Welcome to from the pulpit and classic sermons.
Each week we bring you a different message
from some of history's greatest speakers in the
Christian faith and powerful sermons for modern preachers
too.
This week we have A.W. Tozer with
his message the voice of the Holy Spirit.
I want to read from the fifth, John
16, 7 down to 11.
Nevertheless, I tell you the truth.
It is expedient for you that I go
away.
For if I go not away, the Comforter
will not come unto you.
But if I depart, I will send him
unto you.
And when he is come, he will reprove
the world of sin and of righteousness and
of judgment, of sin because they believe not
on me, of righteousness because I go to
my Father and ye see me no more,
or of judgment because the Prince of this
world is judged.
In Revelation 2 and 3, I'll not read
them, seven times the text is repeated.
He that hath an ear, let him hear
what the Spirit is saying unto the churches.
Then in the last chapter of Revelation, verse
17, the Spirit and the bride say, Come.
And let him that heareth say, Come.
And let him that is athirst come.
And whosoever will, let him take to the
water of life freely.
Let us pray.
Our Father, in us, in our flesh, dwelleth
no good thing.
In our minds dwell no power of persuasion.
Without thee we can do nothing.
But with thee we can do all things.
So now, Father, we turn away, as though
we were taking an axe away from a
little boy and giving it to a man,
as though we were shoving aside an amateur
and letting a master sit down for the
instrument.
We shove aside the man that men know,
and we invite the man Christ Jesus to
speak and to effectively confirm the word by
the Holy Ghost.
Help us tonight, Lord.
Tomorrow may be too late.
We ask it in Jesus' name.
Now, let me say again that the world
we inhabit is a lost world, and the
inhabitants of the world are lost.
The inhabitants of the world are lost, not
in any poetic sense of the word, but
they are lost by a mighty, calamitous visitation
of woe too grave, too terrible to describe.
And to make it worse still, this lostness
is inside the heart.
You see, there are two ways of getting
lost down here.
There is the way that a child may
sometimes get lost in the city, go around
the block and cross the street and forget
where it is.
It is geographically lost or physically lost, but
it knows it's lost, and its lostness is
external.
Then there is the confirmed amnesia victim that
is lost in his mind.
He does not remember who he is, how
old he is, where he was born, what
he did, does not remember anything up to
a given moment yesterday or the day before.
That is a worse kind of lostness than
the lostness of a child that wanders down
the street and can't find his way home.
For a dozen policemen will help with the
child, and the child will advertise to high
heaven that it's lost.
But the amnesia victim doesn't know that he's
lost, and his closest and dearest friend, his
own wife, can come and speak to him,
and he's courteous but completely detached and indifferent.
He's lost inside.
And to add still to the terror of
this situation, the inhabitants of the world are
not only lost, and not only lost inwardly,
but worst of all is that they scarcely
know that they are lost.
Now, that's the state we're in.
And yet there are voices that are intriguing
us, and it gives me great pleasure to
say, and this is basic to the Christian
message, that while the world is a lost
world, it is not yet a forsaken world.
God is speaking in many voices, and there
are voices that intrigue us because God has
not forsaken his lost world.
He said, and cried, Adam, where art thou?
You'll find all through the Bible the voices
of intrigue, of invitation, of alarm.
Oh, every one that is thirsty, come ye
to the water.
He that hath no money, come ye, buy
wine and milk without money and without price.
Come unto me, all ye that labor and
are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest.
Now, those are only samples of the many
hundreds of verses that are sounding and echoing
through the scriptures.
But the clearest, loudest, most easily distinguishable voice
is the voice of the Spirit.
And his voice gives grave and serious meaning
to any other and to all other voices.
For it were not for the presence of
the Spirit uttering his voice through the consciences
of the world, no other voice would have
any significance whatsoever.
It would all be sounding by some tinkling
cymbal, giving forth no meaning.
For Jesus, our Lord, tells us here of
the Holy Spirit's work in the world.
And he says in the text, when he
is come, when he is come, when the
writer wrote the song that Comforter is come,
he set in fairly good hymnody one of
the great facts of the world, that the
Comforter is here.
And the Comforter came to confirm Christ's words
in Christ's works and Christ's person.
Now, the words of the Lord Jesus Christ
were words so lofty and so astounding as
those of no other religious teacher.
Christ was not the only religious teacher.
We have had the great religious teachers of
the East, and we have them still on
down to Mrs. Eddy and Father Divine.
There have been Christ's saying, lo here and
lo there.
There have been men saying, I have the
voice of God, I am speaking for God.
And they have established their religion, some major,
some minor, some long forgotten, some still going
strong throughout the earth.
But the words of Jesus were in a
task by themselves.
The claims that he made brand him immediately
as being God or an idiot.
The claims that he made outclassed and outstripped
the claims of all the other religious teachers
in the world.
Destroy this temple, and in three days I
will raise it up, he said, of his
own body.
I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven.
Before Abraham was, I am.
Then shall they see the Son of Man
coming in the clouds of heaven, and before
him shall be gathered all nations.
And he shall separate them as the sheep
from the goats.
Those are but a sampling of the astounding
words of Jesus and the claims that he
made.
If you believe not that I am he,
you shall die in your sin.
Then God has given all judgment into my
hand.
I will not at this, for the day
will come when they that are in the
graves shall hear my voice, and shall come
forth.
Now nobody ever talked like that, and many
who heard him did not believe him.
But he said, when the Holy Ghost is
come, and the Holy Ghost came as a
silent, penetrating, immediate witness.
Now there is no contradiction here when I
say that the Holy Spirit's voice entreats us.
And then I also say he came as
a silent, penetrating, immediate witness.
For silence is sometimes more eloquent than sound.
And the penetrating stillness of the Holy Ghost
is more terrible than the loudest shout from
the housetop.
And the Holy Ghost is here confirming the
words of Jesus.
That is why the critics are all in
confusion.
That is why when a man becomes a
doubter and begins to pull the word of
God apart, God makes a fool of him
immediately.
He puts long, hairy ears on him and
turns him out to pasture.
And he writes himself some books.
And standing solemn-faced as a barn owl,
he says things to students in his classes
that would bring hell down in roars of
laughter.
And yet he doesn't know that he's being
funny.
For God has withdrawn from him the inner
life, and he is speaking as a fool
speaks.
Because the silent, penetrating voice of the Holy
Ghost is not heard in his words.
He hears it no more.
But the Holy Spirit is here to confirm
to the consciences of men the truth of
the words of Jesus.
And then the works of Jesus.
There was no denying that a mighty miracle
worker had been there.
He did raise the dead, he did heal
the sick, he did cleanse the leper, he
did turn the water into wine, he did
make the bread to few pieces of bread
to feed the multitude.
He did do these wonderful things, and there
was no denying.
The Pharisees didn't try to deny it.
They could not, seeing the man that was
healed standing among them, they couldn't say anything.
You cannot deny a fact that stands and
stares you in the face, that you can
touch and feel and push around and investigate.
You can't possibly deny such a fact, and
they didn't try it.
They simply said, he does his works in
the power of the devil.
Somebody was doing miracle works there, and when
he is come, the Holy Ghost came, that
he might confirm and verify the divine quality
of the works of Jesus.
And prove him not to be one more
miracle peddler, but indeed the very God who
had made the world and could make it
do what he pleased for it to do.
And then there was the person of the
Lord Jesus Christ, the most significant, the most
telling person that ever lived in the world
was Jesus.
I think that could generally be agreed among
all peoples of the world, even the Mohammedans
might admit that.
And certainly the great religions of the East
would admit it, that he stands out in
history, head and shoulders the sole above all
the great.
And now how are we to dispose of
him?
What's the world to do with him?
What are religious-minded people to do with
this mighty person that stood taller than the
tall pine tree at the beginning of the
Christian era?
Well, the Holy Ghost came to do a
confirmatory work and erased him from the dead.
And now since the Spirit has come, this
mysterious witness has come.
Christ is no longer on trial.
And it's no longer a question of was
Jesus the Son of God?
All that is beside the point and irrelevant.
And there's never any such thing anymore as
a sincere question, was Jesus the Son of
God?
The Holy Ghost has taken out of the
realm of polemics the idea of Christ's deity
and has put it in the realm of
morals.
And this silent, immediate witness, this penetrating voice
in the consciences of men, tell us that
this person was indeed the very Son of
God.
It was very noticeable, wasn't it, that as
soon as Peter was filled with the Holy
Ghost, he immediately rose and preached what he
had never preached before.
Namely, that this man whom he crucified is
the Christ of God.
That God raised him from the dead and
he is the Lord and the Christ of
God.
And as soon as Paul was filled with
the Holy Ghost, you will find that Paul
in the 9th chapter of Acts went doing
exactly the same thing.
He reasoned and proved the scriptures that Jesus
was the Son of God, that the coming
Messiah was to be the Son of God,
and that that man was Jesus, so that
the Holy Spirit witness is a witness to
the Lordship and deity of the Son of
God.
So my friends, remember this, that Jesus Christ
needs no more of your defense.
Jesus Christ needs no more books written to
prove that he was God.
Jesus Christ is no longer on trial.
He needs no advocate pleading his cause before
the unfriendly court of the world.
He needs no witness to rise and say,
I know he was the Son of God.
He needs no reasoner with his fine logic
to prove it by history that Jesus Christ
was the Son of God.
The proof of the sonship of Jesus has
been removed from the realm of the intellect
and placed where it always has belonged, in
the realm of morals.
And the Holy Ghost has put it there.
When he has come, when he has come
and he came and he is here, he
may be grieved and he may have to
withdraw partly from some places, but he is
here and he is here as a silent,
holy witness, more eloquent than all the noise
of the world, saying this man was indeed
the Son of God.
I say that Jesus Christ is no longer
on trial before men, but men are now
on trial before him.
And strange and wonderful as it may be,
he who once stood before Pilate now makes
Pilate to stand before him.
And he who pleaded his cause before the
unfriendly world now sits and judges that same
world.
And he's transferred the religious question to the
heart.
There is a throne where one sits, where
never a man can come.
And there is on that throne a man,
wonderful paradox.
The long claws that stretched out to get
him and take him to the cross can
never reach as high as that throne where
he sits.
And yet he sits there in the form
of a man so that we would recognize
him instantly in the shape of a man
and know that this is a man and
he's there invested with full authority and full
power and with full right of judgment.
And there is a holy witness present who
in all things speaks for this man who
sits on the throne.
It is expedient for you that I go
away, for if I go not away he
will not come.
But if I go I will send him
unto you and when he is come he
will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness
and judgment.
I think that we ought to remember that
however we treat the Holy Spirit's warnings, we
treat Jesus Christ himself.
However we treat the Spirit's presence, we treat
the Lord himself.
We ought to get that in mind.
Christ the Lord is not some faraway being,
but he is mysteriously, wondrously present now in
our midst in the person of the Holy
Spirit.
When he is come he will convince the
world concerning, and he is here now convincing
the world that the fate of the individual
man does not depend upon historic evidence.
Now with all my heart I believe in
the historicity of the gospels.
It is not a subterfuge to hide away
from the belief in the historicity of the
gospels.
I believe they're historically correct.
I believe that they can be confirmed in
the format of history.
I believe everything that's here is historically true.
But let me point out something to you
my friends.
If faith depended upon a man knowing enough
history in its right and proper context, and
being familiar enough with the writings of the
historians of the world, to arrive at a
scholarly belief in the deity of Jesus, then
there could only be a relatively few people
anywhere in the world safe.
If in order to believe in Jesus Christ
I had to know the historic facts of
Rome and Greece and Palestine and Syria and
Egypt, and if I had to be able
to go to the great tombs and search
for myself and discover the historic truth, and
then having discovered that historic truth, I had
to know enough of the laws of evidence
to know whether it proved him to be
the Son of God or not, then I
would have to be a scholar, a logician,
and a lawyer to arrive at belief in
the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But the Holy Ghost came to take the
deity of Christ out of the hands of
the scholars and put it in the consciences
of men.
The Holy Ghost came to lift it out
of the history books and put it on
the flaky tablets of the human heart.
So you can go to the jungles where
men cannot read and write, where there were
nothing but a G-string, and you can
begin to preach Jesus Christ and sin, and
the Holy Ghost will witness the sin and
righteousness and judgment, and he will confirm the
truth of Christ, words and works, and person
to the most ignorant jungle heathen.
And that means they've never heard of Rome,
never heard of Greece, never heard of Pilate,
never heard of Caesar, never knew the city
of Rome ever existed, doesn't know that Palestine
exists, doesn't know where Jerusalem is, never heard
of David, never heard of Abraham, knows nothing
about the Reformation, and yet you can go
missionary and simply tell the story, and they'll
begin to tremble and sweat with the knowledge
that they're sinners, and they'll believe in Jesus
Christ, and having believed, they'll be transformed and
turned inside out, and made honest and good
and clean and humble and right, and they'll
learn to read, and they'll begin to sing
the sinful gospels, they'll form themselves into a
church, and the great strong elemental fellows born
of the jungle and the wild winds and
the storms will become deacons and elders and
preachers in that church.
And they have no scholarship, no knowledge of
history, no ability to weigh evidence.
They know nothing about relevance and irrelevance and
the laws of evidence.
No, when he came, he took Paul Emmix
away from the scholars and gave it back
to the human soul, so that now, my
faith in the deity of Jesus does not
rest upon my ability to comb through history
and arrive at logical conclusions concerning historic facts.
The Holy Ghost blazes in on me like
a lightning flash, binds me with the wonder
of it.
If ye are willing to do his will,
ye shall know the doctrine whether I speak
of God or not, said Jesus our Lord
when the Holy Ghost had come.
And he is here.
I think that this is one of the
most important truths that can be taught in
the world today.
And yet, so far as I know, I'm
the one single lone individual that's preaching.
There may be others, certainly in the spirit
of it and in the whole weight and
drift of it.
My friend Raymond Hill agrees with me on
this.
He talks over these things and we're one
in it.
But we're one or two or three at
most in the midst of a vast cloud
and sea of witnesses that are prepared to
make the deity of Christ rest upon historical
evidences when the Holy Ghost has taken it
away from that realm altogether and has put
it as a burning point in the human
conscience.
So the problem today is a moral problem
altogether.
It's not an intellectual problem at all.
Now don't let's be too humble here.
Don't let's like a lot of the poor
misguided people do.
Admit with a wry face that we're a
bunch of dumbbells, barely know our letter.
Augustine was not a dumbbell.
Luther wrote his theses first in Latin and
then in German.
Wrote to the Pope and wrote it first
in Latin for the Pope and then wrote
it in German to give to the people.
No, no.
You don't have to pump your head out
so it's a blessed vacuum in order to
be a Christian.
And there's much use for the human mind,
so keep yours.
There's much use for the human brain, so
take care of it, keep it cool.
And educate it all you can.
There's lots of use for it.
But I repeat, the use for it will
not be in the realm of divine evidence.
The Holy Ghost takes care of that.
The Holy Ghost is here to confirm the
person of Jesus.
And whatever the Holy Ghost says stands forever.
And whatever he does now, the judgment will
approve and confirm.
We come into a church like this, oh
we get here some way.
If we got here, ain't here to meet
a girl or a boy.
Maybe we came here hoping we would.
Maybe we came here to get a parent
off our neck.
Maybe we were just wandering by and wondering
what was all about.
Maybe it's just a habit.
Any one of the 25 reasons might be
dredged up out of our memory right now.
And we think we can just come in
and go away again and there'll be no
harm done, like going to a PTA meeting.
Say, I'm a little bored, but I'll sit
through it.
What's it all about?
And when it's all over, you go on
either better or worse.
My friends, a concept like that ignores one
of the most vitally important facts in the
world.
And that is that wherever the Lord's people
meet, the Holy Ghost is there, confirming the
word and the work and the person of
Jesus, and demanding moral action, so that the
man never knows when he goes to a
gospel meeting.
He never knows when the last shredded excuse
will be stripped from his naked, trembling conscience
forever.
For the Holy Ghost is not foolish.
Sometimes preachers are.
I heard this terrible thing recently, this terrible
thing.
A man, and I think he was a
minister, he had a good sense of humor.
And he, knowing the Bible, he learned how
to make the scriptures always say the right
thing.
Payoff line, as we say.
And when there'd be a conversation on, he'd
turn it around so that a world, a
flip of the verbal tail that made people
laugh at all the scripture quotations, one day
came to die.
And they said to him, well, you must
find great comfort in the scriptures.
And they began to quote the scriptures to
them, and he said, don't, don't, don't quote
it, don't quote it, don't quote it.
There isn't a verse you can quote that
I haven't made the subject of a joke.
And now, when I need it, it means
nothing to me.
The Holy Ghost isn't joking.
People may be, and it's gotten in this
country now, in evangelical circles, where a man
without a sense of humor can't get to
first base.
He's ought to be funny.
Let's go hear that jaybird.
He's funny as a crutch.
The very fact that Dr. Budwell, you can
call a preacher a jaybird, proves he's lost
his character.
And men may play, but the Holy Ghost
isn't dead earnest.
Jesus Christ went away dead earnest, and he
sat down in utter solemn sincerity, by the
presence of the majesty on high.
And he sent that wave of silvery light,
containing in himself all the essence of the
Father and the Son.
Down he came in the form of a
dove, and in it fire sat upon each
of them.
And they knew that Jesus was the Son
of God, they knew it instantly.
They didn't know it while he was among
them, but they knew it then.
They didn't know it for sure, but they
knew it now, that when he has come,
he will convince men concerning how the Holy
Spirit will not witness to minor matters.
Another important thing I'm saying here tonight, you
can't get the Holy Ghost involved in minor
things.
Then let's reach up and pull out a
grotesque illustration out of the air, and let's
put it like this.
Let's imagine last fall, when two great and
good men were running for the presidency.
I insist upon them, both great and good
men, Stevenson and Eisenhower.
And these two men were running against each
other for the presidency.
Suppose that in their speeches, suppose that Eisenhower
had insisted upon attacking Stevenson's baldness.
And let us suppose that Stevenson, paying thousands
of dollars for time on the air, would
get up and in his brilliant witty way,
would have spent a whole half hour talking
about Eisenhower's wretched state in time.
Neither man could have been elected.
He was elected a Chinaman by a right
-hand vote.
For in serious and important matters, you deal
with basic principles.
And they both tried to do it.
And they dealt with domestic problems, foreign relations,
taxes.
They dealt with problems that go to the
roots of American living.
You suppose the Holy Ghost is any less
wise than politicians?
And yet we want the Holy Spirit to
help us while we talk about trivialities.
That's why I ask corn to debate over
things that don't matter.
That's why they'll never get me concerned with
the little niceties of prophecy.
And that is why the Holy of Baptized
by Immersion will never condemn those who don't
believe in that vote of baptism.
That is why I will not engage in
controversy over eternal security.
And that is why you cannot get me
involved, because I want the Holy Ghost to
help me, and he won't help me fool.
He'll only help me when I'm serious.
And the Spirit of God is here.
Now a lot of people try to escape
by pretending.
They pretend that they are seekers.
They say, I'm a seeker after life.
Could you look in the glass and say,
I'm a seeker after life?
When he has come, he will convince.
And then you say, I'm a seeker after
life.
Your problem is not lack of life.
Your problem is a moral problem.
And yet men try to hide and escape
by pretending.
They say, I don't know which form of
baptism.
He did not say, when the Holy Ghost
has come, he will convince that the Baptists
are right.
Nor did he say, when the Holy Ghost
has come, he will convince the world that
infant baptism is correct.
He said, when the Holy Ghost has come,
he'll talk about three vital things, sin and
righteousness and judgment.
And he insists on moral sincerity.
As I rode along tonight on the bus
coming up here, I thought this radical thing
to myself, modified it a little, even my
own head.
But I thought, I'm not sure that God
hasn't got more respect for a sincere devil
than he has for an insincere religion.
If a devil is a devil and he
hates God and loves sin, and he's sincere
about it, God will reject him forever from
his presence.
But he'll say, there goes somebody at least
I can respect.
He means what he says.
Now, would thou art hot or cold?
Because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot or
cold I'll spill thee out of my mouth.
I say a sincere devil stands higher in
moral things than an insincere Christian or religious
person.
I'm not sure about baptism.
When I've settled on what mode of baptism
I want to be baptized with, I'll become
a Christian.
Liar!
You might as well know it.
That's insincere.
That's hypocrisy.
That's Phariseeism.
That's dodging the issue.
There's no truth there.
Some say, if I knew what church it
was, which church is it, Mr. Tell me
now.
I write me a letter, which church is
it?
Roman church?
Greek church?
Protestant church?
Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Nazarene, Pentecostal?
What church is it?
Have they never heard the voice?
Have they never been still enough to hear
the mysterious witness that penetrates to their conscience
and says, sin and righteousness and judgment?
If they had ever heard the voice, and
had ever been sincere in response to it,
they'd never have any reason to ask such
questions.
Now, these three vital things, he presses them
home, for they're critical, and they're eternal, and
they're important.
These three vital things, sin and righteousness and
judgment.
Sin because they believe not on me.
The one belief is the sign and the
proof of sin.
Now, let me say this again from a
little different angle.
That faith is also a moral thing.
I've said this before, and you that know
me will have heard me said before, and
probably wonder why I'm saying it now.
But if you wonder why I'm saying it
now, then you didn't know what I meant
when I said it before.
I believe that we are where we are
in evangelical circles because of a basic misunderstanding
of faith.
We think that faith is a conclusion drawn
from the facts.
And out in the world, that is so.
But in the realm of the spirit, it
is not so.
Saving faith is not a conclusion drawn from
facts presented.
Saving faith is a gift of God to
a penitent man.
And there's where we are.
A young fellow gets down on his knees,
nothing, anybody will do that.
Go anywhere and you get them on their
knees.
Go down among the rattlesnake handlers in the
mountains and you'll find them there.
Go over to Arabia and you'll find them
down five times a day on a prayer
mat.
Anybody will go to his knees if you
don't make any demands of him.
It's a simple matter to get people forward,
it's a simple matter to get them to
their knees.
So while they're on their knees, somebody rushes
in with a marked testament and sticks a
text under their nose and says, Who said
it?
You believe God, yes?
Well then do you believe the text?
Yes, I must because I believe God.
Well then get up and testify.
And he gets up with an intellectual faith
that has not saving in it, or any
saving quality.
That's where we are now.
It takes three works of grace to put
a man in this day where the first
beginnings of salvation used to put him in
olden times.
Well, you convince the world concerning sin.
When I was growing up, they were telling
me this little thing.
Oh, how I thank God I've been a
rebel all my life, and a skeptic all
my life.
If I hadn't been, I might have been
pastor of a big church in Ohio.
I could have been.
You know, don't hurt anybody, and don't make
any moral demands on them.
Kiss the baby, pat everybody, eat cake with
them, drink a proper amount of English tea,
and don't hurt anybody's feelings, and thunder against
modernism.
Take a man dead fifty years, rip him
to pieces, and prove that he was a
scoundrel, because he didn't believe the margins of
the Schofield Bible.
I could have had a big church, brother,
and written a taddy.
Sure, I had sense enough to know that
way back then.
But I thank God I've been a rebel
all my life, and still am.
And I'm in rebellion against that kind of
teaching that would pick chickens out of the
shallow and let them die, and against that
kind of practice that would take over the
work of the Holy Ghost and crowd him
out and retire him.
This is the age of the superannuated Holy
Ghost.
We've retired him and said, thanks, we have
our Bible, good King James translation, and we
won't need you till the Millennium.
And the Holy Spirit is a marginal annotation,
and is taken care of by a few
proof texts and forgotten.
But he won't be forgotten like that.
He holds your faith in his.
He used to say, the problem today is
not the sin question, the problem is the
son question.
And if you will believe in the son,
why the matter of sin is all taken
care of.
I heard one man, who had better been
doing something else at the time, I recommend
hoeing in the garden, but he said this,
he said, sin has no more meaning to
God.
On Calvary, sin beat itself to death, and
perished.
And now, sin has no meaning to God
since Calvary.
He ought to have been raising tulums, not
preaching the gospel.
For he was a good man, talking like
a blooming idiot.
The problem never has been the son question.
The problem has been the sin question, from
the day he stretched forth her hand in
an evil hour.
He gave also to her husband, and he
did eat.
And when the sin question is settled, the
son question comes leaping in, happily solved.
And if you will be willing to do
the will of God, you shall know that
Jesus is the son of God.
And you won't have to read long books
to prove it.
It's all there.
Now, not only sin, but righteousness, the voice
of the Holy Spirit.
Righteousness, because I go to my father.
And the fact that he went to his
father is conspicuous proof of the world's condition.
For there was one righteous man in the
world, and he couldn't stay.
There was one righteous man, and he had
to leave.
He was too good to stay.
They hounded him out of the world.
Today, the more we become lightened, the less
welcome we are in society.
And our pitiful effort to make Christianity socially
acceptable is an effort that's worse than wasteful.
To make out of the cross a symbol,
and relegate its nails and thorns and blood
and terror and ostracism back to the hill
above Jerusalem, and forget that that same cross
is alive today wherever the gospel is preached,
is to commit a theological error as deadly
as ruthlessness.
And yet it's what we hear most of
the time.
That, oh, believe me, we know better now,
they don't crucify people now.
They don't crucify people now because they can
get along with them too easily.
There's too much collaboration between men who claim
to follow the crucified one and the people
who don't believe in the crucified one.
Wherever they can catch a Christ-like man,
they'll run for the nails and the hammer.
What do we need?
I don't pray for it.
I haven't the courage to pray for it.
But I'm here and I'm at God's disposal.
What we need in our day is to
have some more Christians crucified.
We need more persecution.
We need more of a social situation that
makes it dangerous to be a Christian.
But it isn't dangerous now.
It's quite the populous thing.
They use a preacher now for almost anything.
They can't cut a tape, so they have
to have a preacher there to cut the
tape.
They can't break ground for anything.
The latest dog pound at Water River has
to be there to say a prayer and
break the first steam shovel full, or shovel
full, while he looks up smirks at the
camera.
The ladies can't begin their campaign to drive
all the ground mold out of Cook County,
except they have a pastor there.
He's got to be there to mumble a
few words, smile, and look religious.
But nobody crucifies the old boy.
They get along with him, get along with
him.
But there was one righteous man, and he
couldn't stay.
Their faces went as black as steam, and
their countenance fell.
And they said, we won't be made moral
fools of by this man.
And they nailed him to the cross.
And the Holy Ghost is here to convince
the world concerning that unpardoned act, that act
of crucifying the world's only holy man.
That is, holy in the final, absolute sense
of the word.
Who was holy without being made holy.
There may be holy men now, and there
may be unrighteous men now.
But they're righteous men because they were made
righteous by the one who never was made
righteous.
Jesus Christ never was any less righteous than
he is now.
He never had to be washed or cleansed.
His baptism was never a baptism for cleansing.
When the Holy Ghost came upon him, it
came upon him as a dove, not as
fire.
There was no need for purgation.
The Bible never says Christ was baptized with
the Holy Ghost.
It says he was anointed.
Baptism was symbolic of cleansing.
Anointing was symbolic of office.
He was anointed without cleansing, for he never
was anything but clean.
The spotless Lamb of God.
And he was the one spotless man, and
he was the man that couldn't stay.
They pounded him out of the world.
Jesus said to the Pharisees when he lived
among them, You killed a prophet.
Now you build a monument.
But you're still guilty of killing them.
So we're now talking nice about Jesus, painting
his picture, saying nice things about him.
We have his blood on our hands as
a race.
He will convince the world of sin and
righteousness and judgment.
Now the prince of this world is judged,
Jesus said.
And the voice of the Spirit speaks to
the day of reckoning.
I was thinking how much better it would
be if we could have a choice.
We come to die, and if God could
give us a choice and say now you're
going to die within the next 12 hours,
I'll give you your choice.
Do you want to rise again?
Or do you want to stay forever in
the state of blessed unconsciousness?
And never rise again.
That's sheer imagination.
That could never happen.
For God has ordained that all men should
rise.
Some to righteousness and some to everlasting condemnation.
But if a man could have a choice,
every once in a while we read that
somebody in a fit of self-pity and
a variety of other sins will get a
gun, kill his wife and two or three
children, then kill himself.
Can't get at him.
Police can't get at him.
Can't punish him.
Coward ten times over.
So cowardly that probably hell won't even admit
him till he's washed a bit.
But if you could give that man an
opportunity and say listen, do you want to
rise?
Or shall we fix it so you'll never
need to wait while millenniums spend themselves?
What a relief for that man.
My God, my God, he cried.
I died with the sound of the gaspings
of my wife and children in my ears.
I died fleeing from it and I haven't
been able to get away from it.
And I hear it yet and hear the
sighs and see the blood.
Please, please let me go to sleep and
never wake again.
It would be a mighty convenient thing if
sinners never had to rise from the dead.
They'd all get burned, Caligula and Mussolini.
And some more of them wouldn't have it
in their power to stay.
It would be convenient for them.
But they that are in the grave shall
hear the voice of the Son of Man.
There's a judgment.
I believe in that judgment.
I believe that they've taken it away from
us in the hour in which we live.
And they've said it's ridiculous that God isn't
a bookkeeper.
And you can't conceive of God putting entries
in a book like a common clerk.
John Jones, 321 West 44th Place June 14,
1953, did commit the below-mentioned sin.
Say God's no clerk.
God isn't writing books.
Debit books.
Oh, how ignorant can we get and still
not drop dead?
Of course God isn't keeping that kind of
books.
Of course God isn't a clerk.
But every deed that ever has been committed
or ever will be committed from the beginning
to the world till the last man is
instantly now present before the eyes of God.
And God needs no clerks and no pens.
The omniscient God sees perfectly all that ever
was and all that is and all that
ever will be.
And without raising his eyebrows, he knows every
man's heartbeats and every man's thoughts and every
man's needs.
So judgment will be very easy for God.
Judgment won't be difficult for God.
Of course he puts it for us to
understand.
Books were opened and the dead were brought
forth and so on.
All that's to convince men.
But God doesn't need any help like that.
God already knows judgment, sin, and righteousness.
Now the spirit of God persists.
He'll keep on that penetrating, silent, eloquent voice
until the voice can no longer be heard.
Or until we listen and return.
And you know it still works.
The man who hears the gospel message and
believes it, really believes it, really turns to
the Lord Jesus Christ, there's still transforming power
in him.
You don't see much of it, but you
see some of it.
I won't mention names, but I'm thinking of
a young fellow.
I think he may be present here tonight.
He was this morning.
No, nobody looked at him twice.
Just one more boy, young fellow, all good
-looking and all that, but just one more
young fellow in the millions.
Brought it down the aisle here some, maybe
two months ago, and something happened to that
boy.
And the whole life is transformed.
Whole life is transformed.
Face looks different.
Better looking than ever.
The tone of his voice is different.
Everything is different.
And now he says, I'm going to quit
my job and get a job where I
can be at church.
Not that my job's all right, but take
me out of church and get a job
where I can be at church.
What happened to the fellow?
I mean, what could happen to everybody that
listens and hears the voice and believes and
turns?
Jesus Christ is still the miracle worker.
He still raises the dead Lazaruses out of
the grave.
He still raises the consciences of men out
of the deep mud of their past.
He still converts.
He still regenerates.
He still transforms.
He still makes Christians out of dead clods.
He still does.
Tragic that he doesn't do it more frequently.
Tragic that we hide from him in the
caves and pens of the earth.
Tragic that we hide among the trees of
the garden.
He that hath ears to hear says the
untreating voice.
He that hath ears to hear, let him
hear.
The spirit and the bride say come and
whosoever will, let him come and drink of
the water of life freely.
Humble thyself and the Lord will draw near
thee.
Humble thyself and his presence will cheer thee.
God will not walk with the proud nor
the scornful.
Humble thyself to walk with God.
Now the Holy Spirit is entreating you.
God's love entreats.
The blood of Jesus Christ eloquently entreats.
The spirit of God.
The world is lost, but the world is
not finished.
You've been listening to the From the Pulpit
in Classic Sermons series.
This week you heard A.W. Tozer with
his message, The Voice of the Holy Spirit.
Tune in next week to hear Tony Evans
with a message from this year's National Religious
Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tennessee.
On From the Pulpit in Classic Sermons.