and be holy in all departments, everywhere throughout
your entire life.
Now, the Apostle here exhorts us.
I like to exhort better than command, though
it is He here exhorts us to holiness
of life, and he bases his exhortation upon
two great facts.
One is the character of God, and the
other the command of God.
He says simply that God's children ought to
be holy because He is holy.
That's the character of God.
Then he says God's children ought to be
holy because He commanded them to receive in
the Spirit which you could not now understand
or receive, things being what they are.
Now, that's a paraphrase of what our Lord
said, certainly, but it's a fair statement of
the meaning of his words.
And now he comes along in obedience to
and in line with these teachings of our
Savior, and among other things, he commands us
to be holy.
And because this is an apostolic injunction, we
who claim to be apostolic Christians dare not
ignore it.
And when I use the word dare not
here, I do not mean that I forbid
it.
How could I forbid you to do anything?
I do not mean the church forbids it.
How could this church forbid anybody to do
anything and make it stick?
I only mean that morally we do not
dare ignore this commandment, be ye holy.
We have to deal with it some way
or other.
We dare not ignore it.
Ignoring it is the way that it is
dealt with by most Christians.
We read it and then ignore it.
But we dare not, and we dare not
accept it as optional.
It is not that we go to the
Bible and say, Now I am going to
look this over, and if I like it,
I'll buy it, in the language of the
day.
But if I don't, there's no harm done.
This is not something optional which I may
do or not do at my own choice.
This is an apostolic injunction to commandment, to
holiness of life, and I dare not overlook
it.
Then it is not something which I can
judge the wisdom of or the appropriateness of
and then weigh it in my own balances
and decide just how far it applies to
me.
It doesn't have to apply to me.
I can walk out on it.
God has given us all and each one
the right to make our own choices.
So we don't have to bow our neck
to this yoke, and we don't have to
apply it to ourselves.
If we don't like it, we can turn
our backs on it.
Once Jesus said to his disciples, Except ye
eat my body, my flesh, and drink my
blood, there is no life in you.
And they looked at each other and walked
away from him.
And he said, Will you also go away?
And Peter gave the answer that I must
give this morning.
Peter said, Lord, if we wanted to go
away, where would we go?
Thou hast the words of eternal life.
Those were wise words indeed by the man
of God.
So I say that we do not need
to listen to the apostolic injunction.
We do not have to obey it.
There's only one place where the Bible is,
but there are a million places where it
isn't.
And you can always find a place where
it isn't.
There's only one kingdom of God, but there
are lots of other places.
And if we don't like it, it's always
possible for us to reject it.
But I say, Lord, how could we reject
it?
Where else would we go?
If we refuse these words, where will we
turn?
If we turn away from thy authoritative word,
to whose authority can we turn?
Eisenhower's?
The Pope's?
To where shall we turn?
What great man, and I do not speak
sightingly of these great men, but any great
man in whatever field, could we turn to
him?
Who is he?
He's a man with his breath and his
knowledge.
Would it be to some great school of
learning?
Could we go to the university down here
on the midway and say, I'm looking for
a professor to show me the way, to
help me?
He couldn't help you, he must be himself
helped.
So I say, therefore, we dare not ignore
this.
And I have explained what I mean by
dare not.
We dare not accept it as optional, and
we dare not judge of the wisdom of
it and make our choice as to whether
it's worthy of our obedience.
To do so is to jeopardize our souls
and to earn for ourselves severe judgment to
come.
Now, I want to point out to you
that the doctrine of holiness has been wounded
in the house of its friends.
Whenever Satan has reason to fear a truth
very greatly, he counterfeits it.
And wherever he can, puts it into such
a bad light that the very persons who
are most eager to obey it, are frightened
away from it.
I think it would not be hard to
make a case for that statement and to
prove it if I wanted to do it.
And show how he was afraid of the
virgin birth, so he has done everything possible
to reduce Jesus Christ into one more, being
one more man.
He was afraid of the bodily resurrection, so
he has done everything he can do to
take the weight and pressure off of the
doctrine of the bodily resurrection.
He will allow Jesus to rise from the
dead in spirit, but he's afraid when we
say he arose from the dead in person
and in body.
He's afraid of the second coming of Christ,
so he has done everything he can do
to becloud the doctrine of the second coming
of Christ.
And so with every doctrine.
The ones he fears the most are the
ones he parodies, and pawns his parody off
as the real thing, and frightens away the
serious-minded saints.
Now, in evangelical circles, the doctrine of holiness
has been identified with a specific school of
theology.
Having their own terminology, and their own system
of metaphysics, and their own phrases, they have
copyrighted the term holiness and claimed it exclusively.
And it has been thus betrayed by its
friends.
Because I hesitate to say that some who
call themselves by the name of holiness have
allowed the doctrine to harden into a theory
which has become a hindrance to repentance.
And they invoke this doctrine to cover up
frivolity and covetousness.
I have had occasion to mingle somewhat with
those who have taken out the copyright on
the word holiness.
And while I have found some good people
among them, I have found just as many
good people among the fundamentalists, and the Calvinists,
and those who don't believe what they believe
quite.
So that they are what they are, obviously,
in spite of their copyright doctrine, not because
of it.
While there are few that are, I believe,
worthy, I have found a great deal of
frivolity carried on in the name of the
deeper life, and a great deal of worldly
mess that has been sanctified, accepted, taken in,
and given a place in the sanctuary.
And the results, of course, have been that
honest, serious persons have shied away from the
whole thing.
Someone told me of hearing a man stand
in the pulpit some while back and said,
I was sanctified fifteen years ago, and I
want to tell you, my friends, that I
have never sinned since.
Now, maybe he hadn't, but if he hadn't,
he'd be the last one to know it.
If he was a holy man, instead of
a holiness man, he'd never have made a
crack like that.
Maybe he never sinned since.
That could be possible, I suppose, theoretically.
But he would not find it out.
Other people might be saying it, but he
would never have said it.
He would rather have knelt and said, Thou
art in heaven, and I am on earth.
Oh, God forgive my confusion of faith.
He'd never have said, I haven't sinned in
fifteen years.
So that some serious-minded people have been
driven away from the whole idea of holiness
by those who have claimed it and then
have lived frivolous, worldly, and conceited lives.
But we dare not be frightened away by
this.
We are under the holy authority of the
apostolic scene.
We have been told by a holy man
of God, and we have been ordered by
God himself to be holy.
And therefore, regardless of how badly wounded the
doctrine of holiness has been, we must not
let it die, and we must not assume
that we have no moral obligation to this
truth.
The doctrine is highly important to God.
It must be highly important to God, because
I have personally counted in an exhaustive concordance
and have found that the word holiness occurs
650 times in the Bible.
Then I have not counted in my King
James the other word, sanctify and sanctify, which
is the same word, exactly, only in our
English different, so that the count would no
doubt jump up nearer to a thousand than
650 times.
Now, this word holy is used to describe
the character of angels and of heaven itself,
and even of God.
It is written that the angels are holy,
and those angels who look over the battlements
to gaze down upon the scenes of mankind
are called the watchers and holy ones.
And it is written that the angels are
holy, and then heaven itself is said to
be a holy place, and that no unclean
thing can enter in.
And God is described in the term by
the adjective holy, holy ghost, and holy Lord,
and Lord God Almighty, holy Lord God Almighty.
Those words are used of God throughout the
Bible, showing that the highest adjective that can
be ascribed to God, the highest attribute that
can be ascribed to God is that of
holiness, and that in a relative sense the
angels and heaven itself partake of the holiness
of God.
And then again its absence is given as
a reason for not seeing God.
I know the grotesque interpretations that have been
given to the text, without holiness no man
shall see the Lord.
But because some people, in order to support
their patented theory, have misused the text, that
is no reason for my throwing the text
out.
Holiness without which no man shall see the
Lord, that does mean something, and what it
means ought to disturb us until we have
discovered what it means, and then having discovered
what it means, we have met its conditions.
Briefly, I want to tell you the meaning
of the word.
In the Bible it means moral wholeness.
Actually it means kind.
Holy means kind, merciful, godly, pure, blameless.
It means kind.
It means merciful.
It means godly.
It means pure.
And it means morally blameless.
But all this, never to be thought of
in the negative, never.
It is always to be thought of in
a positive, white intensity of degree.
For it is written that God is holy,
it means that God is kind, merciful, pure,
blameless, in a white, holy intensity of degree.
And when used of men, it means the
same, certainly not the same degree as God.
Not absolute holiness, but it means an intensity
of a degree of holiness that is not
negative but positive, and it means that it
can be tested and can be trusted.
A holy man can be trusted, and a
holy man can be tested.
Some people's piety will not stand up under
tests.
Some of us are afraid.
Once when God was taking Israel through a
certain section, he went ahead of them and
warned them.
He said, Don't take them this way, because
there is a fight on over there, and
they are so green that they will run
away if they see the fight.
The Lord steered them around a battle, lest
they all get excited and flee in disorder
into the wilderness.
He knew their weakness and steered them around
it.
So there are those of us who are
holy, but we are afraid of the tests
that will prove whether we are holy or
not.
And we can't always trust ourselves.
But a holy man can be trusted, and
a holy man can be tested.
And wherever there is a breakdown of holiness,
there is a proof that there was never
any real degree of holiness there in the
first place.
Now, not only this moral holiness, there is
one great religious thinker who has just gone,
a German, a Lutheran man, who is dealing
with the question of holy, and the idea
of the holy has greatly intrigued me and,
I believe, also instructed my heart.
This man says that the word holy, as
originally used in Hebrew, did not have, first
of all, the moral connotation.
That is, when it says that God was
holy, it did not mean, first of all,
that God was pure.
That was taken for granted.
It did mean that later, it did come
to mean that, as I've explained.
But he says that the root, original meaning
of the word holy was something other than,
something that lay beyond, something strange and mysterious
and so different from, and awe-inspiring.
And that is in the word, too.
You'll find it there.
So that when we talk about the holiness
of God, we talk about something heavenly and
awful and mysterious and fear-inspiring.
Now, this is supreme when it comes to
God, but it is also marked in men
of God, deepened as men become more like
God.
This sense of the other world, this mysterious
something that rests on men, that is a
holiness.
Now, if they should have that and not
be morally right, then I would say it
was a counterfeit of the devil.
But when they are morally right and are
walking in all the holy ways of God,
and then in addition to their good, righteous
living, they also have this mysterious quality that
they had come down from another world and
carried upon them the fragrance of a kingdom
that is supreme above the kingdoms of this
world, then I am ready to accept that
as being of God.
Moses had it when he came down from
the mount, you'll remember.
He had been with God forty days and
forty nights there in the wilderness.
And as the colored preacher said in that
sing-song oratory that they love, he said,
Moses went and nobody knew where Moses had
gone.
And Moses was away forty days and forty
nights and nobody knew where Moses was.
And Moses came back and then everybody knew
where Moses had been.
Now, that's what I mean.
He would have been on the mountain and
nobody knew where he was.
But when he came back, everybody knew where
he had been.
He came down with this heat lightning playing
over his countenance, this strange something that you
couldn't pin down or identify, but it was
there.
That mysterious quality there has all but forsaken
the earth in our day.
The philosopher I refer to, that theologian had
to invent a term for it, he called
it the numinous.
And that word, numinous, has now gotten into
all the books.
But he invented it to mean that over
-plus of something that is more than righteous,
but is righteous in a fearful, awe-inspiring,
wondrous, heavenly sense, and glowing with a mysterious
fire.
Now, I say this latter quality is all
but forsaken the earth.
God has been reduced to our own terms.
And we are now told to gossip the
gospel and sell Jesus to the people.
And it's been reduced, I say, to a
place where men may be righteous.
I don't say that they're not, but I
say that we miss and lack that quality,
that overtone of something.
Now, this mysterious fire was in the bush,
you'll remember.
Fire doesn't frighten people.
Small fire doesn't frighten people.
It's only when it gets out of control
and your loved ones or other humans are
there that it becomes a portentous and fearful
thing.
Fire is not one afraid of fire.
And yet here was a man who knelt
beside a bush where a small fire burned
and hid his face, for he was afraid.
And there was that quality that was mysterious.
And later in the mountain yonder, I repeat,
when with the voice of the trumpet, Moses
shook until he said, I am fearfully afraid
and quake.
And then that shekinah that was over Israel.
Of all the figures in the Bible, and
this is more than a figure, it's a
symbol.
Of all the symbols in the Bible, I
know none, no other, that is so satisfying,
so deeply satisfying as the symbol of the
shekinah.
I use it often and often refer to
it in my preaching and praying because it
to me sums up wonderfully this holiness of
God present.
There was that cloud hanging over by day,
plainly visible.
That mysterious cloud, not made of water vapor,
not a shadow cast somewhere, but a mysterious
cloud.
And at night, as the light of the
day faded away, that cloud began to turn
incandescent.
And when the darkness had settled, it shone
brightly like one vast light hanging over Israel.
So every tent in that diamond-shaped tent
city was lighted fully by the strange shekinah
that hung over.
Nobody had built that fire, nobody put any
fuel to that fire, nobody stoked that fire,
nobody controlled that fire.
It was God bringing himself within the confines
of the human eye and shining down.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have lived, wouldn't
it be, have been to have lived then?
To take your little baby by the hand
when he was big enough to toddle and
say, want to show you something wonderful, want
to show you something, look, look at that,
and have the little lisping fellow say, what
is it, mama?
And you say, that's God, that's God.
Moses, our leader, saw that fire in the
bush.
Later Moses, our leader, saw that fire in
the mountain.
And now since we've left Egypt, that fire
has hovered over us now all these years,
maybe ten, maybe twenty, maybe thirty years.
That fire is there.
But how do you know there's a God,
mama?
There's the fire.
There's that mysterious over-plus from another world
that has no connotation of morality, particularly.
That's all taken for granted.
It has only a connotation of the reverent
and solemn and awe-inspiring and terribly different
and wonderful and glorious.
And that was there.
And then it was in the temple when
they had built the temple, when Moses had
built the tabernacle and when the temple was
built.
And then when the fire came down at
Pentecost, it was that same fire again, and
it sat upon each of them.
And it rested down upon them with an
invisible visibility, a visibility that was yet not
exactly visible and certainly would never have photographed
if they'd have had cameras.
But it was there.
It was a sense of being in or
surrounded by this numinous, this holy element.
And so strong was it that in Jerusalem
the Christians went on Solomon's porch, and the
people stood off from them as wolves, they
say, stand off from a bright campfire, and
looked on, and it said they durst not
join themselves to them.
Why?
Had there been any prohibition?
Was any man standing there with a sword
saying, Don't come near?
No.
They were praying people, humble, harmless, undefiled, clean,
and so fleeting and harmless as far as
the crowd was concerned.
But the crowd couldn't come.
They didn't rush in and trample the place
down.
They stood away from Solomon's porch because there
was a holy quality there they couldn't come
up to.
And when Paul was explaining the mysterious fullness
of the Holy Ghost in the book of
Corinthians, he said, Some of you, when you
meet together, when you obey God and God
speaks, there is such a sense of God's
presence there that the unbelievers fall on their
faces and go out and report that God
is with you indeed.
That emanates from God, as all holiness emanates
from God.
If we are what we ought to be,
if we may see to it that our
conversation, the whole sum of our lives, beginning
with the inner life, becomes becoming more and
more God-like and Christ-like, less and
less like the things of this world, more
and more like the things of the world
above, I believe there will be upon us
something of that.
I have met a few that have had
this on them, and I don't hesitate at
all to say to you that it has
meant more to me than all the teaching
I've ever had.
All the Bible teachers that I ever have
taught, and I thank God for every one
of them.
I stand indebted deeply to every Bible teacher
down the years.
But they did little but instruct my head,
but the brethren who had this strange thing
on them instructed my heart.
Some weeks ago there appeared an article called,
The War of the Ages, in the Alliance
Weekly.
It was sent to me by the widow
of my friend Emil Sawulka of East Africa.
I knew Emil Sawulka when I was a
young fellow, I've mentioned it before, certainly in
my preaching I have not overlooked it.
But I knew him, a long-deemed, rather
homely, serious-faced man who smiled infrequently, but
when he did it was like the coming
out of the sun after a storm.
He had this in marked degree.
He had it so completely that he was
the dean of his field.
And over in Keswick I talked to three
missionaries, and day after day I talked to
them.
As we ate and as we walked together
and as we had our services together, these
missionaries knew this man.
They told me of this serious-minded, long
-deemed fellow with the unpronounceable name, who walked
with God so perfectly that there was something
on him.
They said there was something different, Mr. Tozer,
and I'll say what you will, this man
had something different.
Personality?
Absolutely none.
He was without it.
But now in his seventies, on an old
motorcycle, he's chugging over the rough way, and
suddenly the motorcycle goes out of control and
Emil falls beside the way, and they picked
him up.
He died shortly after of a heart attack.
It wasn't an accident, but he died in
the harness, died with his face toward the
light.
He took with him that old tired body,
I suppose, and they laid that away in
Africa, and his spirit went to God.
But he left behind him a sense of
the Newmans, a sense of this mysterious, awe
-inspiring presence that comes down on some people
and means more than all the glib tongues
in the world.
I've gotten so I'm afraid of a glib
tongue.
I'm afraid of the man that can always
flip his Bible and answer your question.
He knows too much.
Afraid of the man who has thought it
all out and has a dozen epigrams that
he can quote, that he's thought up over
the years to settle everything spiritual.
Rather than I'm afraid of it, there is
a silence sometimes that's more eloquent than all
human speech.
Sometimes there is a confusion of face and
a bowing of the head that says more
divine truth than the most eloquent preacher can
say.
And so he says, Be holy as and
for I am holy.
First bring your life morally into line that
God may make you holy, and then bring
your spiritual life into line that God may
settle upon you with the Holy Ghost.
That there may be upon you that quality
of the wonderful and the mysterious and the
divine.
You don't cultivate it and you don't even
know it, but it's there.
And it's this that the church of our
day lacks, that we might seek to cultivate
the knowledge of God, that we might seek
to become more God-like.
And then without cultivation and without seeking, there
would come upon us this that gives our
witness meaning, this sweet, radiant fragrance.
Haven't you noticed that in some churches it's
felt very strongly?
But you say you don't go by your
feelings, do you, Mr. Tozer?
Sure.
Quote me on that if it's worth it.
Feeling is an organ of knowledge, and I
don't hesitate to say so.
Feeling is an organ of knowledge.
Define love for me.
You can't define love.
You can describe it, but you can't define
it.
And a person or a group of people
or a race that had never heard of
the word love and didn't know what it
was, all of the dictionaries in the world
couldn't teach them what love is.
But just let some old, freckled-faced boy
with big ears somewhere and his hair a
bit awry, let the feeling of it come
to his heart, and he knows more than
all the dictionaries can tell you.
Love can only be understood by feeling it.
And so it is with the warmth of
the sun.
Tell a man who had no feeling, it's
a warm day, he wouldn't know what you
meant.
But take a man who is normal out
into the warm sun, and you'll soon know
it's warm.
You can know more about the sun by
feeling than you can by description.
So there are qualities in God that can
never be explained through the intellect, but can
be known by the heart.
So I do not hesitate to say that
I do believe in feeling.
I believe in what the old writers called
religious affections.
And we have so little of it because
we have not laid the groundwork for it.
The groundwork of repentance, and obedience, and separation,
and holy living.
And if we lay the groundwork, thus you
will find there will come to us this
sense of the otherworldly, this presence of God
that will be wonderfully, wonderfully real.
So that when, sometimes as a religious prayer
cliche, we pray the little expression, O God,
draw feelingly near, we're not too far off.
Some would wave us off on that and
say, you're off the track.
I'm not sure.
O God, come feelingly near.
He came feelingly near to Moses at the
bush.
He came feelingly near to Moses on the
mount.
He came feelingly near to the church at
Pentecost.
And he came feelingly near to that Corinthian
church when the unbelievers went away awestruck, to
say, God's in the middle of them.
God's with them.
O how we need this in our day.
O Son of God, most holy, that holy
thing which shall be born of thee shall
be called the Son of God.
O holy thing, born, crucified, risen, enthroned, we
beseech thee that thou rebuke all the unholiness
in us that would grieve thy Spirit from
us.
Rebuke, we beseech thee, all of the flesh
and of the mind that is even negative
and that thus hinders the operation of the
Spirit.
O we beseech thee, let the Shekinah be
seen today.
Let it hover over each habitation, showing that
the Lord is now.
We beseech thee, may we go away from
this place, serious, if need be perturbed, bothered,
until we have done something with this injunction,
and have sought to be holy as thou
art holy, and have tried by surrender and
faith to purify our hearts unto obedience.
Grant, we beseech thee, to answer all this
in Christ our Lord.
Amen.