Sermons from the Book of Revelation by Dr.
A.
W.
Tozer.
Sermon number 16.
The 10th chapter, beginning with verse 8 and
going to verse 11.
And the voice which I heard from heaven
speak unto me again, and said, Go and
take the little book which is open in
the hand of the angel, which standeth upon
the sea and upon the earth.
And I went unto the angel and said
unto him, Give me the little book.
And he said unto me, Take it and
eat it up, and it shall make thy
belly bitter, but it shall be in thy
mouth sweet as honey.
And I took the little book out of
the angel's hand and ate it up, and
it was in my mouth sweet as honey.
And as soon as I had eaten it,
my belly was bitter.
And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy
again before many peoples and nations and tongues.
I sat two days and two evenings last
week in an air-conditioned boardroom in New
York, and not being very well protected on
the top side of my personality, the cold
air came down the wall on me.
And the result is a little bit of
laryngitis, which I trust won't prevent the sermon
tonight.
God has his treasure in earthen vessels, and
if he'd asked me, I'd never have any
trouble with my voice.
But he doesn't, so I occasionally do, rarely
but occasionally.
I mention that so you'll know I don't
sound like a man ninety all the time,
just when I've been in an air-conditioned
room.
Thank God for such science.
Now, you will notice that I have been,
in the time that I have been preaching
on the Book of Revelation, following a certain
pattern.
And that pattern has been this.
I have held the Book of Revelation to
be a prophetic outline of future events, prediction
of things to come.
But I have also held that the Book
of Revelation contains a very wonderful amount of
spiritual truth, which we can have for ourselves
now.
And while it is not unrelated to the
prophetic events, it may be separated from it
for our own devotional use and our own
spiritual help.
So tonight, there won't be as much about
prophecy as there will be next Sunday night
when we talk about who are the two
witnesses.
But tonight, I want to talk about the
little book, this book of the angel had
and gave to John, and told John to
take it and eat it up.
And he said, Now when you have it
in your mouth, you will find it's very
sweet.
It's delicious in your mouth, but after you've
swallowed it, it's gotten down into your system,
it'll be a very bitter thing.
Now, I don't know what this book is,
but I assume that it is the Word
of God, certain part of the Word of
God, something that God particularly had in mind
for the man, John.
And this agrees with other passages of scripture.
It agrees, for instance, with the book of
Jeremiah, where we learn that Jeremiah, in the
15th chapter, took and thy words were found
and I did eat them.
And thy word was unto me, the joy
and rejoicing of mine heart, for I am
called by thy name, O Lord God of
hosts.
And if you turn on over to Ezekiel,
you'll find a wonderful passage there.
When I looked and behold, a hand was
sent unto me, the 2nd chapter, and lo,
a roll of a book was therein.
And he spread it before me, and it
was written within and without.
And there was written therein lamentations, and mourning,
and woe.
Moreover, he said unto me, Son of man,
eat this thou findest, eat this roll, and
go speak unto the house of Israel.
So I opened my mouth, and he caused
me to eat that roll.
He said to me, Son of man, cause
thy belly to eat it, and fill thy
bowels with this roll that I give thee.
Then did I eat it, and it was
in my mouth as honey for sweetness.
And he said to me, Son of man,
go get thee unto the house of Israel,
and speak with my words unto them.
For thou art not sent to a people
of a strange speech, and of a hard
language, but to the house of Israel.
Not to many people of a strange speech,
whose words thou canst not understand.
Surely had I sent thee to them, they
would have hearkened unto thee.
But the house of Israel will not hearken
unto me, for they will not hearken unto
thee, the prophet, for they will not hearken
unto me, God.
For all the house of Israel are impudent
and hard-hearted.
We have this in the Old Testament, and
then we have it in the New.
Martin Luther said that if he could live
long enough to do it, he had no
doubt that he could find in the Old
Testament every word of the New.
And I am quite sure that in the
prophetic scriptures of the New Testament, you will
find very little more than a little advance
upon the prophetic scriptures of the Old Testament.
So we have a prophet here, Jeremiah, and
another prophet, Ezekiel, eating the word of God.
Then we go on over into the New
Testament and come to the book of Revelation,
and we find it again.
There is a cause and effect relationship between
the eating of the book and the testimony
given, and the results, which he called having
the belly bitter.
When the word of the Lord is digested,
that is, when it gets down into the
life and becomes a part of the life,
and when it dictates the witness and gives
the prophet his position and the Christian his
witness, then it becomes bitter.
It becomes bitter to the flesh because of
the attitude, the hostility of the world, and
the weakness of the flesh, and the sinister
hatred of the devil.
The word of God is sweet to the
taste and strong to deliver, but it also
has a way of getting the people in
trouble who live by it.
Now, I would like to point out tonight
that the human race is in a bad
way.
You will find lots of men who will
say otherwise.
They will spend an evening telling you what
a wonderful bunch we are, and they will
write books telling us how wonderful we are.
In fact, I occasionally will get a letter
from somebody reminding me that I must not
take such a dark view of the world,
because the world, after all, is pretty good
if we only could look on the bright
side.
But there is in the world something that
we have called a disaster, a major disaster.
It has come by the fall of man
and by man's sin, and the sin of
man has brought an alienation from God.
That is, it has broken off relationship with
God, and it has brought what we call
mortality, which of course is that we are
subject to die, and it has brought death
itself.
But we have got to watch one thing.
We have got to watch less when we
are looking over the human race and seeing
how they suffer, and how there is death
and mortality and disease and insanity and crime
and all these things, that we don't get
sentimental about it and begin to pity people
instead of realize that we are to blame.
There are two ways of looking at this.
Some say that sin is a disease.
It is something like polio.
You get it, you can't help if you
have it, and it kills you, but you
are not to blame for it.
You are a poor fellow and you have
no responsibility any more than a child has
a responsibility that is born with a bad
heart and is a blue baby.
You can't help it, you were born into
the world that way.
But our Lord told us about a prodigal
boy, the younger brother who went out into
the world deliberately, and who engaged in riotous
living deliberately, and who spent all that he
had deliberately, and who was reduced to poverty
and rags deliberately, and who got to work
in the field working for the swine keepers
deliberately, and all this was his own fault.
It was not the result of something that
he couldn't help, as polio might be, or
a heart attack.
It was his own doings, and the human
race is in a bad way, but we're
in a bad way by our own fault.
And we have been redeemed potentially by Jesus
Christ our Lord through the atonement which he
made on the cross, through the propitiation which
he made for us.
And we have justification and regeneration, we who
are Christians.
We are justified, that is, declared righteous before
God.
We are regenerated, that is, generated a second
time.
And we have all this, we Christians, but
we are not yet rescued.
Now, this is the thing that's bothering the
Church now.
Whenever there's a revival in the Church, the
Church always begins by acknowledging and making a
part of her very lifeblood the belief that
we're in a bad place, that there has
been a major disaster, and that while through
the Christian faith God saves, we're not yet
rescued.
We live in peril, we are sheep in
the midst of wolves.
You will find in the book of Romans,
the book of Corinthians, you will find the
earnest expectation of the creature awaited for the
manifestation of the sons of God.
For the creature was made subject to vanity,
not willingly, but by reason of him who
has subjected the same in hope.
Because the creature itself, that's creation, shall be
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the
glorious liberty of the children of God.
For we know that the whole creation, and
not only they, groan and prevail, but we
ourselves also, which have the fresh fruits of
the Spirit, even we ourselves, groan within ourselves,
waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption
of our body.
And Paul, in 2 Corinthians 11, gives a
long list of the troubles that he had,
he was saved, but he wasn't yet rescued.
He was redeemed, but he wasn't yet out
of the fix.
And that's where the Church finds herself today.
The Church, the true Church of Christ, is
a redeemed Church.
She's been born of the Spirit and washed
in the blood, and as far as judgment's
concerned, her judgments are behind her, but she's
not yet rescued.
And Paul says, in stripes, I was above
measure in prison.
I went in prison more often than anybody
else.
I almost died, numbers of times, and deaths
awp'd.
I received of the Jews five times, forty
stripes, save one, that's thirty-nine stripes, the
famous cat-whipping.
And thrice was I beaten with rods, and
once I was stoned, and thrice I suffered
shipwreck, and night and day I have been
in the deep, and journeys oft, and weariness,
and painfulness, and watching, and hunger, and thirst,
and fasting, and nakedness.
All these things came upon me, he said,
plus the care of the Church which weighed
me down all the time.
So you see, the Church of Christ is
redeemed, but not rescued.
She has her name written in heaven, but
she's on earth.
And as long as she's on earth, she's
going to be in trouble, as long as
she acts like the Church.
But when she doesn't want trouble, then she'll
stop acting like the Church, and then she'll
not have her troubles anymore, except, of course,
those troubles which come to all men alike.
And this, I think, is found here.
Now, this is not prophetic, particularly as I've
said.
But this is found here.
Here's truth, and you don't hear it often
preached from the book of Revelation.
But we're asked to eat the truth just
the same as the prophets were, and as
John was.
We are ordered to eat the truth, take
the book into our system, till it permeates
every part of us.
In the blunt Elizabethan days, they didn't hesitate
to say, until it goes down into your
belly, down into your whole digestive system, until
it's taken up by your whole life, and
it permeates every part of your life, and
until there's no antidote for it and no
escape and you can't get away from it,
till there's total committal, till the truth takes
full control, and until the cross becomes an
instinct, a second nature, a mastering impulse.
Always truth is very sweet.
When we sing truth, it's always very sweet.
And when we read it, it's very sweet.
But when it takes over and begins to
control us and determine our lives and becomes
to us a reflex, second nature, a mastering
impulse, then it becomes bitter as gall to
the carnal nature.
Truth has consequences, you see, my brother.
And if we were in heaven, truth would
be uniformly sweet.
Nobody would ever complain about the bitterness of
truth if we were all in heaven.
But because we are not in heaven, but
because we're halfway between heaven and hell, we're
here in this world, we're not in hell,
and thank God we're not going to be.
We're not in heaven, and praise God, we
are going to be.
But we're halfway between heaven and hell in
this world of good and bad, this world
of saints and sinners, this world of joy
and sorrow, and so truth sometimes is very
harsh.
And our difficulty, you know, my friends, is
that we, God's people, won't allow truth to
get down into our system.
It is sharp, and we don't like its
sharpness.
It's painful, and we don't like its painfulness.
It's bitter, and we don't like its bitterness.
So we compromise.
Now, judging from the lives of the people
I see, I wonder how many of us
have ever really eaten the book.
I know we've memorized it in Sunday school,
I know that we're going to read it
through in sixty-two, and all that stuff.
I know that we do read our chapter,
and we do study Sunday school, and we
even teach.
But I wonder how many have eaten it
and let it get down into your system
until there's no antidote for it.
Most people are ready to pray with their
fingers crossed, and they're ready to start to
follow the Lord with the understanding that if
things get tough, they're going to go back.
Like the Irishman I heard about called his
friend in, and he said, Now, you and
I have been fighting for half a lifetime,
but I'm going to die.
I'm dying.
And he said, I'd like you to forgive
me.
I don't see, I don't want to die
with anything on my conscience.
He said, Here we are together now.
We've lived farm by farm, and we've fought,
and we've acted like enemies, but I want
to get over that.
Now I'm an old man, and I'm going,
and I'd like to have you forgive me.
And his neighbor wiped a tear out of
his eyes and said, Sure, Pat, I'll forgive
you.
He said, I'll forgive you.
And so they shook hands, and the neighbor
started to the door, and Pat said, Now,
just one minute.
He said, If I get well, all this
is off.
And this is exactly where we stand, my
brother and sister.
It sounds funny, but it's tragically funny.
It is tragically so.
We always want to keep our fingers crossed.
We get on our knees and say, O
God, take all of me.
But not quite.
O God, make me a holy man, but
not altogether so.
O God, take everything I have, but not
quite everything I have.
And so we are putting this proviso in.
Lord, not quite.
This is off if I get in a
tight spot.
You see, we appear to have it wrong.
We think that because we've been redeemed, we've
been rescued.
No, we're kept by the power of God
through faith under salvation, ready to be revealed
in the last time.
That's sure enough.
But we've not yet been rescued.
The battle is still on, the fight is
still here, the enemy is still around us.
We're still grasshoppers in the wilderness, we're still
sheep in the desert, we are still children
wandering through the earth, we are still good
people in a bad world, we are still
in a world that will crush us and
destroy us if it can.
And we want to use the cross to
save us from the cross.
This is one of the most ominous things
I see in modern Christianity, that we want
to use the cross to save us from
the cross.
We want to be saved by the cross
from the cross.
But you can't use the cross to save
you from the cross.
That is, Jesus our Lord dying on the
cross and rising again will save you.
But that same cross has to do something
in you and to you and for you.
We would have it, you know, that if
we believe in Christ and join a pleasant
fellowship and form regular religious habits and quit
the dirtiest kind of iniquity and go to
banquets and sing choruses and go to summer
conventions.
I do myself, you know, so I'm not
against summer conventions.
And adding the whole thing up, we're having
a pretty nice time of it.
Well, that doesn't sound to me like Paul,
and it doesn't sound like the prophets, and
it doesn't sound like John, and it doesn't
sound like Noah, and it doesn't sound like
Luther, and it doesn't sound like Knox, and
it doesn't sound like any of them.
Because they didn't look at it like that.
They didn't say, I'm going to believe in
Christ and join a pleasant fellowship and form
regular religious habits, and then from here on,
everything is going to be wonderful.
Thereafter, I'm going to take it relatively easy
and work for Christ, but be reasonable about
it.
I've listened to people tell me to relax
and tell me to take it easy and
tell me I ought to take a month
off.
You know, in my work with the Alliance,
I could have a whole month if I
wanted to take it, and with full pay,
I could go wherever I wanted to go.
If it was winter time or summer time,
I could choose to come up here and
fish in Canada.
If it was winter time, I could choose
to go down to the islands.
I don't think I'd want to go down
there now to let a fellow shave, but
as long as he's down there.
But I could go where I please, and
everything would be lovely if I wanted to
do it.
But I don't do it.
I don't take any of them.
I said a fellow reminded me when I
was down in New York last week, a
man reminded me of what I'd said sometime.
You know, your words come back to haunt
you.
And he said, You said once that no
preacher ought to die of old age if
hard work would kill him.
And I said, Brother, I said it, and
I'm going to stay right by it until
I die.
I don't believe that any man ought to
rust out.
I believe that if hard work will kill
a preacher, that he ought not to want
to be an old man.
I even think it may be a reflection
on a preacher if he gets too old.
You know, if he takes life too easily,
and he teaches that Christianity is a lovely
bandwagon, or as my grandmother used to say,
a band box.
I don't know what it was, but it
was some soft place you got into, like
that duffel bag our brother's going to sleep
in.
And we, I don't know what it is,
but I know it's easy.
And we take Christianity like that.
And we won't eat the roll.
That's our trouble.
You know, the trouble with having your old
church, you listen to the roll, but you
won't eat it.
You nibble at it, but you won't swallow
it.
You won't let it get a hold of
you.
You're going to control it.
You read the Bible, and you buy a
new Bible every five years, and you read
the Bible, but you're not going to let
the Bible control you.
You won't do that because it's bitter.
It'll make your belly bitter.
It'll be harsh and sharp and painful, and
you won't have it.
So you're going to manipulate the Word instead
of letting the Word manipulate you.
We won't get ourselves in trouble for Christ's
sake.
That is our difficulty.
We just won't get ourselves in trouble for
Christ's sake.
A man says he loves a woman, he
wants to marry her, but he won't get
himself in trouble for it.
If her father, for instance, says, You come
around any more, I'm going to take a
bull bat and drive you off.
If he is willing to be driven off
with a bull bat for her sake, I
would say it's true love.
But if he says, I love you truly,
and then stays out of baseball bat reach
and out of gunshot, and will not put
himself in trouble for her, I doubt very
much whether she's any more to him than
a passing interest.
For human nature is such that whatever is
the greatest and most for us is what
we'll put ourselves in trouble for.
Now let me say to you mothers, you
have your little children around you, your little
babe, your half-grown little fellow with his
bumpy knees and long legs and ears that
won't stay in.
He's still your baby, and yet he doesn't
like to hear it.
Well, you know, you're committed to him.
You wouldn't hesitate to die for him at
all.
You're committed to him.
If the doctor said to you, You've got
to give him blood.
You've got to give him not a pint,
but a quart of your blood.
You'd say, Well, I report.
Where do you want me to go to?
You wouldn't hesitate if you knew it, because
you're committed.
You're totally committed to that which you love
the most.
There are people that would die for others.
Paul said that.
Paul said in Romans 5 that some people
would even dare to die for others.
A few people would.
It has been known to me of cases,
a few cases anywhere, where some people simply
died for somebody else.
They loved them so much.
I know.
I know that I have people.
I have loved ones and our children as
they grew up.
I know that God wouldn't have had to
ask me twice.
I'd have given my life for them, and
it would have been all heroic on my
part, and it's not anything heroic on the
part of the mother.
She loves that child a little more than
she loves herself.
But isn't it strange when we come to
Christianity, we won't commit ourselves like that?
We want to find a way out, a
way back.
We want to find a dodge, a parenthesis,
somewhere we can duck into, to save going
through the whole sense.
We want some way to get around this
total committal.
I want to ask, are there any who
have written the book?
I know we nibble at the book.
We teach the book here in Sunday school.
I know that.
And I teach the book on Sunday here,
and teaches the book downstairs on Wednesdays.
And I know all that.
But have we swallowed the book?
Have we chewed it down into our system
until it permeates every part, until we're totally
committed?
Now, I wouldn't judge anybody because I couldn't
be a judge.
I don't know.
I don't like to be judged by men.
They may not know my circumstances.
And therefore, I don't want to judge others.
And our Lord tells us we are not
to judge.
So I would not stand to judge any
individual.
But I wonder how many of us have
so eaten the book that our economic interests
are jeopardized.
We are jeopardizing our economic interests.
I believe, and I would not hesitate to
say this, all over the North American continent,
from the Key West to the farthest north
in Canada, and from coast to coast, I
believe that there are evangelical Christians who believe
all right, and they nibble the word, but
they're not committed to a point where their
economic interests are going to be jeopardized.
They're going to look after their economic interests
first.
And they have somehow or other managed to
compromise themselves before God.
They have made their conscience amenable to them.
They have tamed their conscience, as you might
tame a house cat.
And it lies down and purrs at their
feet, and they have no trouble at all,
because they have compromised between serving God and
their economic interests.
And while that doesn't mean they don't give
their tenth, that doesn't mean that, but it
just means that they're not going to jeopardize
themselves.
They're not going to put themselves in a
place where they say, maybe I'll lose everything.
No, they'll say, I don't believe God wants
that.
Then they'll begin to argue with themselves.
And they will say, now listen, if you
jeopardize, you
don't have anything, and if you don't have
anything, you can't give to missionaries, can you?
And the compromise is made, and the book
is spit out.
It isn't swallowed, it's just chewed.
And it's very sweet while you're chewing it,
provided you don't swallow it.
It's very sweet in your mouth, and it
doesn't get down into your system.
I wonder how many there are among the
evangelicals everywhere.
I go among Christian businessmen an awful lot,
and I have Christian businessmen listening to me
now.
I preach for the Christian Businessmen International and
other Christian businessmen groups, and I have never
known exactly, but I wonder how many of
them would put themselves on the spot where
they would swallow the book down into their
system, where their economic interest would go out
and blow up in their face, for Christ's
sake.
I don't think there would be very many.
The fact is, the philosophy of a good
many of my dear friends in the money
is that the Lord put them there, and
therefore everything they have, the Lord gave them,
and because he gave it to them, that's
it.
But I'll tell you, I'm not sure that's
New Testament Christianity, brothers and sisters, I'm not
sure of it.
You pull up in big cars and have
expensive dinners and all sit around and testify
about how the Lord helped them to buy
that big nine-roomed house, the same as
you could have the five-roomed one.
All right, maybe so, maybe so.
But it seems to me that I remember
a certain person saying, Oh, man who made
me a judge and a divider over you.
It seems to me that I remember a
certain one, and he's nobody else but Jesus,
who refused to have anything to do with
the real estate deals of some people who
wanted to follow him.
He said, Let the dead bury their dead
and come and follow me.
Well, that's that.
Now I wonder if we've eaten the book,
have we swallowed the book?
Then I wonder, and I don't judge again,
I'm only asking questions and trusting the Holy
Spirit to make the application.
I wonder, are there any, and if so,
how many, and where are they that would
allow their total committal to Christ to jeopardize
their blood tithes?
Actually, it jeopardized their blood tithes.
Separate them from their family if they had
to do it, if they had had to
be sold.
Some parts of the world in our foreign
fields, that happens.
When somebody is converted, he has to say
goodbye to his father and his mother and
all of the taboos and all of the
tithes of the tribe and go away.
In some sections, if a Jew is converted
to Christ and really believes on Christ and
owns him as his Messiah, they have a
funeral for him and count him dead and
reckon him dead and never mention his name
again, never communicate with him.
They count him dead.
He turns from the mother that gave him
birth and the father whose gnarled hands worked
to bring him up and says goodbye to
them and walks out of the house, never
to be known by them again.
That's total committal, my brother.
But we evangelical Christians of these days, we're
not going to go so far as all
that.
We consider it to be a bit fanatical
and quite ridiculous.
We are going to believe on Christ and
join a pleasant fellowship and form some good
religious habits and then take things relatively easy.
We're not going to jeopardize blood tithes.
A man says, I'd give myself to Jesus
Christ, but I can't.
My wife, I couldn't even break up our
home.
I would give myself to Christ, but my
husband was a brute and he wouldn't allow
it.
I'd give myself to Jesus Christ, but I'd
have to leave my home if I did.
They didn't eat, they didn't swallow the book,
they just nibbled at it.
Then I think about friendships.
Friendships are beautiful things.
Two men each wrote an essay on friendship.
One was Henry David Thoreau and the other
was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Somebody pointed to the fact that Emerson's concept
of friendship was, your friend was somebody you
could do something for.
And Thoreau's concept of friendship was, your friend
was somebody who could do something for you.
So that's quite a different way of looking
at friendship.
The friendships are very beautiful.
I've made friendships all over this world and
they're to me very wonderful.
I don't hesitate to say that they're closer
than tithes of blood if those people of
my blood are not Christian.
I've made Christian friends all over the world
that are to me so close.
I like them and love them so much
that they're nearer to me than some of
my own blood relatives who are not Christian.
I don't hesitate to say that.
I believe that's part of the New Testament
pattern.
Then I wonder if there are any who
would really give up their comforts for Christ's
sake, and any who would commit themselves to
a point where they jeopardize their health for
Christ's sake.
Most of us don't want to jeopardize our
health.
The world will jeopardize its health.
A man will drink himself drunk and line
the gutter.
He will overeat until he's full of cholesterol
and all the rest.
But if it comes to religion, he says,
No, you don't mean I'm to be a
fanatic, do you?
A fanatic is somebody that takes Jesus Christ
seriously.
That's some concept of a fanatic, somebody that
believes what Jesus Christ said and follows him
and follows him wherever he goes.
Jesus Christ took his relation to God seriously.
When they came to him and said, You
know what's going to happen to you?
They'll kill you if you don't look out.
That old man Herod is looking for you
now.
He said, Go tell Herod, that old fox,
that I'll be around a while yet.
Tell him I'll still be here.
He literally put not only his health but
his life in jeopardy and finally gave himself
to die just for the unjust that he
might lead us to God.
Eat the book, John.
Eat the book, Jeremiah.
Eat the book, Paul.
Eat the book, Ezekiel.
Eat the book, and when you've eaten it,
swallow it down until it gets into your
system, until it begins to permeate every part
of you.
When our oldest boy, Loa, came back from
Africa after serving in the Second World War,
he was all yellow.
When he went over, he wasn't yellow, and
I didn't think he had turned oriental.
There he was yellow when he appeared.
He was tan, but under the tan it
was yellow.
We asked why.
Well, he had malaria.
They had given him something and it had
got into every part of his system and
turned him yellow.
He got over it, of course, and he
turned back to his regular color again.
But it had permeated him, every part of
him, so that his pigmentation had changed.
I believe that the people of God ought
to be people who have chewed the book
and swallowed the book and digested the book
and absorbed the book until it colors them
and gives them the right complexion, until you
can't touch them anywhere but you touch the
book.
I don't know how many are like that.
If we're like that, even our lives are
in danger and our health is in danger.
Oh, Reverend, don't work too hard now, don't
work too hard, Reverend.
I'd rather, I can't die young now, excuse
me, that's hopeless, but I'd rather have died
young for Christ's sake than to get old
taking care of myself.
An old guy coddled in himself, getting his
three meals a day, stretched out in comfort
while the world perishes, reading the Alliance Witness,
streams in the desert, lazy old tramp with
a degree or two.
My brother and sister, God's people are called
to be heroic.
They're called not to loaf through, but to
work through.
But we nurse on the sweet book, what
a dear book it is, what a sweet
book.
We run and get another translation of the
sweet book in order to get a little
bit more sweetness, a little more flavor, but
we're not going to let it change us
very much.
You know what a revival is in a
church?
A revival in a church is when a
good percentage of the people decide to swallow
the book and let it have its effect
on their lives.
When a good percentage, not all of them
ever, but a good percentage of them in
some solemn hour before God decide they're going
to swallow that book down and let them
chew it up and get it down into
their system and let it get to where
it can't be any antidote for it.
It's going to have its work, it's going
to have its effect upon them.
It's going to be second nature to them
and a mastering impulse to them.
And when God sees people are like that,
God pours the Holy Ghost out.
I have no doubt that God would pour
the Holy Spirit out upon his people.
I don't know whether he'll ever do it
to us in the Alliance or not.
I don't know whether he'll ever do it
to Avenue Road or not, because you have
too much life.
You know too much.
Today, Satan has outfoxed us.
He's found a totally dedicated people.
He's found a people who are sons of
evil and groups of the devil and betrayed
by sin, but they're serious and committed unto
death.
They are the Communists.
In the committal that we should give to
Jesus Christ, evil men are given to evil
doctrines, and they're conquering the world for God's
people alone.
I think it is a tragedy beyond description.
I think it is a cosmic tragedy worthy
of the pen of a Shakespeare.
When Communism can take over a country and
we Christians flee like a bird to our
mountain and run for our lives and call
it an iron curtain, I think it is
a tragic, awful thing.
Maybe it's necessary sometimes.
Maybe they couldn't live there.
Maybe they're driven out and compelled to leave
as they were in the 11th of Hebrews
and hide.
But I think it's still a terrible thing
that we Christians, with all of our faith
in God and in Christ and in the
blood and in the Holy Ghost and in
the power of God through the Holy Ghost,
that we can't stand up to the Communism,
but we've got to retreat everywhere.
Walk backward and walk backward and walk backward
until one of these days the Church of
Christ will walk off the edge of the
earth, unless God can find some people who
will swallow the book of total committal.
I say I don't know whether it'll ever
be with us or not.
I wish I could say I believe it.
If I did, I'd be lying.
I'll have to tell the truth.
I got a letter the other day.
I wish I'd have brought it.
I could have read a few lines out
of it here, but I'll try to remember
what it said.
I got a letter from one of the
largest denominations in the world.
I'll not name it.
One of the largest denominations in the world,
and that denomination is a hodgepodge of liberalism
and evangelicalism.
There are good people in it and modernists
in it, Christians in it.
There they are, all mixed up together.
One of the largest denominations in the United
States and in the world.
I got a letter from an editor of
one of their magazines asking permission to reprint
from the Alliance Witness.
He said, Mr. Tozer, I'm working with this
denomination for the time being, and my own
people wouldn't understand me if they knew what
I was writing to you.
But he said, you know, there are some
of us in this denomination that are plunging
through and being filled with the Holy Ghost.
And you'll find them here and there, and
you'll find a preacher occasionally.
And God is pouring his Spirit out upon
us, and while the great masses don't understand
it, some of us are being filled with
the Holy Ghost, and we're going forth with
new power and new life.
It's wonderful, he said, what God is doing
for us right here.
Now, I wouldn't join that denomination.
I wouldn't link myself with any group that
has any liberalism in it if I knew
it was there.
I wouldn't join any group that has modernism
in it if I knew it was there.
But here is the danger.
The danger is that we believe because we
are evangelical in our creed, we are therefore
pleasing God the Father Almighty.
It may be that our evangelical creed is
merely nibbling the sweet book and never allowing
it to get into our system where it
can change our lives and make us different,
where it can jeopardize us and put a
cross on our back and make us bold
soldiers and martyrs if need be.
I wonder if God will not pass by
those who nibble the sweet book and perhaps
go among those who have been starved for
half a century and do the wonderful miracle
of grace, pour waters upon them that are
thirsty and floods on the dry ground.
And I wonder if when revival comes, if
it comes to Canada and the United States
before Jesus comes, I wonder if revival will
come to such churches as this and the
full gospel and the gospel churches.
I hope it will.
Sometimes I think that what one dear old
Bible teacher said one time to a bunch
of Alliance people, he got up to teach
the Bible to them, and he said, I
don't know whether it would do you any
good to preach the Bible to you any
more or not, to give you any more
food.
He said, you're stall-fed cattle, you've got
hay on your horns, and you're not obeying
and not doing the thing you're told.
I am afraid, my dear friends, that those
who only know a very little bit but
live in the light of what they know
are better off in the sight of God
than those who know a great deal and
won't commit themselves to it.
And that's what I'm afraid of.
Now, I don't charge anybody.
I'm afraid for my own heart, and I'm
worried for myself, not about my salvation, not
about my justification, not about my eternal life,
but whether I'm a man committed so completely
that if my income was all suddenly taken,
I'd thank God and go ahead anyhow.
If my friends were all suddenly to desert
me, I'd look up and thank God and
go ahead anyhow.
If I felt my health suddenly dissolving away
from me, I'd look up and thank God
and go ahead anyhow.
I hope I am.
And I'm not claiming much for myself.
But, dear men and women, we need a
revival.
We need a spiritual reformation that will change
everything.
We need to chew a book and swallow
it so we can't regurgitate it, so there's
no place to hide, no way to compromise,
no bridge to go back over, no excuse
to offer, no compromise to make, no way
to get out of it.
It'll make you bitter, bitter in a world
that hates God, bitter in a world that
crucified Jesus and never repented of it, bitter
in a world that'll make untold fortunes on
his birthday but wouldn't follow him from here
to the corner, great stores that'll get rich
in the next two weeks celebrating a birthday
of a man they wouldn't follow from here
to the corner.
That's the kind of world we live in.
The Lord has called a people, a people,
a people, to be a spirit-filled people,
a godly people, a committed people, a worshiping
people, a people for his own possession, a
peculiar people.
Do you want to go that way?
Amen.
This concludes the series on the book of
Revelation.
The book was never completed beyond this point.
Due to the length of this sermon, the
original tape does not contain the last five
minutes of this message.