Now, in this 52nd chapter of Isaiah, Isaiah
52nd chapter.
Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion.
Put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the
holy city.
For henceforth there shall no more come unto
thee the uncircumcised and the unclean.
Shake thyself from the dust.
Arise and sit down, O Jerusalem.
Loose thyself from the bands of thy neck,
O captive daughter of Zion.
For thus saith the Lord, You have sold
yourself for naught, and ye shall be redeemed
without money.
This is a very familiar passage, and I
don't want to talk long about it, but
only to point out that this was written
about Israel, and it describes a natural and
earthly and national, literal revival yet to come.
And yet, though it refers to Israel, Zion,
its spiritual content is for all of those
who name the name of Israel's God in
truth.
I say this because sometimes men want to
slough over what is written in the Old
Testament.
This is not applying to us.
But Isaiah's words were fully applied to New
Testament believers, without hesitation, by John the Baptist,
Christ himself, Paul, and the other New Testament
apostles and writers of epistles.
They quoted Isaiah without hesitation and applied it
directly, without excusing themselves or apologizing.
They applied it to New Testament church.
They did it, we can do it.
And not only can we do it, but
we should.
The Old Testament was for the Jews, but
the spirit of the Old Testament is the
same spirit that wrote the New, and intrinsically
the same laws apply, the same principles underlie.
While the dispensations change, the God of dispensations
has not changed.
Now, he cries, awake, awake.
And this call, awake, awake, it would take
an actor to repeat those words and give
them the mighty emphasis that God must have
given them.
And he cried, awake, awake, to Israel.
Now, this is addressed to sleeping people, and
I wonder what it is to sleep.
Let's look at it for just a little
bit.
We know that to sleep is to be
unconscious or semi-conscious.
It is to have a dimming of feeling
and thought, and awareness is either absent or
very faint.
When I ride on a train, I sleep
all night.
In fact, I sleep better on a train
than I do when I'm not on a
train.
It is I stay asleep longer.
The lulling of the thing must take me
back to my childhood, because I'm sort of
nursed and rocked to sleep with the rhythmic
beat of the wheels and the swaying of
the train.
And yet I'm never quite asleep.
The next day I'm rather groggy, even though
I've slept all night.
That's an odd situation, because while I'm asleep,
I'm only semi-asleep, partway asleep.
And there's an awareness that isn't quite there,
and yet it's there.
It's very faint.
The light never quite goes off.
It just dims, and you can't read by
it, so to speak.
Then, during sleep, one may be in the
gravest danger and not know it.
A man may be in grave danger, Dr.
Hamlin told us last night, about a man
out in the Keswick, near the Keswick colony,
of which I have very often spoken here,
in New Jersey.
A colony dedicated to the cure of alcoholics
by the only method that Dr. Hamlin says
he knows, and that is by conversion and
the new birth.
Some years ago, the old Mr. Rawls, the
father of the present director of the colony,
felt he should take a walk one rainy
night out to the little spur railroad that
runs out there.
And he did, and found a man asleep
across the rails, drunk.
He picked him up, dragged him out of
there before the coming freight had ground him
to bits, got him converted, and he became
one of the songwriters and has lived a
long and useful Christian life.
Now, that man was asleep and in grave
danger and didn't know it.
He could have been killed there if somebody
hadn't found him by a kind of divine
providence.
And so it is with people who may
be in immoral sleep.
They may be in danger and not know
it.
The doom of a man may be approaching
and yet he gave it no concern at
all.
I've been in hospitals and in homes where
they would take me in and talk in
a low voice and point to a sleeping
man or woman, more often man, but I
in my experiences.
And he was in a deep sleep and
he never came out of that sleep.
Death was creeping on and he was completely
unaware of it.
Now, that's the danger of sleep.
And that's why God says, Awake!
Awake!
And that's why the New Testament says, Awake
thou that sleepest and Christ shall give thee
life.
Now, there are two kinds of sleep which
I want to mention.
There's what we call moral sleep.
It is to live and to have habits
and to commit acts which are deeply wicked
and hateful to God and yet not know
it.
Acts that are dangerous to the soul and
yet not be aware of it.
To live a life and have habits that
are self-destructive and harmful to self and
others and yet not be aware of it.
To live a life which must certainly and
surely lead directly to that place about which
we do not like to speak, hell itself,
and yet not be aware of it.
Not alarmed, not worried, not concerned.
They used to have a word they applied
to the situation where God moved in, and
people that were not concerned suddenly became concerned.
They call it an awakening.
And if you will notice the literature of
revival, you will find that the New England
revival was rarely called revival.
It was called the Great Awakening.
People who had been asleep, morally asleep, careless
men and women, young people, were suddenly awakened
morally.
And that's what they called it, a Great
Awakening.
I wonder if that ought not to be
the word we'd use in the day in
which we live.
That people might suddenly become awakened, were sleeping.
You say, can we sleep and yet work?
Yes.
We can be morally asleep and yet be
intellectually awake.
We can be morally asleep and yet be
planning, running businesses, writing, painting, working, traveling, flying
airplanes, playing baseball, doing anything that men normally
might engage in and properly might engage in.
Not that what they are doing is wrong.
Work is not wrong, but their lives are
wrong.
So it's entirely possible to be intellectually, physically
awake and yet be morally asleep.
And I believe that that's one thing that's
wrong with us now and today.
We sleep on dangerous sins.
Nobody likes to be awakened.
Do you like to be the one that
goes in and drags the youngster out for
school?
You?
I never did.
We had a flock of them to awaken,
but I never liked it because they never
welcomed you.
He that bringeth evil tidings is like a
cold rain on a summer day, doesn't he
say that in Proverbs, the words to that
effect?
And to go in where some young fellow
or girl is deep in sleep and utterly
relaxed and comfortable and say, it's time to
get up, they never like it.
Nobody wants to be awakened.
Now, yet they may be in danger.
Lying and cheating and gossiping and secret sinning
and the miser and the grouch and young
believer, all of these may be deep in
sleep and are deep in sleep, if this
describes them, and the day of awakening not
very far away, that is, the day of
judgment not very far away, and yet may
sleep on into the day of judgment.
I used to hear the evangelists say in
the days when evangelists set out to awake
you, not to comfort you, they used to
say, you are asleep and you will be
awakened by the trump of the archangel.
I'm afraid that's too true of a lot
of people.
Busy and happy, apparently, and at peace and
unconcerned with their social enjoyments around them, their
growing family, their comfortable homes, all proper and
desirable and right and good things to have.
But morally, asleep and not know how bad
off they are.
Now, a few are semi-conscious, that is,
a few sinners are semi-conscious, slightly troubled
but drowsy, and a few others are deeply
troubled but rather numb, like someone who is
awake but not quite awake.
People are different, I guess, and you'll excuse
my referring to myself again.
I had a little season in the Army
when I was a young fellow, not very
long, I wasn't in as long as General
Harrison.
I didn't rise as high, but I think
that I went as high as I could
have gone, private.
But ever since I used to jump out
of bed at first call, three notes, and
I was out on the third one, I've
never had any trouble waking up since.
And to this hour, when I awake, I'm
fully awake.
I'm either asleep or fully awake, never in
any twilight zone in between.
But I have been with people that were
completely woozy for five minutes, or ten minutes
afterwards.
They couldn't talk and you couldn't get through
to them, they couldn't communicate, they were just
blissfully drowsy.
And half asleep and still awake, sitting on
the edge of bed, but still awake, still
asleep, didn't know which they were.
And I have met people that are like
that, they're deeply troubled, but they're numb, they're
not awoken enough to do anything about it.
Some people, when they're converted, are converted the
way I wake up out of a night's
sleep, with an absolute sudden wakeness that has
no drowsiness in it.
But most people are not converted quite like
that.
They wake up a little slower, a little
more slowly, and it takes a little more
time.
But it ought to be a complete awakening
that would rouse the sinner, that would rouse
the wrongdoer from his wrongdoing, rouse him to
the danger of it.
You could imagine that man lying across the
railroad tracks and hearing the long moan of
the then steam train coming down that track.
I said a spur, it wasn't really a
spur, because it had passenger trains on it
in those days.
I've seen the track myself.
It was from one town to another, but
it wasn't too important a branch of the
railroad.
But if you could imagine his suddenly rousing
himself and sitting up and seeing the headlight
through the rain aiming in his direction, getting
out of there fast, well, now that's the
way we should react to the call of
God.
That's the way every young person should react
to the call of God.
Some of you have been reared in Christian
homes, where Christianity and the Bible and the
Gospels and the New Testament and the Sunday
school and the presence of Christian people has
become a routine thing, and you're not affected
by it at all.
Prayer doesn't even affect you.
I warn you that that's not a proof
you're all right, that's a proof you're morally
asleep and you need to be awake.
Then there's another kind of sleep, and I
don't know what this might have been nearer
to what the Prophet had in mind, and
I think certainly it was nearer to what
the New Testament had in mind when it
said, Waked thou that sleepest and risest from
the dead, and that is a spiritual sleep.
I would suppose that the moral man or
the man who is morally asleep is also
spiritually asleep, but it's possible for one to
be morally awake and then slip back by
degrees into a kind of a spiritual somnolence,
that is, coldness and lack of feeling about
God and the things of God, about Christians
and about the dying and about the scriptures
and about prayer, and get used to things
and get sophisticated, spiritual sophistication.
It lacks freshness and warmth.
God is far away and there is little
communion and little joy in the Lord.
This is a spiritual sleepiness, to have a
cold heart with little pity and little fire
and little love and little worship.
This is a spiritual sleepiness.
The old man of God wrote like this,
he said, You sons of Adam, vain and
young, indulge your eyes, indulge your tongue, taste
the delights your souls desire, and give aloose
to all your fire.
Pursue the pleasures you design, and cure your
hearts with song and wine.
Enjoy the day of mirth, but know there
is a day of judgment.
I believe that we Christians ought to be
very careful that we are awake and that
we stay awake, that we are alert, that
we are alerted to what's going on in
the world.
Most Christians aren't, I'm afraid, alert.
They don't know what's going on around them.
They know it historically.
They know it in what we call current
events, but they don't know what the current
events mean.
If you're far enough in the hills somewhere,
where the only news you get is by
pack mule, you may not know what's going
on at all in the world, that is
not what events are going on.
But it's possible to have a radio in
every room and listen to every news broadcast
and subscribe to three papers in Time magazine
and Newsweek and still not know what's going
on.
You know what I mean?
Perfectly possible to know what's going on, but
not know the meaning of what's going on.
I have noticed, and I've had occasion to
notice, and we use it ourselves in a
limited degree, but I've noticed how in the
day now, religious journalism has gone to religious
news items, whole page after page given over
to religious news items.
What this person did, what that person did,
and who was elected to this, and who
held a meeting over there, and who was
the president of this college, and the arguments
such and such had about baptism.
There's news everywhere, news.
But it's possible to be crammed with religious
news and filled with religious shop talk and
yet not have the spiritual discernment to know
what it means.
If there's anything I've asked God for, it's
that.
It makes you just about as popular as
a hawk in a hen roof or a
skunk at a picnic.
You're not popular at all, and you'll never
be.
Nobody wants to be awakened.
When everybody is dancing around Diana of Ephesians,
great is Diana, nobody wants an apostle to
come around and say, that little girl's dead,
she's nobody.
They want to kill him right away.
They say why he's taking away our source
of income.
Well, somebody will say, Mr. Tozer, I'm for
you in a general way, but I think
you need correction here on one thing.
If somebody is asleep, how can you rouse
anybody?
The Bible says more than asleep, the Bible
says the sinner's dead.
How can you rouse dead men?
They want to tell us that it takes
a prevenient miracle of God's grace to awake
a man sovereignly without his consent.
And after he has been sovereignly converted without
his consent, then he believes and then he
is awake and then you can preach to
him.
Well, I never believed that down to this
hour, and I'm believing it less and less.
And the very brethren who preach it don't
practice it, because they'll preach a sermon like
that and then turn around and give them
all their cause.
That's a lot of things.
If a man is dead and you can't
wake him and he can't hear and he's
so totally depraved he's unable even to hear
the voice of a preacher, why give him
all their cause?
He might just as well go home.
But I know some brethren that do those
two very self-contradictory things.
It's an instance where a man is better
than his theology.
He's got more sense than his teacher.
Lecture 11 Justification and Sanctification 3 Now, I
want to answer this.
Can a sleeping man be awakened?
Can a person dead in sin be awakened?
Well, the answer is, the technique and the
psychology of it ought not to bother you.
Can you wake your 17-year-old son
to go to high school?
Can you?
He's in deep sleep.
And a brother at that age, they can
go deep.
They're nearly dead with sheer downright delight and
sleepiness, not a muscle tense anywhere.
Deep sleep.
How do you get him awake?
Are you going to stand at his bedside
and say to your husband, George, according to
my theology, this fellow is asleep and can't
hear, therefore we're no use to try to
wake him.
You don't practice what you preach.
You yell at him.
I used to pull one of my boys
out by the feet.
That was the only way I could get
him up.
I'd grab him by the feet and start
to pull.
He'd wake up and start to laugh.
He'd struggle with me, and by the time
he was out on the floor, we were
in good nature and he was awake.
That was the only way.
There is a way to get a boy
awake to send him to school.
And if you can wake a sleeping boy,
then why should we refuse to say that
we can wake a sleeping sinner?
And if we couldn't arouse a sleeping soul,
then no one could be saved because everybody
is dead in sin until the Lord is
born anew.
And then no church could ever have an
awakening nor a revival, and the Prophet himself
would be a fool for trying to awake
anybody.
Now, let's not press an illustration too far.
The old man who said those terrible words
pursue your pleasures, fill your hearts with song
and wine, enjoy the day of mirth.
But no, there is a day of judgment.
He went on to pray this prayer.
O mighty God, turn off their eyes from
all these alluring vanities, and let the thunder
of thy word awake their souls to fear
the Lord.
He believed it was possible.
He said, shake thyself from the dust and
put on thy beautiful garments.
And in the Bible, garments, of course, are
righteousness and true holiness.
That's the Bible.
Basic goodness, moral soundness.
Basic goodness.
I was taught for a long time that
there is none righteous, no, not one, and
that therefore to say a man is a
good man is to insult God.
But the Bible says he was a good
man and full of the Holy Ghost.
The Bible says that.
He was a good man and full of
the Holy Ghost.
I want to repeat, and I've said it
every second Sunday for 28 years, that a
Christian ought to be, among all other things,
basically a good man.
And if he's not basically a good man,
I can't see how he can be a
Christian.
He's not good by nature.
By nature, he is, as the song says,
a sinner by ailing, by birth, and a
sinner by choice.
And everybody who has ever been truly converted
knows that.
But when God converts a man, he not
only writes his name in the Lamb's Book
of Life and justifies him from his past
sins, but he makes him basically to become
a good man.
He ought to be a good man.
I talked to a preacher the other day,
or did he write me?
One of the two, anyhow, communicating with a
man of God.
He said, Brother Tozer, I have been reading
Phinney, and he said, I'm simply bowled over,
I'm simply astonished to learn that Charles G.
Phinney expected as much of a converted man
as we now expect of a man after
he's been filled with the Holy Ghost.
He said, Phinney would not grant a man
to even be converted unless he showed a
purity of life that we now call sanctification.
He said, he started where we end.
That was Phinney.
Was that why 75 percent of his converts
stood?
Was that why?
Because he insisted that basically a man ought
to put on his beautiful garments if he's
going to serve the Lord Jesus, not use
the Lord Jesus simply as a means of
getting something.
Any of you ever read Sidney Harris in
the Daily News?
Sidney Harris is a columnist, a writer, a
newspaper man, through and through, and I don't
think a converted man, I don't want to
say he isn't, but he never said he
was, and some things that he has said
indicate to me that he wouldn't be.
He is a theatrical critic as well as
a general philosopher.
About last Thursday of Friday he had a
little paragraph.
He said, The modern religious revival leaves me
cold.
For this reason men are trying to use
God in place of offering themselves to God
to be used by him.
Then he added these significant words.
And if I said it, they'd write me
dirty letters and tell me I was a
mean old ogre and old age was setting
in.
But this newspaper man added these words.
No man has a right to ask God
for peace of mind unless it's founded on
righteousness.
The children of this world are wiser in
their generation than the children of the day.
And every once in a while, out from
some liberal university somewhere, or out from some
place where you wouldn't expect any light at
all to come, somebody will make a pronouncement
that's like a flash of lightning in the
darkness, telling us that if we don't look
out, we'll be using God to get peace
of mind, using God to get business, using
God to get rich, using God and never
serving God at all.
If God never entered another pair for me,
as long as I live, I still want
God to believe that I want to serve
him until the day I die.
He never did another thing for me, yet
from this morning on he withdrew his hand
and let me go to pieces, physically, mentally,
nervously, financially and every other way.
I still want him to know I want
to serve him just because he's God.
But this modern emphasis that God is a
convenience and that Jesus Christ so kindly died
for us in order that we might have
peace of mind is a travesty on the
gospel.
The sinners know it and the liberals know
it.
Only we poor, sleepless evangelicals fail to see
it.
Basic goodness, I say, and moral soundness and
purity of life, honesty that won't cheat a
tax collector or anybody else, truthfulness that won't
lie not even about one person more than
is present, mercy and humbleness and forgiving love.
What a sight that is to put on
the beautiful garments.
Beautiful garments, there are some, thank God, there
are some.
There are some here and there throughout the
world that wear the beautiful garments of righteousness
and true holiness, and they walk with their
God.
They're not very popular, maybe, and they're not
heard of that much, but they walk with
their God quietly.
And as Gray said in Gray's Elegy, something
to the effect that many a mute Milton
had walked here among these hedgerows and between
the chops of corn filled with everything Milton
knew but unable to express it.
So I believe that there are mutant glorious
Pauls and Davids walking the earth today, here
and there, simple, plain, godly people that believe
in the power of the blood of Jesus,
not only to save us from hell but
to cleanse us now on earth.
They're not heard of, maybe, they're mutant glorious
than Milton, but they're among us, and they're
the seed of the act of survival.
Well, put on my strength, he says.
In the Bible, of course, that means the
power of the Holy Ghost.
And I pray that all of us would
awake now to our duty and our privilege
and our right under grace to be filled
with the Holy Ghost, so that we might
rise and shine and let our light shine
forth to the world.
Well, God bless us.
It's time we wake up, and I pray
with the Prophet or with the hymn writer
awake, God turn, Almighty God turn off their
eyes from all these alluring vanities, and let
the thunder of thy word awake their souls
to fear the Lord.
May it be so.