Verse 10 verses.
These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his
eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour
is come.
Glorify thy son, that thy son also may
glorify thee, as thou hast given him power
over all flesh, that he should give eternal
life to as many as thou hast given
him.
And this is life eternal, that they may
know thee the only true God, and Jesus
Christ, whom thou hast sent.
I have glorified thee on the earth.
I have finished the work which thou gavest
me to do.
And now, O Father, glorify thou me with
thine own self, with the glory which I
had with thee before the world was.
I have manifested thy name unto the men
which thou gavest me out of the world.
Thine they were, and thou gavest them me.
And they have kept thy word.
Now they have known that all things whatsoever
thou hast given me are of thee.
For I have given unto them the words
which thou gavest me, and they have received
them, and have known surely that I came
out from thee.
And they have believed that thou didst send
me.
I pray for them.
I pray not for the world, but for
them which thou hast given me, for they
are thine.
And all mine are thine, and thine are
mine.
And I am glorified in them.
Let us pray.
Father, we feel as if we had entered
a holy place when we read these words,
for we hear thy Son in his high
priestly prayer.
O God, make us worthy to hear, make
us worthy to kneel with thee, belittle behind
thee, waiting reverently back where thou didst kneel,
unworthy to kneel quite where thou didst kneel.
Help us to hear and believe and enter
into and accept it.
Lord, lend thy Holy Spirit tonight in great
power to make truth effective.
We ask it in Christ's name.
Amen.
Now in verse 6, our Lord says, I
have manifested thy name unto the men which
thou gavest me out of the world.
Thine they were, and thou gavest them me.
In verse 3 he says, no, in verse
2, as thou hast given him power over
all flesh, that he should give eternal life
to as many as thou hast given him.
Now I want you to notice that our
Lord here talks about the men which God
gave him, the ones that God gave him
out of the world.
And he said that they were God's and
that God gave them to Jesus, and that
Jesus did two things for them.
He gave them eternal life, and he gave
them a revelation of the name of God.
Now this revelation was not made to the
world.
I want you to notice it very clearly.
I pray not for the world, but for
them that thou hast given me out of
the world.
The revelation was not made to the world,
and the prayer was not made for the
world.
Now if that should startle anybody, kindly remember
that it's here, it is true.
Jesus, our Lord, said it, and we dare
not deny it, nor modify it in any
sense.
We in our eagerness to be all things
to all men and to show that everyone
anywhere at any time can come, we tend
to overrate what Christ did and is doing
for the world.
What he did and what he is doing
is available to all the world, and therefore
in that sense potentially it was done and
is being done for the world.
But it is not effective toward the world.
It is effective only toward certain ones, the
ones that our Lord Jesus says are given
to him out of the world by the
Father, the men which thou gavest me out
of the world.
Now as somebody should imagine or be afraid
that I was misinterpreting or misunderstanding the words
of Christ in his high priestly prayer, I
ask you to notice in Matthew 11, 27,
all things are delivered unto me.
Those are the words of Jesus, and then
he goes on to say that all things
are delivered unto me of my Father.
But no man knoweth the Son but the
Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save
the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son
will reveal him.
Then in Matthew 16, 17, when Peter had
nobly testified to his belief in Jesus Christ
as the Lord and Savior, our Lord replied,
Blessed art thou, Simon, son of Jonah, for
flesh and blood has not revealed these things
unto you, but my Father which is in
heaven.
And in John 26 there is a passage
which, have you ever noticed how it is?
It says, Ye believe not, because ye are
not my sheep.
Now it doesn't say, ye are not my
sheep because you do not believe.
That's the way we say it, but he
said it precisely the opposite.
He said, Ye believe not, because ye are
not my sheep.
And in John 6, 37, our Lord says,
Well, he says, him that cometh to me
I will in no wise cast out.
And have you noticed how we have divorced
that passage from that which precedes it?
For what precedes it is this.
Here's what Jesus said, All that the Father
giveth me shall come to me, and him
that cometh to me I will in no
wise cast out.
Those who belong to the Father and are
given to Jesus are not cast out.
Now that's what he said.
And then seven times in this chapter, which
I have read, seven times in his prayer
to the Father, he says, The ones that
thou hast given me, they were thine, thou
gavest them to me, thou gavest them to
me out of the world, and I manifested
thy name to them, and I gave them
life.
Now admitting the difficulties here, and I don't
hesitate at all to admit that there are
difficulties, that there is mystery here, and that
we can only see the parts of God's
ways in all this.
Admitting all that, yet we can sum this
up by saying that there are some persons
who are gods in a peculiar way.
How they are gods I do not know,
although I shall show you later how we
can know that they are.
But I do not mean that this, I
do not mean to teach here blind, fatalistic
election which makes God close his eyes and
put a pin down and choose the one
that the pin touches, or arbitrarily choosing certain
ones from the foundation of the world.
I don't want to teach that, but I
do want to be bold enough to allow
the scriptures to teach what they do teach,
that there are some persons who are gods
in a peculiar sense that other people are
not.
And that these persons who are gods in
that peculiar sense are given to his son
Jesus Christ, our Lord, and that Jesus invariably
and always receives them and gives them two
things, a manifestation of who and what God
is, and eternal life.
Now these things, it says here, are true,
and we dare not move away from it,
nor recoil.
And it says that for these, our Lord
Jesus Christ makes intercession at the right hand
of God.
Thine they were, says our Lord.
Now here in the masses of maybe in
this city, certainly in this and perhaps in
this church tonight, there are some who belong
to God in a special way.
They are the prodigals about to come home.
They are the sheep about to return back
to the fold again.
Now I say and repeat that I do
not know what makes them gods in a
peculiar sense.
Scripture teaches about it.
Thine they were, and thou gavest them to
me.
All thine are mine, and they come to
me, and I do not cast them out.
But while I do not know the mystery
that underlies all that, I do know how
we can locate these sheep that are to
be found, these prodigals that are to return
to themselves and to the Father's house.
Now I show you five marks tonight, that
mark such as these.
One is, and in giving you these, I
am not introducing anything that is not here.
I am letting the whole Bible talk, and
then letting human experience and Christian biography and
the knowledge, such small knowledge as I may
have of mankind and of the world.
Together I let these tell you, these five
marks, and I want you to notice them
and see if this means you.
Now the first mark of the chosen is
a great moral sensitivity.
These people are bothered.
They're bothered.
There are millions of people that are not
bothered spiritually.
They may be bothered, strained.
They usually take it out by having a
nervous break.
But I'm not talking tonight about tension.
I'm talking about people who are bothered, and
they have a great moral sensitivity.
It doesn't mean they're good necessarily.
It doesn't mean that.
But it means that they're sensitive in the
areas of moral things.
There is a little instrument which is known
to everybody, and they've not seen them, they've
at least heard about them, called the Geiger
counter.
Now the function of the Geiger counter is
to tell when there's any radioactive substance present.
If you take this Geiger counter and pass
it over an area where there's radioactivity of
any sort, even your wristwatch, anything that throws
off a tiny bit of radioactivity, that Geiger
counter will begin to make little noises.
It will go click, click, click, click.
And the more activity, the faster.
That's how they can locate anything that gives
off any, is radioactive, by this Geiger counter.
Now there are some people who are totally
without sensitivity to the presence of sin and
righteousness.
They're totally insensitive to it all.
You can pass their heart over it and
there's no click.
They do not see, nor feel, nor hear,
nor sense anything at all.
They're apathetic and callous and insensitive and feelingless.
I think that this would take in most
of the people of the world.
They're apathetic.
They're not against religion, they're not opposed to
the Church, but they're just calloused about it.
They're not against preachers and the gospel and
the Bible, but they're insensitive to the claims
of the Bible.
They're feelingless.
They do not have feeling about it all.
And when they come to die, they do
not panic and scream as the evangelists would
sometimes make out they do.
Maybe some do, but most of them don't.
Instead of panicking and screaming, they die peacefully
in their nest, as the book of Job
says.
And they die just as they live, feelingless
and calloused.
If by any chance these morally sensitive people
come to die, they would be the ones
that would panic, because God has given them
this most precious treasure, this sensitivity in the
presence of deity, this sensitivity in the presence
of sin and righteousness.
And such persons as that are bothered.
They're disturbed.
They're worried.
And instead of being apathetic, they're deeply concerned.
Now, that doesn't mean they're converted yet.
It doesn't mean they've come home.
It doesn't mean they've given up their sins
and turned to Christ.
But it does mean that the God who
laid his hand on them has given them
the same thing that he's given, that scientists
have given to the Geiger counter.
He's given them an ability to feel and
respond in the presence of God and of
divine things.
But to those who don't have it, sin
is just sin, that's all.
And the rose of Sharon is just another
flower, and heaven is just something you talk
about when you're sad, and the gospel is
something that you've heard about, and so on.
But the morally sensitive person, the one about
whom it can say it all, and no
man knoweth the Father but the Son, and
nobody knows the Father except the one's son.
Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah, flesh and
blood, and all that the Father giveth me
shall come to me.
This is the group.
I well remember as a young fellow.
I certainly was no saint, God knows, and
I was a distress and disturbance to my
mother.
But I did have this sensitivity there.
Now, where it came from, I don't know,
for I only know one person that was
praying for me, just one.
He lived next door to us, and I
didn't think he was too good a Christian,
but he was some kind of Christian, and
he did pray, I understand.
At least he tried to talk to me
about the Lord once, and I assumed he
prayed for me.
So I don't know where the moral sensitivity
came from, but I do know that I
was sensitive to spiritual things.
I'd say some things that I can't very
well say because all these sermons are taped
and they go around over the world, and
I don't want what I would say to
go around over the world, so I'll omit
it, and I shouldn't even, I should have
omitted saying that I was going to omit
it if I'd want to be right about
it all.
But I'm thinking of others who were better
than I, far and away better than I,
and they're not saved even to this day.
But the Lord, by his marvelous grace, laid
hold on me.
I thank him with all of my heart
for the fear that I had in my
heart, and I thank him with all of
my soul for the anxiety and the state
of being bothered about my soul that God
in his kindness gave me.
The second mark that I note is a
mighty moral discontent.
I've quoted here before what Browning said about
certain people.
He said, "'They are finished and finite clods,'
he said about a man.
A finished and finite clod, untroubled by a
spark.
And that was Esau.
I guess you couldn't describe a man better,
Esau better, than to call him a finished
and finite clod.
He was a clod, that's what his name
meant, the red clay.
He was finite, as we all are, and
he was finished.
The terrible part about Esau was that God
was done with him.
That's the terrible part about Esau.
If I thought if God were to come
to me tonight and notify me that he
was ready now to put a label on
me and say, this is finished, I would
not be a happy man, I would be
a man deeply grieved, because I'm not satisfied,
I hope God isn't.
Esau was satisfied, and that was his trouble.
Esau was a contented man.
I think Esau was rather a good man.
We paint Esau anything but a good man,
and we make him a great hairy gorilla,
but he was anything but a hairy gorilla.
He was a twin brother of Jacob.
And you can't ask me, you can't get
me to believe that one fellow should be
a great, dark, ugly, should be a very
gracious, kindly fellow.
Not so.
One fellow did have more fur on his
arms than the other, as the artists have
painted.
Simple truth is that Esau's only vice was
that he was contented, and Jacob's only virtue
was that he was not.
You will find, if you read their story,
that Esau was a better man than Jacob.
He didn't get into problems, and
he didn't cheat the way Jacob did, and
he didn't hide behind his father's back the
way Jacob did.
He was a better man, but he was
a contented man.
He had no moral discontent in his heart,
and that was his trouble.
Jacob's only virtue was that he was not
a contented man.
For as a virtue in a pasture field
may be a vice in the kingdom of
God, that is complacency.
But the man upon whom God has laid
his hand becomes discontented.
The purpose of all books on how to
have peace of mind is to get you
contented, get you adjusted so that you are
well contented with your lot in life.
But the purpose of the Holy Ghost is
not to make you contented, but to stir
within you a longing that's not fulfilled.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness, for they shall be filled.
The hungry man is the man that will
get food, and the thirsty man is the
man that will get drink.
Paris Reidhead says that the weak preachers are
out trying to get people to eat food
that they don't want, and drink water that
they have no consciousness of desiring.
He's perfectly right.
If you have a sense, if you're bothered
by religion, if there is a longing after
God inside your heart, if there is a
deep dissatisfaction with your present spiritual and moral
state, blessed are you.
Flesh and blood has not revealed this unto
you, but my Father which is in heaven.
If you have a hunger after the bread
of life, blessed are you, because there are
thousands just as good as you are that
don't have it at all.
There are thousands that are better men than
you, and women that don't have it, that
are kinder, that are more thoughtful of others,
and have the common little human virtues that
we admire, and yet they do not have
this moral discontent.
And for that reason, like Esau, they will
be cast aside, and their birthright removed, because
they have no discontent.
And then the third is a consuming hunger.
I have mentioned that partly.
But this consuming hunger is something without which
there can be no manifestation, and there can
be no transformation.
This consuming hunger, this longing after God, you
remember that Julian of Norwich prayed for the
wound of contrition, and the wound of compassion,
and the wound of earnest longing after God.
This is a mark of the Christian, the
mark of the one who will be a
Christian, the mark of the one who will
become a Christian, the mark of the prodigal
who is about to get up and start
home, the mark of the sheep that is
about to be found.
This beautiful pining of holy desire, this yearning
and longing after God, and that is followed
by a deep humility, a deep humility.
There is so much in religion these days
that is not humble.
It's human.
It's Christianity.
But the mark of God's chosen, one mark,
is that of deep humility.
And those who have it have renounced self
-trust.
They don't intend to try to make themselves
good.
They don't intend to try to make themselves
acceptable to God.
They've renounced self-trust, and they've seen themselves
as they are, and no man who sees
himself as he is can ever be proud.
But a man can be perfectly happy about
himself, and quite satisfied.
He has learned a language of humility, and
if you praise him for something, he'll say,
well, it wasn't anything.
But in his deep heart there's great pride
there.
But those upon whom the hand of God
has fallen, the blessed ones, the happy ones,
they may not be saved yet, they may
not be in the kingdom, but in a
sense that is not true of others, they
are those that God will give to his
son.
They have a deep humility, and they know
that they're no good, and with Paul they
say, I'm chief of sinners, and I'm not
worthy to be called a Christian.
And then lastly, there is the limitless receptivity
to God.
Now, everybody's receptive to something, you know.
Everybody's receptive to something, and the advertisers well
know that.
They know that the world is going to
be receptive.
That is, you and I are sponges.
We can take it in, and it's amazing
how much we can take in.
There are men now wintering, or just have
been wintering, in the watering places of the
world that made money on the fact and
got rich on the fact that you and
I have receptivity.
We're receptive to ideas, and we're receptive to
pressure, and we're receptive to psychological push.
We're receptive to it.
Everybody's receptive.
The woman who reads the ads and sees
they're selling something with three cents off, she'll
burn six cents worth of gasoline to go
down and buy it in order to save
money.
She's receptive to those things, you see.
Receptivity is everywhere, but one of the mysterious
signs of identification is that some people are
receptive to God.
God is here searching, and searching for the
receptive heart.
And when his gospel falls on the receptive
mind, there is an immediate response.
When his gospel falls on the heart of
the man who is not receptive, there's no
response at all.
When the rain falls on the sidewalk, it
lies there until it's evaporated and goes back
from whence it came.
When the rain falls on the fruitful field,
it fructifies it and makes it fruitful, and
it brings forth grain.
And so, when the gospel falls on certain
minds, there is no response at all, except
an aesthetic response, maybe, or poetic response, but
there's no moral response.
You're receptive to something.
Are you receptive to the voice of God?
If so, then, I say, blessed are you,
because there are so many of which it's
not so.
God is here searching, and he's looking for
the receptive heart, and he's passing his Geiger
counter over people, and he does it all
the time.
And there is no evidence, when he passes
it over some people's hearts, that they know
God is present at all.
But when he passes it over other hearts,
there's a disturbance inside.
There's a grief, there's a sorrow, there's a
longing, there's a turning against self, there is
a turning toward the cross, there are the
beginnings of repentance, because they've got that receptivity
there.
And I believe that the Holy Spirit is
constantly passing over us, constantly passing the truth
over us.
And I pray, I would rather die, I
tell you frankly that I would rather die,
I would rather walk out here on the
sidewalk and drop over and be gathered up
by the authorities and carried away, and thus
end my earthly life, and to grow to
lose my sensitivity, and lose my receptivity, and
lose my humility, and lose my hunger, and
lose my discontent with my present state.
God has a few that are insatiable.
You can't satisfy them.
I grieve, I grieve over the playboy Christians
that are satisfied.
They're happy back-slapping fellows who think that
Jesus Christ is simply wonderful.
But there is no receptivity to God there,
no longing after God, no deep yearning for
holiness, no consuming hunger to be like Jesus,
no awful devouring discontent.
I'm afraid that on our continent we have
this kind of Christians in vast numbers.
We've got to pray, we've got to pray
that God will have his way in the
whirlwind and the storm.
But you say, if God has elected and
chosen, why should we pray?
I answer that I do not believe that
God has chosen from the foundation of the
world certain ones, and they can't escape and
reject other ones, and they can't come.
But I do believe that as God moves
among men, some respond, and while they're not
yet converted, maybe, they have this quality in
them which God calls them.
He says, they're mine.
They are mine.
No man can come except the Father draws
him.
No man can come.
So when God finds this moral sensitivity there,
when God finds this deep discontent and this
consuming hunger after God, when he finds this
deep humility and limitless receptivity to eternal things,
God says he's mine in a peculiar way.
God begins to move him and crowd him
toward Christ.
We've got to pray, we've got to pray
that circumstances or some mystery of God will
come to greater numbers, and that instead of
the satisfied Christians that we have now and
the satisfied religious people that we have now,
we'll have people who are troubled.
When Peter preached the gospel at Pentecost, people
were troubled deeply.
The arrows of God's truth went into their
hearts, and they became spiritually sensitive to a
point where they cried out, Oh, men and
brethren, what shall we do?
It's this that we need.
We need it as a baptism.
We need a cloud, a rain from God
that will find these people and will bring
them to Jesus.
We need it, and we need it desperately,
and we need it here in this church.
Now, what can I do for myself if
I am not a Christian?
But I do find that I have a
great sensitivity toward spiritual things.
I do find that I am not contented
with my state.
I do find that I have a great
hunger to know God.
I do find that there is a receptivity
to the voice of the gospel.
What should I do?
Repent and seek the healing sorrow.
Repent and seek the healing sorrow, for there
is a healing sorrow.
There is a sorrow that brings us to
repentance never to be repented of.
It is the healing sorrow.
I would rather be no Christian at all
than to be the finished and finite type
of Christian, untroubled by a spark of desire,
untroubled by a spark of longing, untroubled by
a spark of sensitivity.
I pray God may keep his longing.
Men come to me and they say, I
am troubled, I am troubled, I am not
where I ought to be, I am seeking,
I am longing after God.
Have you got a light for me?
I usually begin by telling them, You are
the least of my troubles.
You are the least of my troubles, and
I believe you are the least of God's
troubles, that you should be disturbed and worried
over your spiritual condition.
For there are not many that are, and
the ones that are invariably go forward to
new heights and new depths and plumb new
abysses of glory and rise to new heights
of glory.
What I am worried about is not those
who come and say, I am in trouble,
my heart aches, I long for God, what
shall I do?
My grief is for those who can shake
your hand and smile in your face and
never feel a longing, have never experienced a
twinge of moral discontent, never know receptivity, so
go their ways, figuring out their lives, keeping
generally within the bracket of popular Christianity, but
never seeking after God.
Oh, that God would bring seekers among us,
and that he would make us seekers, and
that he would make you a seeker, and
if you are not a Christian, that he
would give you the healing sorrow of repentance
now, and if you are a Christian, that
he would fill your heart with a great
longing, that would rather seek God than have
the world or anything the world can offer.
Now let us pray.
Maybe the Holy Spirit has spoken to some.
If he has, I want to pray for
you, and will you raise your hand so
I will know you want prayer, anybody present
here tonight, God bless you, I see you
back there, anybody else would say pray for
me, Mr. Tozer, who else, yes, I see
you too, and you, who else here tonight,
anybody up on the balcony here who would
like to have us pray for them, just
put up their hand.
Father, we pray for these men and women
who have raised their hand tonight, and have
by it asked us to pray for them.
O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
Lord God of our Savior Jesus Christ, we
pray that thou will take these and lead
them, and