Dr. A.
W.
Tozer.
Now, in the Book of Psalms, a psalm
of degrees of David.
I have referred to this psalm in times
past here, and have used it to clinch
a point or two, but this morning I
want to talk about it at length.
Behold how good and how pleasant it is
for brethren to dwell together in unity.
It is like the precious ointment upon the
head that ran down upon the beard, even
Aaron's beard, that went down to the skirts
of his garments, as the dew of Hermon
and as the dew that descended upon the
mountains of Zion.
For there the Lord commanded the blessing, even
life forevermore.
Here, painted by the pen of inspiration, held
by the man David, is one of the
most charming pictures in the entire Bible.
It is a picture of brethren, and by
brethren is not meant men only, but men
and women, and young people, of united minds,
met together in unity.
And then, because they were thus met together,
and because there was unity, we read about
oil and dew and life and blessing.
Now, the coming together in unity was man's
part.
The pouring out of oil and dew and
blessing and life was man's part.
So I want to talk about the necessity
for a united mind among people desiring a
spiritual visitation.
This text shows, as the rest of the
Bible will confirm, that unity of mind on
the part of the people of God precedes
the blessing.
Now, I have heard God's children pray.
I've prayed myself a lot of prayers that
never should have been prayed, but the Lord
edits your prayers, as you know, and makes
them acceptable.
The Holy Ghost, the scripture says, knows what
is the mind of God, or God knows
the mind of the Spirit, and he presents
our prayers rightly.
So what God hears is an edited prayer,
a prayer that he understands because he knows
we do not.
And I have prayed lots of prayers that
took a lot of editing to make them
acceptable, and I'm sure that you have.
And one prayer that we have made is,
O Lord, send the Holy Spirit that we
may become a united people.
Well, that is all right, except that it
is precisely backwards.
The Holy Ghost comes because we are a
united people.
He does not come to make us a
united people.
We could remember that.
Lord, come and bless us and unite us
and help us to get united in order
that the blessing might flow and there might
be an outpouring of oil and you and
life.
That is the way we should pray.
If you will look at the book of
Acts, you will find in the 2nd chapter
that when the day of Pentecost was fully
come, they were all with one accord in
one place.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven
as of a rushing mighty wind, and it
filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like
as of fire, and it sat upon each
of them, and they were all filled with
the Holy Ghost.
And then a few months later they prayed
again, and when they had prayed the place
was shaken.
This is in the 4th chapter, where they
were assembled together, and they were all filled
with the Holy Ghost.
And they spake the word of God with
boldness, and the multitude of them that believed
were of one heart and of one soul.
Neither said any of them that aught of
the things which he possessed was his own,
but they had all things common.
Now the assumption is they had been like
that right along.
They didn't get that way because the place
was shaken where they were assembled.
The place was shaken where they were assembled,
and they were all filled because they had
been that way.
And it doesn't say the multitude of them
became of one heart, it said the multitude
of them that believed were of one heart.
And with great power gave the apostles witness
of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and
great grace was upon them all.
Now this teaches us that unity is necessary
to the outpouring of the Spirit of God.
I wonder if I might go to the
technical world for a bit of an illustration.
If you have 120 volts of electricity coming
up to your house, but you have broken
wiring inside of your house, or a fuse
blown, which of course is broken wiring, and
you do not get power, you turn the
switch but nothing lights, you turn the switch
but the stove doesn't warm, you turn the
switch but your iron doesn't come on, you
turn the switch but no radio comes on.
Why?
Because you have a broken wiring.
You have the power ready to leap in
and do its work with all the appliances
that you have in your home.
But where there is broken wiring, either because
a fuse is burned which is put there
for safety's sake, or because something else has
come loose or broken, you have no power.
Now unity is necessary among the children of
God if we are going to know the
flow of power.
In the book of Philippians, the man Paul
says, If there be therefore any consolation in
Christ, if any comfort of love, if any
fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and
mercies, fulfill ye my joy that ye be
like-minded, having the same love, being of
one accord, of one mind.
Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory,
but in lowliness of mind let each esteem
other better than themselves.
And look not every man on his own
things, that is he his own advantage, but
every man also on the things of others.
Now, revivals have been mainly this.
Whether they have been big revivals or small,
they have been mainly the achieving of a
oneness of mind among a number of Christians.
There is much isolated blessing these days, much
isolated blessing, that falls short of this.
Many ministries, many meetings fall short of this.
Revival, you see, is a persistence of the
spiritual mood.
It is a persistence of it.
We all have times of spiritual moods, and
there are occasional times in churches when there
is a sudden spiritual mood that comes among
the people of God.
But a revival is a persistence of that
spiritual mood among the people, and it carries
over from day to day and from week
to week.
This persistence enables the Holy Ghost to do
what he couldn't do if it were broken.
The average church is like this.
We come on Sunday and we get a
little blessing, and we lose it until Wednesday.
And then we come and get another little
blessing, and we get back up on a
peak, and then we lose it until Sunday,
and then we get back on another peak.
It's a continual going up to the peak
and going down into the valley and going
back to the peak again.
It's better to do it that way than
not to do it at all, but it's
a whole lot better to stay on a
high level than to come down in the
middle of the week and have to come
to a prayer meeting to get back up.
Now, a prayer meeting is necessary, and you
know that I am urging you to come
to the prayer meeting Wednesday night.
But we shouldn't ought to have to come
in order to heal up broken wares.
We ought to stay one.
That is, we ought to be persisting.
The mood, the spirituality ought to persist.
Now, I've talked about a oneness of mind,
and I must make clear what I mean
by it in order that you might not
misunderstand me.
I am not referring particularly to identical doctrinal
views.
Probably it would be impossible to achieve them.
You see, a Protestant church is like a
democratic society.
I believe the Church of Christ ought to
be like a democratic society.
There are two kinds of governments now in
the world.
There is the democratic society, which is one
but is free to have a variety of
opinions, and we usually do have a variety
of opinions.
But when the chips are down, we're together.
When the need arises, we're together.
In the United States in 1941, there were
divisions everywhere, divisions among the people.
Everybody was after everybody else, and then the
Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, and they united the
country overnight.
The news of that bombing brought them together,
and Democrat put his arm around Republican, and
the Republican and the Democrat put their arms
around the straddler in the middle of the
road.
They were united until the war was over,
and then they went back to slugging it
out again.
It's the same all over the world.
You and your Canadian Conservatives quarrel with your
Canadian, what do you call them?
I hear it over the radio how they
fight back, and you'd think they were scoundrels
and ought to be in jail, and they
don't mean it at all.
But just let somebody declare war on Canada
and you'd be one in a second.
Everybody from the kid on the corner stopping
traffic to your Prime Minister, everybody would be
united.
I believe that you can have differences of
opinion and yet be united, because differences of
opinion are incidental, but the union and unitedness,
they're fundamental.
You see, there's another kind of society then,
or government in the world, and that is
the totalitarian government, and there you're united because
you have to be.
If you have an opinion, you don't dare
whisper it.
Even if you whisper it, somebody is likely
to turn you into the Gestapo.
So everybody is united, and when they have
an election, everybody votes for Khrushchev, because they'd
rather vote for Khrushchev than to go to
Siberia and dig in the salt mines.
So everybody votes the same way.
They are united, but they are united from
fear and intimidation and brute force.
And so in the Catholic Church everybody is
united.
There is very little place for a difference
of opinion at all, because they tell you
what to believe.
You either believe this or you cannot be
saved.
This is necessary to salvation, that you believe
all this.
When a thing has become a dogma, it
is necessary to salvation, and you either believe
it or else you're out already.
In the Protestant Church it is quite otherwise.
There are certain great basic truths that we
stand for and that we believe are necessary.
I wonder if I could reach out and
pull in a rather grotesque and maybe a
little bit silly but at least illuminating illustration.
What is necessary to our lives and what
must we all have?
We must all have a heart and it
must all beat so many times per minute.
It varies a little bit, but it doesn't
vary much.
And we must all have lungs for the
getting of our blood purified by oxygen.
We must all have lungs.
And we must all have a brain and
a mind.
We must all have a spine and a
nervous system.
We must all have that.
There are certain other organs we must all
have, the tallest, the shortest, the oldest, the
youngest.
We must all have them.
There are certain things you can take away
from men, and they're still men, and they
can still function as men and be men,
but you can take them away.
You can cut off a man's hand, you
can cut off his leg and he can
peg it for the rest of his life.
You can take a lot away from a
man and he's still a man, and he
can still think and he can still talk
and he can still write and he can
still do anything that he could do before.
But there are certain things you can't take
away if you take them away.
He dies.
Cut out his heart and he's dead.
Cut out his lungs and he's gone.
Let his blood leave his body and he's
gone.
Let his kidneys stop functioning and in a
few hours he's gone.
So in the Church of Christ there are
the great organs of truth, the great organs
that must function.
They must be there or you don't have
a church.
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth and of all
things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son
of the Father, begotten of Him before all
ages.
God of God, light of light, very God
of very God, begotten, not made.
I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord
and giver of life, who with the Father
and Son together is worshiped and glorified.
And I believe that Jesus Christ, for us
men and for our salvation, came down from
heaven and was conceived by the Holy Ghost
of the Virgin Mary.
And he suffered and he rose again after
his death from the dead the third day
and ascended to the right hand of God
the Father Almighty.
These are the great organs of truth.
We believe them.
We believe in righteousness.
We believe in the resurrection of the dead.
We believe in the coming of Christ again.
We believe in the blood of the Lamb.
We believe in the redeeming power of that
blood.
We believe in the Lordship of Jesus.
We believe in the Trinity.
We believe in man's sin.
We believe in God's forgiveness.
These are the great organs of truth.
You take them out of the church and
you have not a church, you have only
a religious organization.
That's all.
Put them in the church and let them
function, and you have a church then indeed.
For that reason, the Christian and Missionary Alliance
has always allowed, until recent times, and I've
fought this tooth and nail, and I'm going
to continue to fight until, as old Buddy
Robinson says, until I lose my teeth and
then gum it till I die.
Because I am going to believe and continue
to believe that there's a place in the
fellowship of God's children for people who hold
different views on things that don't matter, just
the same as there is a place for
a redheaded man in a church.
There's a place for a baldheaded man in
a church.
There's a place for a little short man
in a church.
There's a place for a tall, lean man
in a church.
There's a place for a beautiful woman in
a church, and there's a place for the
plain one.
We don't say you've all got to be
redheaded, you can't join this church.
We don't say you've got to all be
named Mary, or you can't join this church.
We don't say everybody has to be named
Jack.
We say there are certain great fundamental truths,
and we unite on them.
Then you can be short or long, tall,
black-haired, redhead, no hair.
You can be whatever God has made you.
So that's Christian democracy at its finest, loving
each other and being one.
I'm going to explain in a few minutes
what I mean by the unity that brings
revival.
I'm telling you now what I don't mean.
I don't mean the unity of fear.
In fundamental circles a generation ago, we had
a hierarchy that was just as powerful and
just as tough as the hierarchy that controls
the Roman Church.
Only, of course, they never had been elected,
they just appointed themselves.
And if you said anything that didn't jab
with the notes of the Schofield Bible, you
were out on your ear, skidding across to
the other curb.
Everybody had to believe exactly the same thing
about everything, including the Second Coming and the
Antichrist and all the rest.
Everybody had to believe exactly what everybody else
believed.
I grew up in that kind of an
atmosphere, and I was one of the first
ones to rebel against it and fight it.
The oneness I'm talking about then is not
the oneness of a totalitarian church, where somebody
up there tells you what to believe down
here, and you all sit there and say,
Yes, Father, Yes, Father, Yes, Father.
No.
If I preach something and you search your
Bible and find it isn't so, I don't
want you to believe it.
I want you to come to me and
say, Brother, I liked your sermon, but you
were off on this.
We have the book here, and that book
tests whether we're right or wrong.
Then I don't mean the oneness of passivity
and compromise.
In order to stay one, some churches compromise,
and there's the oneness of passivity.
Nobody cares much anyway, so they just compromise.
That's the beautiful unity of the dead.
I suppose that there isn't anything that is
any more united than a cemetery.
Everybody out there, no matter whether they are
Democrat, Republicans, or whether they were Tories or
Conservatives, while they live, they all lie there
calmly together, because they're dead.
When you go into a church where the
pastor is careful never to say anything that
can be pinned down, because he's afraid of
hurting somebody who has a good big pen
and a large checkbook.
So he's careful to say nothing at all
and take no position.
And everybody gathers around him.
He's dead and everybody gathers a lot of
dead people around him, and they call that
a church.
Not a church at all.
It's simply an agglomeration of dead men, afraid
to have an opinion.
The beautiful tolerance of the dead.
Now what do I mean?
I have a few minutes to tell you.
That clock is slow, but you don't know
what time it is anyhow, and it doesn't
matter.
I want to tell you how God will
revive this church, and how God will do
it, and the only way he'll do it,
there must be among us a oneness of
determination to glorify the Lord alone.
The Lord won't ask you whether you're Armenian
or Calvinist, but he will ask you, are
you determined to glorify me alone?
Are you determined to glorify me alone?
In order to have this unity, all the
Lord's people are going to have to get
together on this.
We're not going to honor men, although we
will give honor to whom honor is due
in a secondary way, but we're going to
glorify the Lord.
No one will seek honor for himself.
I try to pray very often, maybe not
every week, but I try to pray very
often, O God, bless Toronto today, and if
you must bless somewhere else, not through me,
then bless somewhere else, but bless, Lord.
Glorify thyself.
I don't want God tying his blessing up
to me.
I want God to bless any man that
will meet his conditions anywhere.
If it's to be in Knox Presbyterian Church
or Jarvis Baptist or Lansing or Yonge Street,
wherever it is, I want God to meet
his people wherever they meet his conditions.
But I want to be in on it,
and I want this Church to be in
on it.
So I want God to understand that I'm
not selfishly pleading, Lord bless me and my
people, but I'm wanting God to bless and
honor wherever the people are dedicated to the
glorification of the Triune God, and each glad
to have God use the other if he
wants to do it.
Not any man looking to his own honor,
but every man on the honor of somebody
else.
No man seeking his own advantage, but every
man seeking the advantage of others.
That's first.
United in our determination to glorify the Lord
alone.
Second, united in absorption in the Lord's doings.
Concentration is often ruined by side interests.
This persistence of the spiritual yearning is often
ruined by side interests, and God wants his
people to talk Christ and to think Christ
and to dream Christ and to love his
word and his ways, and to be so
dedicated to it that the conversation normally swings
around to it when they're together.
And I do not believe that God can
continue to bless nor send anything like a
life-giving revival to a church until we
are absorbed in something.
To get anything done, you've got to be
absorbed in it.
Nobody ever did anything when he only did
it halfway.
Men who have done great things have always
had to be men.
To make the electric light and the talking
machine, Edison slept only four or five hours
a night and worked constantly.
And so to compose the great musical scores,
men have sat up all through the night.
They said about Tchaikovsky that he used to
stay awake hours upon hours, and when others
were sleeping, he'd stay on hours upon hours.
My opinion of Tchaikovsky's music is such that
I wonder why he didn't just take a
nap.
But anyway, what I'm saying is that in
order to get it done, he had to
stay awake and do it.
One of the great English composers, Byron, said,
I shut myself in my room and work
as much as 18 hours at a stretch,
never even get out to take a drink
of tea.
And that's something for an Englishman.
So you've got to be interested in something.
And I think of these men, these hockey
men and baseball men and football men, I
just read here in one of the Toronto
papers where they offered Joe DiMaggio $220,000
to just come and be around and come
up to bat occasionally after he'd retired and
refused it.
Just come and be around, they say.
They live, they're dedicated to that thing, completely
sold out to it.
I talked to a young man one time
who convinced me that some people were dedicated
bullfighters.
He said, We are.
They're dedicated to it.
They're dedicated bullfighters.
Now I'd like to know why.
Why?
What in the wide world could ever get
in a man's head that he would dedicate
a life made in God's image with abilities
to do wonders and perform exploits and leave
his name for generations to follow if he
decided to go out and fight a bull?
And we Christians are called upon to be
dedicated.
I read in a little book this morning
a few chapters written by a friend of
mine in Chicago, and he quotes a great
Christian leader who has been around the world
several times and knows conditions around the world,
saying this.
He said, The only religion that I have
found in the world that people don't take
seriously is Christianity.
The Buddhists take themselves seriously, the Mohammedans take
themselves seriously, but the Christians play at it
too much.
We have the one truth that would save
the world, and we're the ones who play,
like children in the marketplace.
We've got to be absorbed in the Lord's
doings.
Third, we've got to be one in determination
to see God's wonders.
Now we can have what we'll have, and
where we have what we'll have.
Remember, my brother and sister, you have just
as much of God as you want, and
this church has just as much blessing as
it wants.
No more.
Say that hunger and thirst after righteousness shall
be filled, so says the mighty word of
God, and it cannot be broken.
Therefore if you thirst, you will be given
water up to your thirst.
If you hunger, you will be fed up
to the point your hunger takes you.
Therefore this church, as a congregation of men
and women and young people, we have as
much of God as we really want.
We've got to be united in determination to
see God do his wonders.
I'd like to see God break out and
break over and do some wonderful things for
his people.
I'm not a divine healing evangelist, but I'd
like to see God lay his hand on
some of our sick and restore them to
health again.
And I'd like to see God do some
things the like of which aren't done in
the average church.
And there's got to be a unity of
prayer for God's outpouring.
Now we've got to have to pray.
Praying is God's method of getting things done
on earth.
God says everything is possible to him that
has faith, and everything is possible to God,
and he unites God and the praying man
in one.
He says God is omnipotent and the praying
man is omnipotent for the time being, because
he's in touch with omnipotence and one that's
in expectation.
I see an awful lot of unbelieving humility,
constant self-reproach, apologetic and timid and afraid.
If we dare not be, let's come boldly
to the throne of grace, that we might
have help and grace, grace and help in
time of need.
So let's come boldly and let's come.
You say, shouldn't we be humble?
Certainly we should be humble, but no man
should be so humble that he doesn't ask.
If we're so humble that we don't ask,
we're playing into the hands of the devil.
We should be humble, but we should dare
to ask.
Ask and seek and knock.
Asking, and the man goes inside the door
and shuts it.
Seeking is trying to find a way to
get into him.
Knocking is banging on his door till he
answers.
Ask and seek and knock.
There must be expectation.
We've got to point up our prayers.
I have said before and repeated that one
of the greatest snares in praying is to
pray for vague things, pray vaguely.
If you shoot at something that isn't pointed,
if you don't shoot at a target, I
used to go out shooting with men up
in Pennsylvania.
I do still when I get out that
way.
You might not believe it, but I can
handle a rifle.
We'd go out and shoot at things.
I didn't like it when they got a
small target because it showed me up.
I liked to shoot something big, maybe an
8mm gun or a .30-30, and the
thing would go boom, and the smoke would
fly, and I'd almost fall over and I
felt really big.
But if I'd been shooting at something, I
was red-faced because I'd missed it.
Occasionally I'd hit, but mostly I didn't.
When we pray just generally and make a
big boom, we say, Oh, he's a praying
man.
What's he praying for?
What's he praying about?
What's he got on his mind?
Has God heard his prayer lately?
He's shooting at a cloud.
How do you know whether he hits it
or not?
He's shooting at the side of a barn.
Maybe he's hit it, maybe that's a knothole
you see there.
No, he didn't do that at all.
If you point your gun at something and
pull the trigger, then go look and face
it and say, No, I didn't hit it,
I'm sorry.
And if I pray for something and God
doesn't give it, it doesn't do God any
honor for me to make myself believe I
have it.
No.
If you want to be filled with the
Holy Ghost and you say, All right, now
I'll take it.
That's what you think.
You ought to be willing to let God
test you and know whether you've answered your
prayer or not.
Well, God expects.
And then oneness to the submission of our
Lord in the midst.
Ah, this fusion of minds into a way
for the Lord.
This making out of many minds a beautiful
mosaic highway for the chariot of God.
This is what we mean, and one in
our resolution to put away forbidden things.
Moral standards are pretty low in modern evangelical
circles, even in the Christian and Missionary Alliance,
I regret to say.
We smile and shrug at things that people
used to be horrified about.
We never have much of a revival until
we have united to put away things that
are forbidden.
Public and private differences and personal sins.
If there are public differences, they must be
publicly made right.
If there are private differences, they can be
privately made right.
But we've got to be one.
Not one, I repeat, as in the cemetery,
because we're afraid to think, but one in
these determinations to glorify the Lord in our
midst.
Well, he says here that because they were
united and dwelling together in pleasant unity, it
was like the precious ointment upon the head
that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron's
beard, went down to the skirts of his
garment.
Old Aaron.
This is the only way I know that
when Aaron was anointed high priest, he was
bald-headed.
If he had had bushy hair, the oil
would have stayed in his hair.
But being bald-headed, it ran down his
head and down over his beard and clear
down to the skirts of his garment.
When God poured the Holy Ghost on Jesus
Christ, he didn't baptize him with the Holy
Ghost, he anointed him.
There's a difference.
Jesus was never baptized with the Holy Ghost,
he was anointed with the Holy Ghost.
And when he was anointed and the oil
came in such profusion down over his head,
it ran clear down over his body.
Just as Aaron's body had the oil drifting
down around it, drifting onto his clothing so
that he smelled like the oil that had
been put on his head.
So this living together in unity among the
Lord's people brings a blessing of oil, that
anointment that comes down upon us.
It's the same ointment that ran on the
head of Jesus, even the Holy Ghost, and
comes all down over his people.
And you and I are members of that
body which he is the head, and the
oil that flowed on his head can flow
down over his body which is you and
me, and we can keep an unbroken continuity
of life from the Jordan River.
The life of the Holy Ghost came upon
the head of Jesus, and it comes now
upon you and me and upon all the
people of God that dwell together in unity.
Are we such?
That's what I want to know.
Are we such?
Are you such a one?
Think about it.
We're giving no invitation.
We're only asking you to think seriously about
this for the rest of the afternoon.
Don't go home and waste the afternoon chatting
or listening or looking or think about all
this.
Are we such that God can bless us?
Do we have this unity of determination to
glorify the Lord alone, of absorption in the
Lord's doings, of a determination to see the
Lord work, of oneness in present expectation, of
submission to the Lord, and of a resolution
to put away everything that hinders?
If we are, then we are a united
people, and we may expect any time the
oil that flowed on the head of Jesus
to flow down over us and bring oil
and blessing and life forevermore.
I'd like to see this church suddenly anointed
as though spring were to come into a
landscape, wouldn't you?
We thank God for everything we have, and
we thank God for the wonderful fellowship.
We thank God for all.
But you've dwelt long enough in this mount,
said the Holy Ghost once to a man.
Rise, get thee over this Jordan into the
land which I will show thee.
I believe it's time that you and I,
as individuals and we as pastors and all
of us together, that we determine that we're
going to have something new and wonderful for
this church.
Amen?
Amen.