...conclude this series by reading it again, in
the first chapter of Deuteronomy.
The Lord our God spake unto us in
Horeb, saying, You have dwelt long enough in
this mount, turn you and take your journey
and go to the mount of the Amorites,
and unto all the places nigh thereunto, in
the plain, in the hill, and in the
vale, and in the south, and by the
seaside, to the land of the Canaanites, and
to Lebanon, and to the great river of
the river Euphrates.
Behold, I have set the land before you.
The women possess the land which the Lord
sware unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
to give unto them and their seed after
them.
Now, that's an Old Testament story concerning a
situation in Israel when they had allowed themselves
to settle down and become contended with circumstances
which were all right, but which could and
did break their spirit of adventure and cause
them to accept the as-is, the status
quo, as being final for them.
Now, that same text with a principle involved
there is found throughout the Old and the
New Testaments.
Every once in a while, prophet and apostle
and psalmist, that is, God is doing it,
is stretching out his hand and trying to
allow these people from their sleep, because man
is somebody that is made of dust, and
dust tends to settle, and men settle.
And they tend to settle down and do
the same things year in and year out,
and so slowly go around that circle.
And when this gets into religion, it is
a deadly and evil thing.
Now, this will be the last of my
talk on how to get out of that
religious rut.
I believe that the majority of Christians are
asleep and that they're in a rut, and
I very much want them to get out.
And yet I do not want to press
anybody nor push.
I think maybe that some people are a
bit disturbed because we don't have more of
an urge on.
But I've always respected my audiences.
I preach the word to them and then
put them in the hands of God and
allow the Holy Ghost and the individual hearer
to have it out.
And it isn't my business to come along
and push and urge.
I have found that it never pays, because
if we yield under pressure, it shows that
we're too weak to resist.
And if we're too weak to resist, and
if we take up a religious position because
we're too weak to resist, then we will
also be too weak to persist.
When you follow Christ, there must be persistence.
You must go on.
And if you allow yourself to be pushed
into a situation, I never have been willing
to listen or to take orders from a
man in the pulpit.
I know that man in the pulpit.
He's just like everybody else, and sometimes not
so much so.
I know him.
I know people in the pulpit.
And I know what they say before they
come into the pulpit and what they do
when they go out of the pulpit.
And therefore, I do not take kindly to
being stampeded by anybody.
Truth is truth.
And if truth doesn't convince a man or
woman and persuade them, then the man has
no right to set up a psychological screen
that makes it impossible to get out.
Because what's happening there is, the man is
projecting himself into the minds and consciences of
men made in the image of God, and
forcing them psychologically to do what they have
no particular reason for wanting to do.
They're not basically interested in it, and they
have no satisfactory reason for doing it.
But they're under pressure.
I heard a man say years ago about
another man, he said he could get blood
out of a turnip and he could get
an offering in a cemetery.
He said, just turning loose.
I've seen people like that, but I've never
wanted to be like that, because I respect
my own interests.
I would rather a man would go to
hell and be a man, I'd rather he'd
live for the sin in the world and
continue to be a man, than to allow
me to put him in a corner and
make a soft pussycat out of him.
God wants men to be men, and he
doesn't want them to yield and be pushed
around.
That's why I never would have been willing,
from the beginning of my Christian life at
17, down to now, I've never been willing
to have somebody stand up and tell me
to say amen.
I'll say amen if I feel like it.
I won't say amen if I don't.
Nobody's going to persuade me or make me
feel bashful or ashamed if I'm not doing
what the rest are doing.
Amen.
So that if you don't have a reason
for doing what you're going to do, then
when you get in, you won't know why
you're in, if you're in, for still you'll
know that for sure.
And then when you get out, you won't
be sure that you ever were in.
And so the whole thing makes for weak,
timeless religion.
And all that violates the law of our
nature, which dictates that all valid acts must
arise from a natural urge or from a
convinced mind.
Now all valid acts have to arise either
from a natural urge or from a convinced
mind.
By a natural urge, I mean to say
that you may be very hungry, and your
hunger doesn't have a high intellectual content in
it.
Nobody needs to stand up and say, Now
all you that are hungry, raise your hand,
and all you that are hungry, do something
else.
You know you're hungry, and you just do
without me, if you can afford it, because
you're hungry.
That's a natural urge.
There are many natural urges.
You see them in little children.
They do things naturally.
They don't reason them out.
So that's one valid reason for an act.
Another valid reason for an act is a
convinced mind.
I'm convinced that I ought to do something,
and I do it because I have a
conviction it ought to be done.
And those are the only two reasons for
doing anything.
And if I force a fellow under psychological
pressure and roll him through a steamroller and
force him to do something because he's too
weak to resist, I have violated his nature,
and I won't do it.
So for that reason, I have said we
ought to get out of the religious rut.
I have given reasons for it.
I have shown that Christians are in a
rut, and I have given sufficient reason for
saying it.
And I have explained that it is bad
so to be, and I have shown how
to get out, and I have shown why
it is important that we get out and
get started on a better kind of Christian
life, both as individual Christians and as a
church.
I have given reasons.
And if those reasons do not move you,
then you'll have to excuse me because I
shall employ no tricks to get you to
make any decisions.
But now tonight I want to take it
a step further, and I want to declare
that it is imperative not only that we
Christians get out of our rut, but that
we get out now.
And I address my remarks to anyone who
is in.
You say, do you mean me?
Well, I mean you if you're in.
But I don't mean you if you're not.
In preaching to a mixed congregation, and that's
what we Protestant pastors have to do all
the time, every congregation of any size at
all has in it a man who has
never been born anew at all, he's not
a Christian, another fellow who is only halfway
in and hardly knows whether he's a Christian
or not, and another one who is a
Christian but not a very good Christian, and
another one who was a Christian but has
cooled off about it, and another one who
is a blazing light shining in his generation.
Now you multiply these or add to each
one of these classifications, the hundreds or whatever
you have present, and you see that it's
not the easiest thing in the world if
I were a physician, I could give each
fellow the medicine depending upon what was wrong
with him, but when you have to give
it, I remember in the army, they used
to decide that we all ought to have
medicine, and they put it in our coffee,
and it ruined the coffee of course, and
the fellows that needed it got it, but
the rest of us had to take it
too.
And so everybody got that bad bitter coffee,
and everybody put it down, and of course
being soldiers they cussed a good deal about
it, but everybody had to take it.
They didn't come in and have a doctor
look at each one and somebody higher up
some brass on his way probably to play
golf, he said, give him so-and-so,
and then he hurried off, and so we
got it.
But that isn't the way the Holy Ghost
does things, so therefore when you address an
audience and you say to them, you're in
a rut, and you say, whom do you
mean?
And I say, I mean the one that's
in.
And if you're not in, I naturally don't
mean you.
But if you are in, I naturally do
mean you.
And there isn't anybody big enough on this
continent to scare me out.
If I think he's in, I'll tell him
he's in.
But also to get action, I won't tell
a man who isn't in that he is
in, for that's an old trick that preachers
know how to work, too.
You take an evangelist from some far country,
as I saw in Chicago, he blazed in
from across the water, you let him have
a night with us, and he came all,
and every place was packed out, and he
got up and gave his talk, and then
he said, now everybody who wants to be
blessed, you come and you stand up.
And our best people stood up.
And they testified and confessed and admitted they
were no good, and he went away and
wrote a book and said what a marvelous
meeting he'd had, the best one he'd had
in the States was at our church.
And I positively know that the people who
stood up and confessed were the cream of
the church.
They were the very best.
Of course, you could write a book about
that.
All I'd have to do here tonight would
be to pull a little trick on you,
dear people, and get at your conscience, and
the best ones of you would be the
ones into the prayer room.
And the rest would go about as usual.
But you know where you're in, I hope
you do.
And if you are not progressing, if you
are where you were months ago or years
ago, if you've settled down and learned to
live with yourself and learned to live with
your present spiritual state, if you're not getting
any prayers answered, or if they are, you're
so vague you're not sure about what it
might have just been an accident, if you're
living so far off from God and yet
hoping you're saved, then I mean you.
Now, there are some reasons.
These are reasons now, not pressure, but reasons
why it is imperative that we get out
as a church, as individuals now, and get
moving on our way to a better spiritual
life.
And I'll give you some of them.
One of them is that you haven't very
much time to do anything about it anyhow.
Your own interests are going to flag one
of these times, and the less you feel
the need to change, and as I've said,
change is imperative, absolutely imperative, the older we
get, the less we feel the need to
change.
If a person has an urge within their
spirit that's based upon a belief and a
conviction that they ought to move out and
begin to reassess their lives and readjust their
living, then they ought to do it right
now while they're thinking about it, because we
tend to cool off and our interests tend
to flag.
And there's danger of political development which will
make it less favorable to serve God.
I suppose there never has been a country
or two countries in the whole history of
mankind, not even in Old Mother England, nor
have there never been two countries anywhere in
the history of the world where it is
more favorable to become a Christian than in
these two that occupy the northern part of
this continent.
It's favorable to be a Christian here.
They won't let you give all you want
to give.
They'll only allow you to give 10%
here.
But you can give 30 or 40 if
you want to.
Nobody will arrest you and take you to
jail.
You just don't get it off your income
tax.
So you'll give it and pay tax on
it.
I'm doing that right along here.
I don't mind it at all because I'm
still eating.
But it's favorable climate we have here, favorable
climate.
And it could easily be that things would
shift around so the climate is not so
favorable.
There are lots of countries where the political
climate and the social climate is not favorable
to becoming a Christian.
Anybody who wants to become a Christian in
some country in the world has a such
time out.
But here, people will help you along.
You get converted tonight, there will be two
fellows who will call you up tomorrow and
say, Jim, I understand you got right with
God last night.
I just want to congratulate you.
Come over and see me sometime.
This is a favorable climate for serving the
Lord.
And now I ask you if the climate
should shift so that it's not so favorable,
and if the social situation should shift so
that it's not so favorable, I want to
ask you if you can afford to wait
for something like that.
Because if you have not taken advantage of
this favorable climate to get right with God
and to improve your spiritual life in this
freedom, would you if you were forbidden?
I wonder, I don't think so.
And then, the next is that the Lord
himself may come.
I realize that there's an awful lot we
don't know about prophecy, but I believe that
most Christians are looking for the coming of
the Lord.
They expect him to come.
They don't know when he will come.
The ones who claim they do, don't.
But he may come, because that is in
your time and soon.
He said he would come back, and he
said at an hour when we think not
the Son of Man will come.
And it could be that this present decline
in expectation may have an ominous significance.
For easily it can be that this would
be the time when fewer people are expecting
the Lord.
30, 40 years ago, everybody was expecting the
Lord and talking about it.
But now, very few are, and fewer are
talking about it.
Yet if you pressed people, you'd say, well,
I believe in the coming again of Jesus
Christ to the world.
I think most Christians believe in his coming
again to the world.
I think if you were to ask the
average Anglican, he would say, I do.
Ask the average Wilson, he would say, yes.
Ask the average United Church man, he would
probably say, well, I believe that the Lord
may come back to the world a second
time.
I don't think many people would outright deny
it, but the point is that they do
not live in expectation of it.
And our Lord said, at an hour when
you think not the Son of Man will
come.
And now, lastly, I believe that it's imperative
that we do something about our spiritual lives
now, because we have a short time to
prepare for a long time.
I mean by that, we have now to
prepare for the end.
We have a day to prepare for a
month.
We have an hour to prepare for eternity.
And so to fail to prepare is an
act of huge moral folly.
For anybody to have a day given him
to prepare, it's an act of folly, I
say, of inexcusable folly, to let anything hinder
us, anything hinder us, or to see any
earthly consequence, any earthly consequence at all.
Nothing in this wide world should hinder us
from coming unto God.
Nothing in this wide world should hinder us
from, if we find ourselves in lust or
find ourselves cold, nothing in this wide world
should hinder us, nothing should hinder us, because
it isn't worth it.
Nothing in the wide world is worth it.
If we believe in eternity, we believe in
God, we believe in heaven, we believe in
hell, and we believe in the eternal existence
of the soul, then there isn't anything in
the wide world important enough to cause us
to commit that act of huge moral folly,
failing to get ready in time for eternity
and failing to get ready now for the
great then that lies out yonder.
I say that nothing, nothing should allow us
to fall into a trap that is in
plain sight.
There's an odd little text in the Old
Testament.
It says, In vain is the trap set
in the sight of any bird.
When the man of God wrote that and
gave the bird a little bit of credit,
they have a saying about a bird's brain.
Birds are not supposed to be very bright.
But this man believed, and it's obviously true,
it was written into the Bible, that even
a bird, if you set the trap with
him watching it, he won't get caught in
it.
Wouldn't it be silly for him to watch
me setting the trap and then he conveniently
fly down and got into the trap that
I just finished setting for him?
And yet there are people doing that all
the time.
In the sight of the trap, the people
of Rez who have to live for eternity,
they fall into that trap, and it's set
for them in plain sight.
And I say that it's folly to put
off to a tomorrow that you may never
see things that you should do now.
A woman had me in her home one
time.
I think maybe I was being entertained there
while I was preaching or something, I don't
recall the circumstances.
Or she might have had me over for
lunch while I was preaching some years ago.
And she took me into a little room
or a good-sized room, and she said,
This is my husband's library.
She said he was a very busy man
while he lived.
And she said he looked forward with eagerness
to the time when he would be financially
able to get away from the crash of
business and read these books that he had
gathered.
He loved them.
He gathered them carefully, put them up there,
and there they are.
And she said just about the time he
was ready to break off from the crash
of business and give himself to study, he
suddenly died.
She was very sad about it, as well
as she might be.
Not only sad because she had lost her
husband, but doubly touched because this man had
put off to a tomorrow that he never
realized, never saw, something that he wanted so
bad to do, but he didn't get it
done because tomorrow didn't come for him.
And I say it's an act of inexcusable
folly.
To count on help that will never come,
because we expect somebody to help us, but
that person will never show up.
And it's foolish to ignore God's help now
offered us.
God is now offering us help.
Suppose that the men were floating out on
the sea, badly exhausted and chilled and in
shock, with a cold after a shipwreck or
a crashed plane in the sea, and suppose
that a helicopter hovered over him and lowered
its baskets and urged him with loudspeakers to
get in, to fasten himself in.
And he waved him away and said in
a weak voice, No, I'm waiting for help.
I'm waiting for help.
I expect the Queen's Navy to come out.
I expect the destroyer from London or from
New York.
I'm waiting for help.
And they said, But man, where is your
help?
Where is your help?
And argue about it and die in the
cold.
Yet people are doing that.
Ignoring the help that's expected to come.
I tell you, there isn't very much wisdom
in sin, ladies and gentlemen, and there isn't
very much that can be said in favor
of lazy Christians or careless Christians.
There isn't much that can be said.
I talked to a Catholic priest one time
on the train, poor numbers, but this man
I happen to remember.
He said to me, Now, this was in
Anglican, and he told me this.
He said, Well, I think maybe there's a
difference between you and me.
He said, I think that you are demanding
a moral level, a holier life than we
expect.
He said, You're just demanding a little too
much of humanity.
No, no, we're not demanding too much of
humanity, because God's commands, as they say, are
God's enabling.
And God never told any man yet to
do anything that that man couldn't do.
When that man with the paralyzed arm that
hung at his side like a limp piece
of flesh, paralyzed, when his body moved it,
Jesus said, Stretch forth your hand.
He couldn't stretch forth his hand.
How could he stretch forth his hand?
Why, men could have written five books to
prove there was nothing in Jesus' hand.
He was paralyzed.
His arm hangs there.
He can't.
The muscles are all shriveled up.
He can't stretch forth his hand.
And yet the command of the Lord was,
Stretch forth your hand.
We believe in Jesus Christ was God stretched
forth his hand and was instantly healed.
So God never asked anybody yet to do
anything that he wasn't enabling to do.
So when I am told that I'm demanding
too much of Christians, I say, No, I'm
not demanding too much of Christians, because God
will give you strength to do anything that
you're willing to do.
The dear collared brother who was preaching, they
asked him, and with the simplicity and directness
as characteristic of these friends, they said to
him, What would you do if you were
facing a stone wall and God told you
to jump through it?
He said, I would jump toward it, and
when I got there, God would have a
hole in the wall.
I believe that.
And I believe that when God tells us
to do something, if we do it, God
will be there to meet it.
Therefore, if the Lord tells you that you
ought to get rid of that habit, you
say, I can't, I can't.
You can't?
Maybe you can't, but God can.
If you will tell God what it is
and stretch forth your limp wizard hand, it
will be a whole hand when it gets
up there.
So we're not asking too much.
We're saying that Christians are letting the world
perish while we play and dust off our
china and wash down our cars and look
after ourselves and watch television and read and
fool and take long trips and play while
the world perishes.
And our days are getting fewer and we're
getting older and our urge is getting weaker
and our interests are flagging as we get
older.
Oh, my dear friends, I am urging you
and declaring that it's imperative not only that
we get out of our religious rut, but
that we get out now.
These are reasons, these are reasons.
This is not pressure, these are reasons, and
you will face those reasons in the great
day of Christ.
Don't forget it.
The man stands up and froths at the
mouth and puts pressure on and tells dead
stories for a half hour, and then invites
me to the altar and I don't go.
The Lord won't excuse me of doing anything
wrong with that.
But if he gives me reasons why I
should do something and back it up with
scripture and I don't do it, then I'll
have to answer before the great bar of
God in that day.
So we'll all have to answer before the
bar of God.
Here are the fall days coming on, and
here is a great city of a million
and a half in metropolitan Toronto.
And God knows how much little real preaching
there is.
Some of it, certainly.
Certainly we have excellent preachers in this city.
Dear Brother Fitch over at Knox Presbyterian is
one of the outstanding preachers of this city
and of this country.
And there are others, good preachers, good gospel
preachers.
But what are they among a million and
a half people?
A young man came down to the front
this morning with his wife, a young wife
three weeks.
He got in here by accident.
He started out to go to United Church
and thought this was one and came in.
He listened to me.
He came down afterwards completely astonished, the two
of them, obviously well-educated.
They didn't know what to make of it
all.
He said, You didn't tell them a thing
about how to handle the situations in their
homes and the situations they face every day.
And I said, I'm expounding the scripture and
giving a great theological philosophy of faith upon
which we rest.
Yes, that he said.
And he said, Your people have this philosophy
of faith and they don't live it.
And I said, Do you know any of
our people?
And he said, No.
And I said, Then how do you know?
He smiled and said, I don't.
But I'm a little bit afraid, there's truth
in this, that we've got the theory but
we're not living it.
It's a few hundred people, a few, S
-T-W, a hundred people who make up
our weekly congregation.
It's a few hundred people.
If these few hundred people would all take
what I preach seriously and determine that you're
not going to be a half Christian, you're
going to be a whole Christian, and you're
going along with God regardless, we could act
like leaven in this city.
It would spread, it would spread.
It would be talked about, others would hear
about it.
Preachers who are careless in their careless in
their carelessness would shake themselves awake and say,
what's the matter with me, where have I
been?
And this city could be revived in its
spiritual life starting right here, if we would
do something about it.
Do you believe that?
Let's pray.
Just for my own encouragement, if nothing more,
I wonder how many present here tonight will
say, Mr. Tozer, we're grateful to you that
you haven't put on pressure, but you've left
everything to our own decision, but have given
us reasons.
And you may count on us, you may
count on me, as God helps me, I
do intend to do something about my spiritual
life.
I'm not going to go muddling along.
I am going.
By intensifying my prayer life, by searching the
scriptures more avidly, by giving myself more completely
to God, I am going to be a
better man or woman, and I'm going to
get out of this rut.
And I'm going to go along with you
as the days and weeks go by, to
make this church the kind of church it
ought to be as a New Testament church.
I just wonder how many would raise their
hand and say, I'm with you, Mr. Tozer.
I'm with you.
Well, now there's a lot of hands, but
of course I can't possibly tell how many
in proportion to the people present, but we'll
not press it further.
We'll only pray now.
Now, our Father, we thank thee for this
quite large number of persons who have thus
signified that Christianity is to them not a
plaything, but a serious, grave and vested reality.
And that as thou dost lead them, they
plan to rise up from this mount and
go take the land which is theirs by
covenant and gift and promise.
Pray thy blessing, O God, upon us as
now we enter the fall, tomorrow being the
first of October, we pray, O God, that
thou wilt give to us an urgency of
spirit and a convinced mind to lead us
by the Holy Spirit, lead us by the
Holy Spirit.
Pray for our children, our young people, our
teenagers, so in such a critical hour as
this, they so need thee.
They need to see, Christian parents and grandparents,
that they don't have to excuse or apologize
for.
We pray thy blessing upon the board, upon
our dear brother, thy servant, Brother McNally, who
is preaching elsewhere tonight, O baptize us into
a new, wonderful, warm fellowship, a
new,
wonderful, warm fellowship, a new, wonderful, warm fellowship,
a new, wonderful, warm fellowship, a new, wonderful,
warm fellowship, a new, wonderful, warm fellowship, a
new, wonderful,
warm fellowship, a new, wonderful, warm fellowship, a
new, wonderful, warm fellowship.