getting his three meals a day, stretched out in comfort while the world perishes, reading the Alliance Witness, streams in the desert, lazy old tramp with a degree or two. My brother and sister, God's people are called to be heroic. They're called not to loaf through, but to work through. But we nurse on the sweet book, what a dear book it is, what a sweet book. We run and get another translation of the sweet book in order to get a little bit more sweetness, a little more flavor, but we're not going to let it change us very much. You know what a revival is in a church? A revival in a church is when a good percentage of the people decide to swallow the book and let it have its effect on their lives. When a good percentage, not all of them ever, but a good percentage of them in some solemn hour before God decide they're going to swallow that book down and let them chew it up and get it down into their system and let it get to where it can't be any antidote for it. It's going to have its work, it's going to have its effect upon them. It's going to be second nature to them and a mastering impulse to them. And when God sees people are like that, God pours the Holy Ghost out. I have no doubt that God would pour the Holy Spirit out upon his people. I don't know whether he'll ever do it to us in the Alliance or not. I don't know whether he'll ever do it to Avenue Road or not, because you have too much life. You know too much. Today, Satan has outfoxed us. He's found a totally dedicated people. He's found a people who are sons of evil and groups of the devil and betrayed by sin, but they're serious and committed unto death. They are the Communists. In the committal that we should give to Jesus Christ, evil men are given to evil doctrines, and they're conquering the world for God's people alone. I think it is a tragedy beyond description. I think it is a cosmic tragedy worthy of the pen of a Shakespeare. When Communism can take over a country and we Christians flee like a bird to our mountain and run for our lives and call it an iron curtain, I think it is a tragic, awful thing. Maybe it's necessary sometimes. Maybe they couldn't live there. Maybe they're driven out and compelled to leave as they were in the 11th of Hebrews and hide. But I think it's still a terrible thing that we Christians, with all of our faith in God and in Christ and in the blood and in the Holy Ghost and in the power of God through the Holy Ghost, that we can't stand up to the Communism, but we've got to retreat everywhere. Walk backward and walk backward and walk backward until one of these days the Church of Christ will walk off the edge of the earth, unless God can find some people who will swallow the book of total committal. I say I don't know whether it'll ever be with us or not. I wish I could say I believe it. If I did, I'd be lying. I'll have to tell the truth. I got a letter the other day. I wish I'd have brought it. I could have read a few lines out of it here, but I'll try to remember what it said. I got a letter from one of the largest denominations in the world. I'll not name it. One of the largest denominations in the world, and that denomination is a hodgepodge of liberalism and evangelicalism. There are good people in it and modernists in it, Christians in it. There they are, all mixed up together. One of the largest denominations in the United States and in the world. I got a letter from an editor of one of their magazines asking permission to reprint from the Alliance Witness. He said, Mr. Tozer, I'm working with this denomination for the time being, and my own people wouldn't understand me if they knew what I was writing to you. But he said, you know, there are some of us in this denomination that are plunging through and being filled with the Holy Ghost. And you'll find them here and there, and you'll find a preacher occasionally. And God is pouring his Spirit out upon us, and while the great masses don't understand it, some of us are being filled with the Holy Ghost, and we're going forth with new power and new life. It's wonderful, he said, what God is doing for us right here. Now, I wouldn't join that denomination. I wouldn't link myself with any group that has any liberalism in it if I knew it was there. I wouldn't join any group that has modernism in it if I knew it was there. But here is the danger. The danger is that we believe because we are evangelical in our creed, we are therefore pleasing God the Father Almighty. It may be that our evangelical creed is merely nibbling the sweet book and never allowing it to get into our system where it can change our lives and make us different, where it can jeopardize us and put a cross on our back and make us bold soldiers and martyrs if need be. I wonder if God will not pass by those who nibble the sweet book and perhaps go among those who have been starved for half a century and do the wonderful miracle of grace, pour waters upon them that are thirsty and floods on the dry ground. And I wonder if when revival comes, if it comes to Canada and the United States before Jesus comes, I wonder if revival will come to such churches as this and the full gospel and the gospel churches. I hope it will. Sometimes I think that what one dear old Bible teacher said one time to a bunch of Alliance people, he got up to teach the Bible to them, and he said, I don't know whether it would do you any good to preach the Bible to you any more or not, to give you any more food. He said, you're stall-fed cattle, you've got hay on your horns, and you're not obeying and not doing the thing you're told. I am afraid, my dear friends, that those who only know a very little bit but live in the light of what they know are better off in the sight of God than those who know a great deal and won't commit themselves to it. And that's what I'm afraid of. Now, I don't charge anybody. I'm afraid for my own heart, and I'm worried for myself, not about my salvation, not about my justification, not about my eternal life, but whether I'm a man committed so completely that if my income was all suddenly taken, I'd thank God and go ahead anyhow. If my friends were all suddenly to desert me, I'd look up and thank God and go ahead anyhow. If I felt my health suddenly dissolving away from me, I'd look up and thank God and go ahead anyhow. I hope I am. And I'm not claiming much for myself. But, dear men and women, we need a revival. We need a spiritual reformation that will change everything. We need to chew a book and swallow it so we can't regurgitate it, so there's no place to hide, no way to compromise, no bridge to go back over, no excuse to offer, no compromise to make, no way to get out of it. It'll make you bitter, bitter in a world that hates God, bitter in a world that crucified Jesus and never repented of it, bitter in a world that'll make untold fortunes on his birthday but wouldn't follow him from here to the corner, great stores that'll get rich in the next two weeks celebrating a birthday of a man they wouldn't follow from here to the corner. That's the kind of world we live in. The Lord has called a people, a people, a people, to be a spirit-filled people, a godly people, a committed people, a worshiping people, a people for his own possession, a peculiar people. Do you want to go that way? Amen. This concludes the series on the book of Revelation. The book was never completed beyond this point. Due to the length of this sermon, the original tape does not contain the last five minutes of this message.