Now, this talk, and at least one more
Sunday morning, the possibility that it might become
another extra one, making three or so, I
am to speak on and to set forth
our Christian manifesto.
Now, this is to be a general setting
forth of divine truth, a manifesto of pastor
and people, a defense of our position, and
a confession of our faith by which we
live.
That doesn't mean that this is going to
be a full-blown course in theology.
It certainly is not that.
But I want to tell you that we
are a church and that we have a
message and that we know what the message
is, and we know where we are met,
and that we are not in the groove
of tradition except where we want to be
and intelligently and openly desire to be, and
that we are not putting our ears to
the ground to find out what other religious
bodies are doing in order that we might
imitate them, but that we get our instructions
from the throne of God through the scriptures,
and that there is a valid reason for
our coming together like this.
It's not social, though it has a social
implication.
It is different, it is spiritual.
So I want first to talk to you
about the things that we are not come
to.
It says we are not come, and there
is the negative.
Then it says, but ye are come to,
and there is the positive.
I want to begin this little talk by
a defense of the negative.
We have been very much, at the hotel
where I stayed in White Plains, and I
noticed a sign that said, Dale Carnegie meeting
here.
Dale has been gone for some time from
this earthly scene, but he still has his
followers.
Dale accents the positive and sweeps the negative
under the rug.
But our Lord never did it, the Bible
doesn't do it, no great Christian leaders ever
did it, and I do not believe that
we dare do it.
So I will briefly make a defense of
the negative in our manifesto, because a part
of our teaching has been negative, it's been
against, and it is going to be, and
it's bound to be.
So we don't deny this, nor apologize for
it.
If a man dedicated himself to the positive
and said, I will never discuss the negative
because that puts doubts in people's minds and
the world is full of trouble, so I'll
just talk about the positive.
The man who would attempt to do that
should go off immediately and have his head
examined, because I have in my hand here
a picture or a cameo of a very
beautiful girl, the Queen.
On the other side there is a picture
of the Canadian Elk, I assume it is,
just the outline.
Now that says Canada, 25 cents.
Now that's good for 25 cents anywhere within
the Dominion.
Now suppose that I say, well, the side
with the Queen on is the positive, and
the side with the Elk on is the
negative.
The negative isn't as interesting as the positive,
it's an elk head, and an elk head
couldn't possibly be conceived to be as interesting,
attractive and beautiful as the Queen's head.
So I have decided that I will split
this quarter right through, I will divide it
right thin-wise down, and I will never
bother you with any elk heads.
It will all be the Queen.
It will all be the positive side, nothing
of the negative side.
Now, where would you put me?
You'd send a man up to Five Old
Orchards and say he's a nice old fellow,
but he slipped his trolley.
Would you do something for him?
Well, brothers, you can no more hope to
preach and teach and be honest about it
and helpful about it by giving only one
side of the coin, than you can hope
to pass this Canadian quarter if you split
it down the middle.
You can't.
It takes two sides.
It takes the positive side and the negative
side.
It is so everywhere, and it must be
so.
God made it like that.
There is polarity in the universe, and we've
got to recognize it.
In order that right is to grow, wrong
has to be either exterminated or at least
minimized.
I've used the words exterminate or minimize.
Personally, I like to exterminate.
If I hadn't been a preacher, I think
I'd have been an exterminator, because I like
to see things that oughtn't to be around
and are not around any more.
I like that.
If a skunk comes in the backyard, I
don't like to go out and discuss philosophy
with him.
I like to give him what they call
in lesser cultured circles, a bum's rash.
Get rid of him and get him out
of there.
And so it is with things that are
wrong.
But I have learned too much about people
to believe that you can do much exterminating
in this world in which we live.
The best we can hope for is to
reduce evil to as complete a minimum as
possible within the Church and as far as
we can within our neighborhood and our community.
But there must be a getting rid of
the negative, things that don't belong there, in
order that we might put the things there
that do belong.
Before we plant, we must plow.
And before we build, we must excavate.
Before Moses could lead the children of Israel
in, he had to break the power of
Pharaoh.
The first had to come before the other
could come.
And Israel had to drive out the Jebusites
and the Hivites and the rest of the
Iths in order that Israel might take over
where they had been.
And when Christ came, he fought the noxious
Pharisees.
And a good deal of Christ's preaching was
telling off those Pharisees, that is, getting rid
of that which shouldn't be there in order
that he might plant that which should be
there.
If you have a head full of error,
it is simply a tight dream to imagine
that you can take truth into that head.
You must get that head emptied of error
in order that truth might come in.
And it's the same with the heart.
When Luther came, he had to engage the
power of Rome, and he dared to stand
against it and be against something in order
that he might be for something.
When Finney came to the States, I don't
agree with all of his theology, but I
do admit that he was one of the
world's greatest evangelists.
Seventy percent of his converts remained as compared
with 30 percent of Moody's and a smaller
percent of every other evangelist.
And in order to do the work of
God as he understood it, he had to
meet and defeat dead orthodoxy of his day
in order that he might get the word
free to save men.
Now, we can't be carried to the skies
on flowery beds of ease.
We have to face up to what is
going on and meet it.
Put on a benignant smile and hope for
the best, but we've got to meet this
situation.
And where we see there is wrong, we've
got to face that out and show that
wrong and dismiss it and then plant truth
in its place.
And if you doubt this, read 1 John,
where John had to do it.
Read Colossians, where Paul had to do it.
Read Galatians, where Paul had to do it.
Read Matthew 23, where our Lord had to
do it.
Read the book of Jeremiah, where Jeremiah had
to do it.
Walk up the hill with Elijah, when he
had to do it.
So we are against some things.
And if you hear anybody say, Mr. Tozer
preaches a good deal that is negative, don't
you come to my defense at all, smile
brightly and say, Yes, sir, that's because he's
a preacher of truth.
And truth has two sides to it, and
you cannot plant the true until you have
gotten rid of the false, and you cannot
or dare not build until you have cleaned
the sand away and got down to the
rock.
Now, I'd like to mention a few things
that we're against, in order that I might
tell you the things that we're for.
We believe the Church on earth is a
divine body, and we believe that as such
we are called together, but we believe also
that we are called to separation.
We are called to separate from the world's
follies and the world's pleasures and the world's
ways and the world's values and the world's
ambitions and the world's greed and the world's
vices and the world's habits.
There is a sharp moral antithesis which exists
between the Church and the world, and this
can never be reconciled.
It affects every Christian so that the Christian
sins when he fraternizes with the world.
He grieves the Holy Spirit by worldly living
and stumps his spiritual growth by imitating the
world.
Little children, said the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves
from idols.
So we are against the idols of the
Church which have been dragged in.
We are against the unhappy and unholy importation
into Christian circles and worship at any cost.
We are against the strange fires which are
being offered on the altars of the Lord.
We are against the strange sacrifices which they
are offering.
We are against the strange gods in their
sanctuaries.
And we are specifically and especially against the
baptized foolery and sanctified frivolity that has taken
over fundamentalism.
We believe we have something better, and so
you may expect that there may be from
time to time a pointing out of that
stump that needs to be taken out of
there, that big rock that needs to be
hauled away.
When I was a boy, my father and
I used to plow the field.
Often I did alone.
It stunted my growth.
I shouldn't have had to work as hard
as I did up until I was 15
years of age.
But two things were in the way.
One would be the old stump that had
been there since my grandfather's time, and the
other would be the huge rocks, the boulders.
We would have to take them out of
there, plow around them at first, and then
get a stone sledge and haul them out
of there.
Maybe if this stump we couldn't get it
out by just pulling it out, we'd have
to dynamite the thing.
But the point was, if you wanted a
smooth field free of stumps and free of
rocks, you'll have to dynamite occasionally.
So if by any chance we might dynamite
a little, don't anybody run for cover and
say, What's happened?
Nothing has happened, we're cleaning up the field
so we'll have a good, smooth field.
We're getting rid of the rocks, we're getting
rid of the old stumps, we're getting rid
of things that shouldn't be here in order
that we may have a rich, green harvest
of things that should be here.
Now, what are we for?
Well, he says, You are come unto, and
then he names the things to which the
Christians are called.
He says, You are come unto Mount Zion,
and unto the City of the Living God,
and unto the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an
innumerable company of angels, and to the General
Assembly and Church of the Firstborn, which are
written in heaven, and to God the Judge
of all, and to the Spirit of just
men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator
of the new covenant, and to the blood
of sprinkling that speaketh better things than that
of Abel.
Now, there they are listed for us, the
things that we are for.
He says, You are not called unto these
other things, but ye are called unto these.
Ye are not called, there's the negative, but
ye are called, and there's the positive.
Ye are called unto these glorious things.
You see, they are contrasted with the things
that Israel came unto.
Israel's things were earthly and visible, and ours
are spiritual and invisible, but ours are as
real as theirs.
The Jerusalem, the golden, the Zion of David's
day and the Zion of the days of
the prophets and of our Lord's day, Jerusalem
was a physical city.
It could be approached.
It was God's delightful, sunny fort, Mount Zion,
where the temple stood and where the sound
of the songs went up day and night,
and where the sacrifices never ceased and where
the singing people came to worship God, and
where the lambs were brought, pointing forward to
the Lamb of God that should take away
the sins of the world.
And this Mount Zion was a real mountain,
a real Zion.
Now, that is gone, but God said, Here,
that was only a shadow anyway, I give
you the reality.
I give you the real city of God.
I give you that which is not visible,
but which is real.
Let's be very careful here that we don't
think that which is not visible is imaginary.
That which is not heard is imaginary.
My brother, there are things just as real
that you can't get hold of.
For instance, your love for your mother.
I think everybody is safe there.
We all loved our mother, love our mother.
Your love for your mother, all right.
That's a real thing with you, a real
thing.
Love, you can't escape it, it is a
reality, it's an entity, it has existence, and
yet it isn't something you can lay your
hand on.
My wife brought up a picture from the
front page of a newspaper from a little
town where our Becky is teaching, and here
on the front page was Becky's picture.
Now, there are others there, but her picture
was there.
I keep it there on my dresser where
I can look at it.
Now, love, you feel that, you feel that,
you feel love, but yet love is an
intangible, it isn't something you can get your
hands onto and put in a box or
fold up and put in your pocket.
It is something that exists and has existence
and reality.
It's not imaginary, it's real.
So it is with this city of God
under which we are called.
It has reality, and yet it is not
visible.
We cannot lay our hand on it, but
it's there.
And so these other glorious things of which
we speak, the city of heavenly Jerusalem to
an innumerable company of angels.
We Protestants have exterminated the angels from our
thinking, whereas the Bible, both Old and New
Testaments, talk about the angels a lot.
And I think that we ought not to
throw out the baby along with the bathwater,
and because the Pope and his little boys
talk about angels, we refuse even to consider
them there.
Even though the Pope does like them, that
doesn't mean that I don't.
There is an innumerable company of angels, and
then there is the General Assembly and the
Church of the Firstborn, which are written in
heaven.
And there is God himself, the Judge of
all.
There is Jesus, the Mediator of the New
Testament.
You say you are talking about heaven.
I haven't mentioned heaven this morning yet.
I'm not talking about heaven at all.
Some people say, Well, we have these things,
but we'll do the best we can, and
finally we'll get to them.
I tell you, my brother, that you don't
have to do the best you can and
wait to die in order to get to
these.
It says, We are come unto them.
The Church of Jesus Christ has these things
accessible to us.
We can meet God now.
We can see and know and touch our
Lord Jesus Christ in our hearts now.
We can commune with the innumerable company in
the Church of the Firstborn now.
We can dwell and live in the presence
of unseen but real angels now.
And we can know the presence of Christ
and the blood that cleanses.
We can have that and know that and
share that and taste that and experience that
now, here and now.
Popular theology has erred right here.
They have removed this in time and space,
and they have told us that this is
some other place, some other time.
In the meantime, we're caught in a bracket
of vacuity, and all we have to do
is just wait it out.
And then someday the Lord will come and
someday we'll die, and then we'll enter all
of this.
I tell you, this is not scriptural at
all, for the Bible says, We are now
come unto this, and we can now feel
the powers of the world to come, and
we can now taste with the inner tongue
of our spirit and hear with the ears
of our heart the sounds and the taste
and smell with the olfactory nerves of our
heart.
We can taste and touch and see and
hear and smell and feel and enjoy the
divine things of God.
That's what a church is, brethren.
It is a company of convinced people and
committed people met around the Lord Jesus Christ
to share and enjoy these wonderful things.
And then, of course, though I'm not particularly
talking about that this morning, go out all
throughout the world and tell others in order
that the church may grow, and others may
be numbered with it.
So these things we now have, they are
present to us in time, and these things
are accessible to us now.
We are now come, we are now come
close to, says one translation, this Mount Zion,
this city that stands on the impregnable rock
of God.
This is the spiritual Zion, real and accessible,
not poetical, not symbolical, not figurative, but real.
And the church's instincts have been found to
identify herself with this.
This is what a church means, and that's
why I grieve in my heart.
I grieve when the church becomes simply a
social organization with a little dash of Christianity
to give it zing.
I think that the whole Church of Christ,
all of these people of whatever denomination, that
we ought to be a called-out people,
a separated people, a sanctified people, a dedicated
people, conscious of what it's all about, knowing
why we're here, knowing whom we're dedicated to,
knowing who redeemed us, knowing God himself and
knowing his Son, Jesus Christ, and feeling in
mystic rapture the presence of the Holy Ghost.
And then when we meet together, we meet
with this, all conscious of this.
And then the outside things, the baptized foolery
and the sanctified frivolity that's cursing the church
and weakening her like a cancer.
You know what a cancer is?
A cancer is simply a bunch of uncontrolled
and uncontrollable cells.
One of the sweetest men that I know,
Dr. Whitman, died and was buried the day
before yesterday.
Cancer.
Here was a brilliant Ph.D., not too
old a man, not a youth by any
means, but a reasonably young fellow yet.
And here this young man, or this man,
this brilliant speaker and educator, Ph.D. out
of Chicago University.
A little while ago something got hold of
him, and he went and had a hasty
operation, but the doctors said we didn't get
it.
He went back to work and labored as
he did labor prodigiously for maybe a year
and a half.
And the news came through to me at
the hotel, Dr. Whitman is gone.
What killed him?
I'll tell you what killed him.
Cells that wouldn't be controlled and couldn't be
controlled.
Not death, but life.
A wild, uncontrolled life brought death.
Look around you at the dead churches all
over this continent, from the tip of Miami
to as far as the ice of the
North.
Wherever there are churches, all their good members
lie out back, waiting the resurrection of the
dead.
Inside, baptized frivolity and sanctified fury.
We don't know what we have.
We don't know how rich we are.
We don't know what we're offered.
Oh, we ought to know, we must know.
I want to close with reading something to
you.
Maybe we've got it in our books.
If we do, let's sing it.
John Newton wrote it.
John Newton was that blessed psalmist of England
who wrote so many beautiful things.
He took what I've been preaching about and
some more, and he wrote it up into
a hymn and sung to the tune of
Franz Joseph Haydn's Austrian Hymn.
It's one of the most elevating things that
I know and love to join in singing.
But I want you to get the words,
don't think anything about tunes.
Lecture 10 The Resurrection And The Three Degrees
Of Glory 2 Glorious things of thee are
spoken, Zion, city of our God.
Now, he wasn't talking about heaven.
This man didn't have heaven in mind at
all.
He was talking about the Church of Christ,
now here on this earth, us.
He whose word cannot be broken formed us
for his own abode.
That's what we're for.
On the rock of ages founded, who can
shake thy sure repose with salvation's wall?
Surrounded thou mayst smile at all thy foes.
See, the streams of living water spring from
eternal love, well supply thy sons and daughters,
and all fear removed.
Who can think when such a river ever
flows, their thirst to assuage?
Grace which, like the Lord, the giver, never
fails from age to age.
That's us now.
We can have this now.
This Church, we here, can have this now.
Round each habitation, hovering, see the cloud and
fire appear, for a glory in the covering,
showing that the Lord is near.
Blessed inhabitants of Zion, washed in the Redeemer's
blood, Jesus, whom their souls rely on, makes
them kings and priests with God.
That's for us now.
That's not heaven, I'm not describing heaven here.
The New Jerusalem is something else again.
But present Zion, of which we are members,
Savior, he says, if of Zion's city I
through grace a member am, let the world
deride her city, I will glory in thy
name.
Fading is the worldling's pleasures.
That's what we're against.
All his boasted pomp and show, that's what
we're against.
Solid joy and lasting treasure, none but Zion's
children know.
That's what we're for.
Here we stand, not being frightened by any
of these pussycats who say, Don't be negative,
we know what we're against.
And we're not frightened by any of these
who say, Now, just hold your breath, when
the Lord comes we'll get it all.
We know what we have now.
So instead of being some of God's dear
little sillings, with barely enough intelligence to find
our way in in good weather, we're reasonably
intelligent men and women, fairly well educated and
some very well educated, and with some level
of culture, and who know what we're doing
and know why we're doing it.
And we're not frightened by the liberal and
the modernist and the unbeliever.
And we don't run for cover and whimper
and say, I'm foolish enough to believe.
I'm not foolish enough to believe, God has
made me wise enough to believe.
He's not a fool who believes, he's a
fool who doesn't.
So this Church stands on this corner for
something.
We know what we stand for.
This is our manifesto.
We want all the world to know, and
we don't care who knows, that we're for
all this blessed inhabitants of Zion.
Are you with us?
Amen?
Thank God.
Oh, I'd love to see God cleanse and
purify and revive and bless and rejuvenate and
bring a revival to this Church.
But we could stand here on this corner
and have them turn to us, turn and
hate us a while, and then turn and
wonder about us, and then turn and love
us, and say, why, those people think they
know it all.
When I preach like this, I've had it
said, he's arrogant.
I don't see any arrogance here.
John the Baptist pointed to Jesus and said,
Behold the Lamb of God that takes away
the sins of the world.
Nobody said, he's arrogant.
He wasn't anybody, he was just pointing to
somebody that was.
So I stand here, I'm nobody, you can
replace me tomorrow.
But I'm pointing to somebody that is somebody,
and to something that is something.
And for that one's sake and for that
sake, I issue this manifesto.
The word of God, only the word of
God.
The word of God shot through and glorified
with sweet Christian song.
The word of God lifted and given wings
with sweet Christian prayer.
The word of God made rich with the
fellowship of the saints and the consciousness of
the hovering wings of God's guardian angel.
And the communion with the General Assembly in
the church of the firstborn of which we're
a part.
If you're not for this, and if this
sounds strange and heretical to you, then I
hope you will learn, and if you don't
learn, I hope we may part.
Because there's no reason why we should fool
each other.
I believe in God the Father, almighty maker
of heaven and earth and of all things
visible and invisible.
And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our
Lord, conceived of the Holy Ghost and born
of the Virgin Mary, who suffered under Pontius
Pilate and who rose again the third day,
and who is God of God and light
of light and very God of very God
begotten, not created.
And 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 in his church, a sanctified,
redeemed and separated people called together to share
in the riches of Zion's glorious city.
I hope we understand each other, and I
hope we'll have your support, your prayers and
your understanding.
Amen.