A.W. Tozer, Bible studies and sermons

[Shammu]

The Father's Gift
By A.W. Tozer

      In the ''sixth'' chapter of John our Lord makes some statements which gospel Christians seem afraid to talk about. The average one of us manages to live with them by the simple trick of ignoring them. They are such as these: 1. Only they come to Christ who have been given to Him by the Father (John 6:37). 2. No one can come of himself; he must first be drawn by the Father (John 6:44). 3. The ability to come to Christ is a gift of the Father (John 6:65). 4. Everyone given to the Son by the Father will come to Him (John 6:37)

      It is not surprising that upon hearing these words many of our Lord's disciples went back and walked no more with Him. Such teaching cannot but be deeply disturbing to the natural mind. It takes from sinful men much of the power of self-determination upon which they had prided themselves so inordinately. It cuts the ground out from under their self-help and throws them back upon the sovereign good pleasure of God, and that is precisely where they do not want to be. They are willing to be saved by grace, but to preserve their self-esteem they must hold that the desire to be saved originated with them; this desire is their contribution to the whole thing, their offering of the fruit of the ground, and it keeps salvation in their hands where in truth it is not and can never be.

      Admitting the difficulties this creates for us, and acknowledging that it runs contrary to the assumptions of popular Christianity, it is yet impossible to deny that there are certain persons who, though still unconverted, are nevertheless different from the crowd, marked out of God, stricken with an interior wound and susceptible to the call of Christ to a degree others are not.

35695

[nChrist]

THE END OF THE AGE
By A.W. Tozer

      Everywhere around us we are experiencing a great new wave of humanity's interest in spiritism and devil worship. I must take this as one of the signs that God's age of grace and mercy is approaching the end point. It tells us that the time may be near when God proclaims: "I have seen enough of mankind's sin and rebellion. It is time for the trumpets of judgment to sound!" If we are willing to add the appeals from the book of Revelation to the weight of the other Scriptures, we discover God saying to us that the earth on which we live is not self-explanatory and certainly not self-sufficient. Although the earth on which we spin is largely populated by a rebel race, it had a divine origin. Now God is about to enforce His claim upon it and judge those who are usurpers. He is saying that there is another and better world, another kingdom, that is always keeping an eye on the world we inhabit!

AMEN! - LORD, we anxiously await being CAUGHT UP to meet you in the CLOUDS!

[Shammu]

The Feasibility of Change
By A.W. Tozer

      . . . people in ruts . . . discover that the passing of time tends to dull their religious feelings, and the signal that used to be quite clear is fading out. Then they worry a little and say, "The signal is gone. I'll have to do something." Suddenly it comes on again and they hear it a little and say, "Oh, it's not so bad after all." They are just in a favorable pocket--perhaps some new preacher has come to town. They think they are hearing the voice again, and they are, a little bit. But it is not long until they are out of range and cannot hear it any more. Time has increased their indifference to spiritual things and dulled their religious feelings, continually making them harder to change. Change is one of the ingredients of Christianity. If people could not change, the gospel would be absolutely meaningless. If the Lord would say, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ; repent and believe," and a person could not repent or believe, the gospel would be meaningless. The fact that people can change is the only hope they have. If they could not change, there would be no reason to preach to them that they must change. And yet we are sent to preach that people should change, meaning they should repent. They should turn from darkness to light. They should turn from idols to God. They should change. This is absolutely necessary, a vital ingredient in the spiritual life.

[Shammu]

The Foolish Spending of Life
By A.W. Tozer

      The Greek philosopher Pythagoras is said to have divided men into three classes: 1. Seekers after knowledge. 2. Seekers after honor. 3. Seekers after gain. Thus far Pythagoras. But I wonder why he failed to notice two other classes: those who are not seekers after anything and those who are seekers after God. These no doubt existed in Pythagoras as they do in ours and it is odd that he did not recognize them. Let us add them to the list. 4. Seekers after nothing. These are the human vegetables who live by their glands and their instincts. I refer not to those unfortunate persons who by birth or by accident have been deprived of their normal faculties. There but by the grace of God go I. I do refer to the millions of normal persons who have allowed their magnificent intellectual equipment to wither away from lack of exercise. These seekers after nothing have certain large ear-marks. They may be known by the company they keep. Their reading matter is the sports page and the comic section; their art is limited to magazine covers and the illustrated trivialities of the weekly picture magazines; their music is whatever is popular and handy and loud. After work they sit and watch television or just drive around waiting for-what? It is an omen and a portent that this describes the bulk of our population in the United States, and that they constitute what we proudly call the electorate; that is, they decide the direction our country shall go, morally, politically and religiously. O tempora! O mores!

[Shammu]

The Four Horsemen of the Gloomy Decades
By A.W. Tozer

      Immediately following the first World War, a wave of pessimism swept over the literate world.
      What the cause was I shall not go into here but, whatever it was, the intellectual mood of the ?20s and ?30s was thoroughly despondent. Materialism, pessimism, cynicism and skepticism were the four horsemen of those gloomy decades and they rode forth conquering and to conquer.

      The scientists were materialistic, the philosophers skeptical, the novelists and biographers cynical and almost everyone pessimistic. Even the interpreters of prophecy were apprehensive, for they saw in the capture of Jerusalem by the British and the rise of the Roman Empire under Mussolini evidence of the nearness of the tribulation days, the coming of Antichrist and the collapse of civilization. About the only religionists on the Protestant side who managed to retain a little optimism were the liberals (?modernists? they were called in those days), and they were cheerful for a wrong reason. Out of the poetic passages of a Bible, in which they no longer believed, they wove delicate daisy chains, which have long since withered, and crocheted pretty religious doilies of which they are not now exactly proud and which they would willingly forget but cannot because their handiwork is still to be found among us--on the seventeen cent bargain table of the second-hand bookstores.

[Shammu]

The From's and To's
By A.W. Tozer

      The evangelical Church today is in the awkward position of being wrong while it is right, and a little preposition makes the difference. One place where we are wrong while we are right is in the relative stress we lay upon the prepositions to and from when they follow the word saved. For a long generation we have been holding the letter of truth while at the same time we have been moving away from it in spirit because we have been preoccupied with what we are saved from rather than what we have been saved to. The right relative importance of the two concepts is set forth by Paul in his first epistle to the Thessalonians: "Ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven" (1 Thess. 1:9-10). The Christian is saved from his past sins. With these he simply has nothing more to do; they are among the things to be forgotten as the night is forgotten at the dawning of the day. He is also saved from the wrath to come. With this also he has nothing to do. It exists, but not for him. Sin and wrath have a cause-and-effect relationship, and because for the Christian sin is canceled wrath is canceled also. The from's of the Christian life concern negatives, and to be engrossed in them is to live in a state of negation. Yet that is where many earnest believers live most of the time.

[Shammu]

The Gift of Prophetic Insight
By A.W. Tozer

      Excerpted from Of God and Men
      A prophet is one who knows his times and what God is trying to say to the people of his times.

      What God says to His church at any given period depends altogether upon her moral and spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need of the hour. Religious leaders who continue mechanically to expound the Scriptures without regard to the current religious situation are no better than the scribes and lawyers of Jesus' day who faithfully parroted the Law without the remotest notion of what was going on around them spiritually. They fed the same diet to all and seemed wholly unaware that there was such a thing as meat in due season. The prophets never made that mistake nor wasted their efforts in that manner. They invariably spoke to the condition of the people of their times.

      Today we need prophetic preachers; not preachers of prophecy merely, but preachers with a gift of prophecy. The word of wisdom is missing. We need the gift of discernment again in our pulpits. It is not ability to predict that we need, but the anointed eye, the power of spiritual penetration and interpretation, the ability to appraise the religious scene as viewed from God's position, and to tell us what is actually going on.

      There has probably never been another time in the history of the world when so many people knew so much about religious happenings as they do today. The newspapers are eager to print religious news; the secular news magazines devote several pages of each issue to the doings of the church and the synagogue; a number of press associations gather church news and make it available to the religious journals at a small cost. Even the hiring of professional publicity men to plug one or another preacher or religious movement is no longer uncommon; the mails are stuffed with circulars and "releases," while radio and television join to tell the listening public what religious people are doing throughout the world.

      Greater publicity for religion may be well and I have no fault to find with it. Surely religion should be the most newsworthy thing on earth, and there may be some small encouragement in the thought that vast numbers of persons want to read about it. What disturbs me is that amidst all the religious hubbub hardly a voice is raised to tell us what God thinks about the whole thing.

      Where is the man who can see through the ticker tape and confetti to discover which way the parade is headed, why it started in the first place and, particularly, who is riding up front in the seat of honor?

      Not the fact that the churches are unusually active these days, not what religious people are doing, should engage our attention, but why these things are so. The big question is Why? And no one seems to have an answer for it. Not only is there no answer, but scarcely is there anyone to ask the question. It just never occurs to us that such a question remains to be asked. Christian people continue to gossip religious shoptalk with scarcely as much as a puzzled look. The soundness of current Christianity is assumed by the religious masses as was the soundness of Judaism when Christ appeared. People know they are seeing certain activity, but just what it means they do not know, nor have they the faintest idea of where God is or what relation He has toward the whole thing.

      What is needed desperately today is prophetic insight. Scholars can interpret the past; it takes prophets to interpret the present. Learning will enable a man to pass judgment on our yesterdays, but it requires a gift of clear seeing to pass sentence on our own day. One hundred years from now historians will know what was taking place religiously in this year of our Lord; but that will be too late for us. We should know right now.

      If Christianity is to receive a rejuvenation it must be by other means than any now being used. If the church in the second half of this century is to recover from the injuries she suffered in the first half, there must appear a new type of preacher. The proper, ruler-of-the-synagogue type will never do. Neither will the priestly type of man who carries out his duties, takes his pay and asks no questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type who knows how to make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these have been tried and found wanting.

      Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has heard a voice from the Throne. When he comes (and I pray God there will be not one but many) he will stand in flat contradiction to everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear. He will contradict, denounce and protest in the name of God and will earn the hatred and opposition of a large segment of Christendom. Such a man is likely to be lean, rugged, blunt-spoken and a little bit angry with the world. He will love Christ and the souls of men to the point of willingness to die for the glory of the one and the salvation of the other. But he will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath.

      We need to have the gifts of the Spirit restored again to the church, and it is my belief that the one gift we need most now is the gift of prophecy.

[Shammu]

THE GODHEAD-FOREVER ONE
By A.W. Tozer

      When Christ Jesus died on that unholy, fly-infested cross for mankind, He never divided the Godhead! We are assured from the earliest church fathers that the Father in heaven, His eternal Son, and the Holy Ghost are forever One-inseparable, indivisible-and can never be anything else. Not all of Nero's swords could ever cut down through the substance of the Godhead to cut off the Father from the Son. It was Mary's son who cried out, "Why hast Thou forsaken me?" It was the human body which God had given Him. It was the sacrifice that cried-the lamb about to die! The Son of Man knew himself forsaken. God dumped that vast, filthy, slimy mass of human sin on the soul of the Savior-and then backed away. Believe it that the ancient and timeless Deity was never separated. He was still in the bosom of the Father when He cried, "Into Thy hands I commend my spirit!" Little wonder that we are amazed and marvel every day at the wonder of the ancient theology of the Christian church!

[Shammu]

The Good Life that Turns Out to be Not So Good
By A.W. Tozer

      Almost everywhere it is assumed that people are seeking truth, that society is literally swarming with dedicated truth seekers. The fact is that men have never in any numbers sought after truth. If we may judge peoples interests by their deeds, then of the young men and women who stream forth from our halls of learning each year the vast majority have no more than a passing and academic interest in truth. They go to college not to satisfy a yearning to discover truth, but to improve their social standing and increase their earning power. These motives are not necessarily to be despised; but they should be known for what they are, and not hidden beneath a pink cloud of specious idealism. What are people actually seeking? Of course they seek satisfaction for the basic urges such as hunger, sex and social companionship; but beyond these what? Certainly for nothing as high and noble as truth. Ask the average American what he wants from life and if he is candid he will tell you he wants success in his chosen field; and he wants success both for the prestige it brings him and for the financial security it affords. And why does he want financial security? To guarantee him against the loss of comforts, luxuries and pleasures, which he believes are rightfully his as a part of his American heritage. The ominous thing about all this is that everything he wants can be bought with money. It would be hard to think of an indictment more terrible than that.

[Shammu]

THE GOSPEL WARNING
By A.W. Tozer

      We who rejoice in the blessings that have come to us through the Savior, need to bear in mind that the gospel is not good news only! The message of the Cross is good news indeed for the penitent, but to those who obey not the gospel it carries an overtone of warning. The Spirit's ministry to the impenitent world is to tell of sin and righteousness and judgment. For sinners who want to cease being willful sinners and become obedient children of God, the gospel message is one of unqualified peace, but it is by its very nature also an arbiter of the future destinies of man. Actually, the message of the gospel may be received in either of two ways: in word only without power, or in word with power. The truth received in power shifts the bases of life from Adam to Christ-a new and different Spirit enters the personality and makes the believing man new in every department of his being!

[Shammu]

The Great Deceiver
By A.W. Tozer

       The Devil is a master strategist. He varies his attacks as skillfully as an experienced general and always has one more trick to use against the one who imagines he is well experienced in the holy war. By two radically opposite things the devil seeks to destroy us-by our sins and by our virtues. First, he tempts us to sin. This might be called his conventional device. It worked against Adam and Eve and still works after the passing of the centuries. By means of it millions each year are, as Paul said, drowned in destruction and perdition. One would think the human race would learn to resist the blandishments of its sworn enemy, and it probably would except that there is an enemy within the gate-the fallen heart is secretly on the side of the devil. It is, however, Satans wiliest stratagem to use our virtues against us, and this he often does with astonishing success. By means of temptation to sin he strikes at our personal lives; by working through our virtues he gets at the whole community of believers and unfits it for its own defense. A parallel to Satans technique may be seen in the activities of certain subversive political groups who use the Constitution of the United States as a shield while they work to destroy that Constitution. By unctuous pleading for the right of free speech they seek to destroy all freedom of speech. By talking piously about government by law they push our country toward the place where there will be government by dictatorship and all laws will mean what a ruling clique of base, cynical men want them to mean. So diabolical is this method that one can only conclude that those who use it learned it from their father the devil, whose they are and whom they serve.

[Shammu]

The Great Illuminator
By A.W. Tozer

      The New Testament draws a sharp line between the natural mind and the mind that has been touched by divine fire. When Peter made his good confession, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matt. 16:16), our Lord replied, "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven" (16:17). And Paul expresses much the same thing when he says, "No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost" (1 Cor. 12:3). The sum of what I am saying is that there is an illumination, divinely bestowed, without which theological truth is information and nothing more. While this illumination is never given apart from theology, it is entirely possible to have theology without the illumination. This results in what has been called "dead orthodoxy," and while there may be some who deny that it is possible to be both orthodox and dead at the same time I am afraid experience proves that it is. Revivals, as they have appeared at various times among the churches of the past, have been essentially a quickening of the spiritual life of persons already orthodox. The revivalist, as long as he exercised his ministry as a revivalist, did not try to teach doctrine. His one object was to bring about a quickening of the churches which while orthodox in creed were devoid of spiritual life. When he went beyond this he was something else than a revivalist. Revival can come only to those who know truth. When the inner meaning of familiar doctrines suddenly flashes in upon the heart of a Christian the revival for him has already begun. It may go on to be much more than this but it can never be less.

[Shammu]

THE GREAT PHYSICIAN
By A.W. Tozer

      If you are a discouraged and defeated Christian believer, you may have accepted the rationalization that your condition is "normal for all Christians." You may now be content with the position that the progressive, victorious Christian life may be suitable for a few Christian - but not for you! You have been to Bible conferences; you have been to the altar-but the blessings are for someone else. Now, that attitude on the part of Christian believers is neither modesty nor meekness. It is a chronic discouragement resulting from unbelief. It is rather like those who have been sick for so long that they no longer believe they can get well. Jesus is still saying, as He said to the man lying by the gate at the Jerusalem pool, "Do you want to be made whole?" Jesus made him whole-because of his desire! His need was great, but he had never lapsed into that state of chronic discouragement.

[Shammu]

THE HAPPY MORN
By A.W. Tozer

      When we sing, "The Light of the world is Jesus," there should be a glow on our faces that would make the world believe indeed that we really mean it! The Incarnation meant something vast and beautiful for John Milton-and he celebrated the coming of Jesus into the world with one of the most beautiful and moving expressions ever written by a man: This is the month, and this the happy morn, Wherein the Son of Heaven's eternal King, Of wedded maid, and Virgin mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring. That glorious form, that Light insufferable, And that far-beaming blaze of majesty, He laid aside, and here with us to be, Forsook the courts of everlasting Day, And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay. Oh! run; prevent them with thy humble ode, And lay it lowly at His blessed feet, Have thou the honor first thy Lord to greet And join thy voices with the Angel quire, From out His secret altar touched with hallowed fire!

[Shammu]

The Heavy Responsibility of Sheep-Feeding
By A.W. Tozer

      God's Word says that a faithful and wise steward gives the people their meat in due season. Some people preach the Bible all right, and you cannot deny that. But they go to the Bible as you would to a medical book to find out what you should prescribe. But instead of prescribing to suit each patient, they just prescribe for everybody at one time. When a preacher is not preaching to a given situation, it is like givng medicine to people indiscriminately. That approach is not particularly fitted for teaching the Word of God. Even though it may be faithful and true, without any regard to the current situation, it is like teaching the multiplication table. The New Testament epistles were written to specific conditions, as were the seven letters of Revelation. Particular situations developed, and then the man of God wrote to these particular people. The seven letters found in Revelation were to particular churches, having regard to the needs of those churches. It was the same with the prophets of the Old Testament. No prophet went into an ivory tower, settled down to relax, read deeply awhile, took out a pen and said, "Now, I'm going to write a book of prophecy." They did not do it that way. They wrote to the need, to the situation. They aimed their arrows at a target. When God is speaking to a particular situation the power of the Holy Spirit is present and active. When David sinned, Nathan the prophet came to him and told a little parable. When David gave his judgment of what to do with the sinful man, Nathan pointed his finger at the king and said, "You are the man" (2 Samuel 12:7a). Immediately David threw off his crown and his robe, dropped his scepter, fell on his knees and repented before God. That was a particular situation. When we are talking to a specific situation the sheep are separated from the goats, the veil is removed and the judgment begins.