The two sermons that Dr. Tozer refers to
on this cassette as having previously preached are
unfortunately unavailable.
Tonight I want to read that text again.
We've read it, you know, variously.
I've read it, and we've read it responsibly,
and we've read it variously.
Now, I want to read it from a
translation that you may never have heard of,
and certainly most of you have never seen.
It is a translation directly out of the
Aramaic, not out of the Greek, but out
of the Aramaic of the Eastern Church, the
language Jesus spoke and the language Paul spoke
originally.
I'll just read the same.
It's Philippians 3, 7 to 15.
Not much difference, just a little, and we're
sticking by the King James, of course, but
I thought you'd like to hear this.
But these things, says Paul, which once were
again to me, I counted aloft for the
sake of Christ, and I still count them
all aloft for the sake of the abundant
knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord, for whom
I have lost everything.
And I have considered all those things as
refuge, so that I may increase in Christ
and be found in him since I have
no righteousness of my own gained from the
law, but the righteousness which comes through the
faith of Christ, that is, the righteousness which
comes from God, so that through this righteousness
I may know Jesus and the power of
his resurrection, and be a partaker of his
suffering even to a death like his, that
I may by any means attain the resurrection
from the dead.
Not as though I had already attained or
already perfect, but I am striving that I
may reach that for which Jesus Christ appointed
me.
My brethren, I do not consider that I
have reached the goal, but this one thing
I do know.
Forgetting those things which are behind me, I
strive for those things which are before me.
I press toward the goal to receive the
pride and victory of God's highest calling through
Jesus Christ.
Then he takes a breath and says, Therefore,
let those of you who are perfect think
these things over.
That's why we're meeting this Sunday night.
And this reason is no reason any other
way than if you've got any other ideas
about this, well, God is really the mystery.
He said, I'm right about it, and if
you don't see the way I do, I
ain't said God is really all right.
Now, I've given you two mottos, and I
want to give you a third one tonight.
You know that we're allowing an old, a
600-year-old book to help us along
the way called The Cloud of Unknowing.
And we're basing our teaching on the New
Testament, and then we're allowing this old brother
to help us a little along the way.
And I gave you, have given you already,
two mottos.
They are, look now forward and let do
backwards.
You got that one.
Last week, I gave you a second one.
You will not do but look on him
and let him along.
I give you the third one tonight.
He is a jealous lover, and he suffereth
no rival.
Now, I have said that there are four
identifiable stages, and a man might find 24.
There's the common Christian, about which I've preached
already, and I'm still talking about this social
Christian.
I talked about that last week.
And we're going to move on in the
weeks to come into what we call singular
Christian.
And then there is the Christian who has
moved up into God until he has begun
to be perfect, though it is said both
by Paul and by the old writer that
we may begin in this life of perfection,
but never attain fully to it till we
attain it in the bliss of heaven.
Now, Paul is our example, and Paul said
in the text that I may know him.
And the word know there means acquaint or
acquaintance, and it means experience.
It means these two things, to be acquainted
with and experience.
You may be acquainted with a man and
yet not have experienced the man in any
sense at all.
If I introduce you, for instance, to my
friend, almost lifelong friend, Reverend Miller here tonight,
you could say, yes, I'm acquainted with him,
but you have not experienced him in the
sense that I have, running around with him,
traveling with him in his car usually, and
preaching with him and going with him here
and there and talking with him endless numbers
of times and playing with him.
There's a difference between acquaintance and experience.
To get acquainted with God is one thing,
but to go on to experience God in
intensity and richness of acquaintance is something more.
And Paul said, I want to know him
in that depth and rich intensity of experience.
Because, you see, as I've said many times,
personality can't be fully known with one encounter.
You may meet a person you don't particularly
like at first, but as you get to
know them, you get to like them, because
you find hidden potentialities in their personality which
you didn't know was there.
Now, Christ is capable of increasing intimacy of
acquaintance, and if I have anything to say
to the Church of Christ and to the
Alliance and to the evangelicals in the world,
it is this, that our great weakness is
that we not only are not going on
to know Christ in rich intimacy of acquaintance,
but we're not even talking about it.
We don't even hear about it.
It doesn't get into our magazines, it doesn't
get into our books, it doesn't get onto
our radios, it's not found in our churches.
This yearning, this longing to know him in
increasing measures.
Now, we may enjoy this increasing acquaintance with
that.
I want you to hear me say that.
You say, but Jesus Christ is a he,
a person.
Why do you call him that?
Now, you may not understand me now, but
as Paul says, if you think otherwise, God
will reveal even that unto you.
Before we can know God as a he
or him, we know God as a that.
I think that every theologian would agree with
me on that, and I find back here
in the book of John these words.
First of all, before I read them, remember
what was said to a virginary?
That holy thing which is born of thee
shall become called the Son of God.
That holy thing which is born of thee.
And now, John, not an amateur theologian, but
the man who had laid his head upon
the breast of Jesus, begins his wondrous first
epistle with the word that.
That which was from the beginning, which we
have heard, which we have seen with our
eyes, which we have looked upon in our
hands and handled of the word of life,
personality is not found there yet.
For the life was manifested, and we have
seen it.
And bear witness and show unto you that
eternal life which was with the Father, and
was manifested unto us.
That which we have seen and heard declare
we unto you, that ye also may have
fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is
with the Father and with his Son, Jesus
Christ.
It's not until the last two lines of
the third stanza that he put personality in
there.
It's that before.
Now, remember, my friends, that Jesus Christ, while
he is person, and you know that, we
all agree that he's the person, he's the
Son, the Eternal Son, he is also that
which is the source of everything.
He is that which is the foundation and
fountain of everything you and I are created
to enjoy.
He is the fountain of all truth, but
he is more, he is truth itself.
He is the source and string of all
beauty, but he is more, he is beauty
itself.
He is the fountain of all wisdom, but
he is more, he is wisdom itself, and
in him are all the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge hidden away.
He is the fountain of all grace, he
is the fountain and source of all life,
but he is more than that.
He said that I am the bed of
life, and I am the life.
He is the fountain of love, but he
is more than that.
He is love, he is resurrection, and he
is immortality, and he is, as the song
says, brightness of the Father's glory, sunshine of
the Father's face.
You know, we try to discover what gets
wrong with us when we start to backslide
in groups and denominations and churches and individuals,
and I believe that our Lord Jesus hit
on the head of it when he said,
You have left your first degree of love.
Not your first love consecutively in the sense
that there's love number one, and love number
two, and love number three, but he said
you've left your first degree of love.
And what I'm preaching to try to bring
about in the church of Jesus Christ is
a rediscovery of the loveliness of the Savior,
that we might begin to love him again
with an intensity of love such as our
Father's knew.
I have said before, and I repeat it
now, that the power and greatness of A.
B.
Simpson was not in his theology, for he
positively was not a great theologian, compared, for
instance, with Calvin or some of the other
theologians.
The power and greatness of the man lay
in his unquenchable love for the person of
Jesus Christ the Lord.
There's a song we sing, and I want
to read some verses, there's a few sentences
that we don't know about.
The first one says, Fairest Lord Jesus, ruler
of all nature, ruler thou of God and
man, the Son, thee will I cherish, thee
will I honor, thou my soul of glory,
joy, and crown.
We know most that woman to others, but
there are others that we don't get, and
here's one.
It says, Fair are the flowers, fair are
her children, when viewed in this unclouded day,
yet they must perish.
All will soon vanish, Jesus alone abides for
us.
Gainst thou upon the world, on your family,
your friends, your loved ones, all the lovely
beauty of children and young people, viewed in
earth's unclouded day.
Yet tender and realism compels us to say,
yet they must perish.
All will soon vanish, and when they have
vanished, we have only Jesus who alone abides
for us.
Earth's fairest beauty, heaven's brightest splendor, in Jesus
Christ's unclouded sea, all that here shineth, quickly
declineth before his spotless purity.
There are those who would trouble you because
you can't get all steamed up about things.
A friend of mine was quite hurt, because
I just can't get all if I didn't
steamed up about earthly things.
I can't possibly do it.
I can't possibly stand off and strike an
attitude of awe at a poor porthole Buick,
or a Cadillac, or something else.
I can't.
And the houses they're building that are supposed
to be so magnificent.
Remember that when you have seen the house
or city that has foundations whose builder and
maker is God, you can't get excited about
any house ever any man in this world
ever built.
You can't get excited about it.
Somebody said that Abraham saw the city that
had foundations whose builder and maker was God,
and he wouldn't build a house after that.
He said, I'll never try to imitate it.
I'll live in the tent till I get
my house up there.
It was so beautiful.
Well, earth's fairest beauty and heaven's brightest splendor
are all unfolded in Jesus Christ, and all
that here shineth, quickly declineth before his spotless
purity.
That's what one man said about Jesus.
Now, I want to tell you that it
costs to know Jesus Christ like that.
It costs, and most people won't pay the
price for it at all.
That's why most Christians are common.
They won't go on, because for Christ's sake,
they have surrendered evil things.
That is, things that are injurious, and things
that are unclean and grossly sinful.
Everywhere in Fundamentalism, we have given up the
grossly sinful things, and we have all agreed
on what those grossly sinful things are.
We shudder at the thought of a honky
-tonk, though there are some churches and tabernacles
that you couldn't tell the difference if somebody
didn't yell Jesus occasionally to give it a
holy atmosphere.
But honky-tonks and unholy places, we stay
out of them, and there are certain things
we don't do, and for Christ's sake, we
have surrendered those evil things.
But this is the mark of a common
Christian, and the man who's never gone beyond
that is a mediocre Christian.
Paul surrendered the good along with the bad,
and he said, not only the things that
are bad have I given up, but he
said what things were gain to me, those
I counted lost, the things that he had
a right to, the things that were gain
to him, and that he had every legal
and moral right to lay hold of and
say, this is mine, and Christianity's not going
to take it from me.
He said, I've given up even that, because
I've seen something so much better.
It is that which was with the Father.
It is that source, that fountain from which
flows all wisdom, and beauty, and truth, and
immortality.
So, for the sake of that, I have
given it all up.
He knew, Paul did, that the human heart
was idolatrous, and it will worship anything that
it possesses.
Anything that you get your hand on, you
will worship.
As a little child would take his teddy
bear to bed with him, so we grown
-ups have our teddy bears, too.
We're too grown-up and mature, you know,
to be caught taking a teddy bear or
doll to bed.
But we have what must look to God
like teddy bears and dolls.
We hang on to them.
A baby, of course, has a right to
that.
I believe in that.
We kept teddy bears floating around for years
at home, until they got drooling, and they
were pretty old when they did.
But the point I'm making is that we
are world leaders.
We mature people, people even in their teens,
when we still insist upon hanging on to
things.
Whatever you hang on to, you worship.
Don't forget that, because it gets between you
and God, whether it be property, or family,
or reputation, or security, or your life itself.
And Jesus taught us that we couldn't even
hang on to our life itself.
That if we made our living on earth
to be something that we wouldn't give up
and hung to, it would get in our
way, and we'd lose ourselves at last.
He taught that.
Taught it plainly.
And then this grasping after security.
Always.
We want to be secure.
Well, Paul wasn't secure.
He said he died dead, and he was
out on the bosom of the sea for
three weeks, night and day, and he was
always in difficulty.
This longing for security.
I want security in this life, and eternal
security in the world above.
And there we have it, that fundamentalism.
Security here, and eternal security there.
Brethren, Paul said, I give it all up.
I disavow and disown everything.
Now, there are certain things God let him
have.
He let him have a book or two.
He let him have a garment, a cloak.
He let him have his own hired house
for two years in one instance, and he
let him have some things.
But Paul never allowed them to touch his
heart.
Any external treasure that touches your heart is
a curse.
And Paul said, I give that up, that
I might know him, that I might go
on to deeply enrich and increase the intimacy
and vast expanses of knowledge of the one
who is infinite and illimitable in his duty,
and I go on to know him, and
that I might know him.
I give all this up.
And he never allowed anything to touch his
heart.
You see, friends, we have been taught over
the last years in our Christian circles that
Christ is something added on to a happy
jolly, rather clean, but well-earned earthly life
to save us from hell and to get
us into the mansions over there.
But that's not New Testament way of looking
at things.
It's not the way Paul looked at it
at all.
Paul looked at it as if Jesus Christ
was so infamously attractive that we didn't count
anything at all to amount to anything.
Paul was a learned man, learned at the
feet of Gamaliel.
He had what they'd call now Ph.D.
Paul was a learned man.
But Paul said, that's all wrong.
He said, he used an ugly word about
it, a garbage.
He said, it's no good.
I put it all behind me.
And he said, I'm of the tribe of
vengeance, and I'm circumcised the eighth day, and
I belong to the fathers, and I've got
the marks upon me, and my name's in
the register, and I can show you who
I am.
But he said, for the sake of Jesus
Christ, I count that nothing at all.
I put that under my feet.
Some of you are proud of your Dutch
blood, and that's why you're half carnal all
the time.
Some of you are proud of your Swedish
blood, and that's why you're carnal all the
time.
And some of you are proud of some
other blood.
All blood's the same kind of blood, corrupt
blood.
And I don't care whether it comes from
or earlier from the gutter, it's corrupt blood.
But we're proud of things, and proud of
what we can do.
Paul said, everything, the proudest thing I have,
the thing at which I am the proudest,
I count it but lost.
But modern Christianity says, stop gambling, or the
bomb will get you.
Stop drinking, or you'll go down like Rome.
Stop this or that.
And you pick out those ugly, vestal things,
that nobody wants to do if they're in
their right mind.
And that's all the things there are.
Paul said, I've quit those so long ago.
He never even did them.
He didn't even do them.
He was a Jew in all good conscience,
and he didn't have to quit them.
And that's why I sometimes feel like smiling
kind of sourly when I hear a big
testimony about somebody that drank and then got
saved and quitted.
Now, sure, you'll get saved and quitted, but
that ought to be elementary.
That ought to be way back down to
years.
The man who writes a book on how
bad he was, you can have the book.
I already have books I won't read.
Well, friends, now let this old man talk
to us a little bit here.
He says, But one thing I tell thee,
he, that is God, he's a jealous lover,
and he suffers no rival.
Now, better than that, what's the matter with
us?
We're allowing rivals to come up.
No decent fellow, nobody that has any self
-respect is going to suffer a rival, but
he says God won't suffer a rival.
And he says here in this old English,
which I'll translate into bad modern English, he
says, And him which not work in thy
will, but he only would be by himself.
He says that God won't work in your
will, but unless he can only be there
by himself.
We have too many gods, we have too
many irons in the fire, and we have
too much theology that we don't understand, and
we have too much religion, and too much
churchanity, and too much institutionalism, and too much
of too much, and the result is God
isn't in there by himself.
He says, If I'm not in your heart
by myself, I will work.
He says, Remember that now.
Him which not work in thy will, but
he only met thee there by himself.
Now, when Jesus Christ has everything cleansed from
the temple and dwells there alone, he'll work.
An old friend of mine talked about him.
He said, God's working like a miner in
the depths of the earth.
Have you ever been in a coal mine?
Way deep down in the earth, they're mining
out coal, or gold, or diamonds, and anybody
can fly overhead or walk overhead or travel
by and never dream what's going on in
the depths of the hill yonder.
Never know that way in that hill unseen
there's an intelligent force at work bringing out
gold.
And so he said to Penelon that that's
what God does in the human breast.
He works hidden and unseen within the breast.
But we're dramatic in our day.
We don't want God to work unless he
comes with a beard on and a staff
playing a part.
We want him to be theatrical and do
the thing, you know, with a good deal
of color and pyrotechnics, which means fireworks in
English.
And God won't work like that.
God says, No, no, no.
You children of Adam, you children of carnality
and lust, you who love a fair show
in the flesh, you who have been brought
up wrong and have wrong ideas about tonight's
con, I won't work.
I won't work in you.
Jesus says, I can't do it.
I'm sorry, I can't work in you, in
your womb or in your heart unless I
can be there alone.
What some of you need to do is
cleanse the temple.
You just need to get busy and go
out.
Dry out the cattle and upset the money
changers and shovel out the dirt and get
rid of a lot of things that are
rivaling the Lord Jesus Christ.
Here's the motto, He's a jealous lover and
he suffereth no rival.
And he goes on and says this, Lift
up thine heart now unto God with a
meek stirring of love and mean himself and
none of these villains.
And therefore look below.
I looked that word low up to Younger
Bridge and it's an old English-Saxon word
meaning unwilling, be unwilling, hate, be unwilling to
think on aught but God himself so that
nothing works in your wit or in your
will, that's in your head or in your
heart but only himself.
Now, again, we're back to where we started
when I said that himself, when I said
that Simpson in the early days talked about
himself, and he shocked and blessed the generation
because he talked about himself.
He said Jesus himself, it's himself that we
need.
I suppose you know how himself came to
be written.
I'm sure somebody, if not I've told you,
about how Dr. Simpson went over to England,
to London, to a Bible conference and there
were three sermons on sanctification.
And he preached the last one.
That's a bad spot to be in.
But the first fellow got up and said
that the way to be holy and victorious
in your heart was to suppress the old
man.
He taught suppression.
Another man got up and taught eradication, and
he said deliverance from the old carnal life
is by eradication.
Get rid of the old man, pull him
up, turn him up to the, root up
to the sun to die.
And Dr. Simpson had to get in between
there, so he got up and he took
one word for his tax, and he gave
his testimony about how he had tried to
get the victory.
And he said, sometimes I would get it
and think I had it and then I'd
lose it.
Then he said, when I came to the
knowledge that victory, sanctification, deliverance, purity, holiness, all
is in self.
Then he said, after that was easy and
the glory came to my life.
I thought that was a beautiful piece of
diplomacy.
I also thought that it was the most
wonderfully wise way to handle a thing in
good theology.
And then around that, he wrote his famous
hymn, Once it was a blessing, now it
is the Lord.
Once his gift I wanted, now it is
to give her home, now himself alone.
Now, there's got to be more of himself
these days.
You know, Christianity has gotten to be, I've
said this before and I'm summing it up
tonight, it has gotten to be a way
of getting things from God.
A way of, we give a tithe in
order that I'm nine-tenths or go further
than they're ten-tenths.
And I claim that any business man who
wouldn't would be a jackass with long, hairy
ears.
A man who would find out that by
giving God one-tenth, his nine-tenths went
further than his ten-tenths had, ordinary business
would lead you to do that, wouldn't it?
Sure it would.
A man that wouldn't do that, that's not
spirituality, that's disease.
And if a man wants, if a man
wants to be a business man and use
God, okay.
But that's not, that's not what the Bible
teaches, and that's not what Paul talked about.
Paul had given up that years before.
That's not what the old writer of The
Child of Unknowing talked about.
He said it only himself.
And he said, Now do thou that in
thee is to forget all the creatures that
ever God made, so that thy thoughts nor
thy desires be not directed nor stretched to
any of them, but let them be and
take no heed of them, so that Christian
businessmen are in danger.
Now, I talk to Christian businessmen and committee
men, and they want me to come and
beg me to come just to say this
to them.
I'm not condemning my good friends of the
Christian businessmen committee, or my good and loved
friend who edits their magazine back here, but
I say, Christian businessmen can get to a
thought where they make Christianity to be a
way to have a prosperous business down here
in a mansion in the sky.
Either way, you'll win.
If you follow the Lord, you'll prosper down
here.
Brethren, to follow the Lord doesn't always mean,
in fact, I would say it rarely means
to have financial prosperity.
But following the Lord has meant down the
years to count those things but lost for
the excellency of the knowledge of Christ.
And where a fellow prospers in spite of
himself, by then the way he gets around
it, he gives everything away, as much as
he can at least, and keeps enough to
live on.
Thank God he's still here, body and soul
held together, and a place to live, and
a car to take him to church and
to work.
But further than that is not much concern.
But we have made Christianity to be a
way, a technique by which we can get
things.
Paul didn't know.
He knew better than that.
He said, Yea, doubtless I count all things
but lost for the excellency of the knowledge
of Christ Jesus my Lord.
I have suffered the loss of all things,
and I do count them but one that
I may win Christ, and that I may
know him through the power of his resurrection.
Now, it's himself who said, Let them be
and take no heed to them.
That's why, that's why, that's why you can't
get anywhere, and that's why some of you
are going to stop coming to hear me
preach this series, because we're getting around to
where you live.
Before, we weren't so near to you, but
they're beginning to stick the needle in a
little, and you just don't want that.
You'd like to have a deeper life.
That cat could be given to you with
a syringe, or that could be given to
you with a glass of water and then
a pill.
They'd take one pill three times a day,
and the fellow said, You just can't do
that.
But some people, that's the way they get
their religion.
They want it in pill form, and they
buy books to get it in pill form.
Later in, there isn't any such a thing.
There's a cross, there's a gallows, there's a
man with stripes on his back, there's an
apostle with no property, there's a tradition of
loneliness and weariness and rejection and glory, but
there are no pills.
But some want the pill.
But I say himself, himself, himself.
Well, friends, I don't know.
I wish, yet I don't wish.
I don't wish anything.
I pray for it, and if it isn't
God's will, why, I don't want it.
And if it is God's will, why, I
don't wish or pray.
But I would like to see somewhere a
recapture once more, before I die, of the
glory that men knew, of the beauty of
Jesus.
One old brother said this about him, many
dubious names, thou bearest, and I might say
that as you students know, but the average
person wouldn't have any reason to know, ishi,
i-s-h-i, is the word for
husband in the Hebrew.
And so, he wrote a poem about Jesus.
This old brother, and he said, many dubious
names, thou bearest, brother, shepherd, friend, and king.
But there none unto my spirit such divine
support can bring.
Ishi, ishi is the jewel.
Mine is while ages roll.
Angels taste not of such glory.
Holy ishi of the soul.
Other joys are short and fleeting.
Thou and I can never part.
Thou art altogether lovely.
Ishi, ishi of my heart.
They sang that once.
Where could you sing that now?
I think we could sing it here, brother.
But there aren't many places where you can
sing it, because people don't have the experience
that it conveys, you see, that it embodies.
Whenever a song is rejected, it's rejected as
a rule, it's a good song, because the
people don't understand it, and they find it
dull.
If you like rock and roll, you won't
like ishi.
And if you like tender lady watches over
me, you won't like ishi.
And if you like tea, you won't like
ishi.
Ishi is the jewel.
Mine is while ages roll.
Angels taste not of such glory.
Holy ishi of the soul.
And this is the teaching of the deeper
life.
It is to put away all the features
that ever God made, and stop trying to
promote your family.
Stop trying to promote your business and use
God to do it.
Stop trying to promote anything and use God
to do it.
And put everything away with God, for he
lists not work in my heart unless he
can be there alone.
Put everything else out.
Some young preacher will study until you have
to get thick glasses, take care of his
failing eyesight, because he has an idea he
wants to become a famous preacher.
He wants to use Jesus Christ to make
him a famous preacher.
He's just a hopster, buying and selling and
getting gain.
They'll ordain him, and he'll be known as
Reverend.
And if he writes a book, they'll make
him a doctor.
And he'll be known as Doctor, but he's
still a hopster, buying and selling and getting
gain.
And if the Lord comes back, he'll drive
him out of the temple along with the
other cattle.
But we can use the Lord for anything.
I'll try to use him, but what I'm
teaching to you and what Paul taught here
and what was picked up by the centuries
and brought down the years and what gave
birth to the missionary society that you and
I know about and belong to was just
exactly the other thing.
Oh, God, we don't want anything as we
want thee.
That's the cry of the soul on its
way up.
That's the cry of the soul.
In England, they say there is a bird
called the skylark.
We don't have them here.
The nearest thing you have to it here
that does the same thing is what they
call the wild canary, the American goldfinch.
But it's a poor little weak example of
the skylark.
So they say the skylark will mount and
mount and sing as it mounts.
And the poet had talked about it, Ted,
that the skylark mounts and sings hymns at
heaven's gates.
And it mounts until it's out of sight,
they say, and they can still hear the
song coming down while they can no longer
see the bird mounting and singing as it
rises.
My friends, this is what I'm teaching about,
but this is what most people don't want.
I think most of you must, or you
wouldn't be here because you knew what I
was going to preach on.
Another thing a man said about him was
this, that I've always loved to quote.
Love sits on his eyelids and scatters delight
to all the wide regions above.
Their silks and the cherry of them veil
in his sight and tremble with raptures of
love.
These people who have to have whole cut
loads of gadgets to get their religion going,
what do they do when they don't have
anything like that?
The truck can't get where they're going.
I heard a man boast this afternoon on
the radio to come to his place because
they were going to bring in equipment from
Pennsylvania and Ohio to serve the Lord with.
Equipment?
What equipment do you need to serve the
Lord with, brother?
For as the dear little camp meeting ladies
used to say, this is my harp of
ten strings.
He said, this is my harp of ten
strings, and I praise the Lord in your
old wrinkled hands with brown spots, you know,
on them.
And they clap their little old wrinkled hands
with shining faces.
Your harp of what do you need?
What clap-clap do you need?
Do you need a bushel back, a basket
full of drops to serve the Lord with,
brother?
If you have two knees, and even if
you're stiffened up with arthritis so you can't
get on your knees, you can look up
in your heart for prayer isn't getting on
your knees.
Prayer is the elevation of the heart to
God.
That's all a man needs.
You can pray in a prison, you can
pray on an airplane, and I do, and
you can pray in a ship.
You can pray anywhere, and you can worship
God because it's himself that we want.
Himself.
Love sits on his eyelids and scatters delight
so all the wide regions above and their
faces are charioted with veil in his sight
and tremble with raptures of love.
The only kind of revival that I'm even
remotely interested in is the kind of revival
that will cause people to tremble with rapture
in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.
That's all.
No, I'm nearly through.
But I'd like to say this to you.
I've been reading the Proverbs devotionally every day,
and I've gotten into the 13th chapter, and
I rather smiled when I read one of
the Proverbs there.
I don't remember how it runs in King
James, but I have it in two other
translations here.
One of them says, Every sluggard is employed
in wishing.
That's the Septuagint version, the old Greek version
translated in English.
Every sluggard is employed in wishing.
And the Knox translation says, Idleness will and
will not both at once.
Now, there we have a lot of Christians.
They're sluggards.
And being a lifelong student, I wouldn't take
that word sluggard at its face value.
I said, What's a sluggard?
So I looked it up to find out
what a sluggard was.
Well, a slug is the sort of a
streamlined snail, and when they crawl along, they
do about a mile a millennium.
They just crawl along, leaving a wet streak
behind them.
That's a slug.
And a lazy slug.
Some fellow looked at it, and then when
his son wouldn't work, he said, You're like
that slug, you're a sluggard.
And that's how we got their word in
the English, a sluggard.
And the Bible says that every sluggard is
employed in wishing.
Goes to church, chases from one part of
the city to the other, you're an evangelist,
hoping that he can become a spiritual man,
but he's too lazy.
He's a slug.
He will and he will not, both at
the same time, it says.
Now, that's the way a lot of Christians
are, and what are you going to do
with them?
Dear God, do I have to wake them
up?
I can.
I've set up every alarm clock I could
wind up and print in public, and I
just can't wake people up.
Sluggards will be sluggards till the Lord comes,
I suppose.
But I think some of you here are
going to get some wings and get rid
of the shell.
I'll tell you this, that if some of
you women kept house like you keep your
soul, you'd be in for a divorce, your
wife, your husband wouldn't stay around.
And if some of you men kept your
business the way you keep your soul, your
wife couldn't live because you'd go bankrupt.
What's your response?
Rather than close in your seven minutes?
Your little brother says this, and I found
it true.
He said now, and I'll paraphrase him and
then read.
He says, if you're going to go on
now, no, God, get up and stir yourself
and lift your heart to God and put
away things and desire for property and things
and seek himself alone and let him work
in you without any rivals.
Well, he says, all the fiends will be
cured when I do this.
And they will try to defeat thee in
all that they can do.
You won't get us to the corner without
some fiends who'll be after you.
So if you want security, don't seek God.
If you want security, the devil will give
it to you for a while and then
send you to hell.
If you're afraid of fiends and all the
rest, don't try to seek God.
But he says this, and I like it.
He says, let not, therefore, but travel therein
until thou feel this.
Now, I'll explain that.
I don't want to be baffled.
But let not means don't be hindered.
Don't let anybody hinder you in your seeking
after God, but travel therein until you feel
desire.
They're all such practical men, these old saints.
They claim they were dreamers.
They weren't dreamers.
They were practical men.
He said, when you first start out to
seek a new height, to become something other
than a common Christian, he said, the first
thing you'll find the devil facing you to
stop you.
And he said, I exhort you now, don't
stop because of that, but press right on
whether you feel like it or not.
There are two times to pray, when you
feel like it and when you don't.
And some want to be emotionally lifted and
wafted into the sky, but the old saints
knew better than that.
Now, they knew that there are times when
you've got to, by what he calls a
naked intent under God.
I want you to take that.
A naked intent under God, he says.
Now, that's what we need, brethren, is this
naked intent to know God, to know Christ,
to put the world beneath our feet, to
put things beneath our feet, to put people
beneath our feet, to open our hearts to
only one lover, and that is some of
God himself, and keep everything else out of
us.
And from there on, we mount and go
up.
I've said I don't think anybody was ever
filled with a Holy Ghost who didn't go
through a time of awful darkness, and what
he called the cloud of unknowing, the shadowy
cloud where you couldn't seem to get through.
But you believed God and you trusted Christ,
and whether you felt like it or not,
you went on, and you believed and you
obeyed, and you prayed when you felt like
it, and you prayed when you didn't, and
you obeyed, and you did what you should,
and you straightened things out, and you got
adjusted in your business, and you got adjusted
in your home, and you got adjusted in
your relationships, and you quit wrong things, and
you gave up things that had been hindering
you, whether you felt like it or not.
He says it's all a naked intent under
God.
Here's the strangest thing.
If you talk about mysticism in the day
in which we live, every fundamentalist throws his
hands high in the air as though you
were invoking the spirit of Old Stalin, and
you say, what are dreamers?
They believe in emotion and feeling.
Every one of them that I'm acquainted with
talks, you've got to believe God by a
naked, curved intent of your will.
Then the other things follow along.
The most unusual thing, I got a letter
this week from the Reformed Church asking me
to write a review of the book on
mysticism.
If you can get mixed up any worse
than that, I don't know how, but they
wanted me to review a book on mysticism
that had been written by Dean Means years
ago.
Mysticism?
Is it possible that we find a hard,
cold, square doctrine that all the genes are
not enough?
Is it possible that people everywhere are seeking
something better?
Yes, it's possible.
All together, it's possible.
More than possible.
But remember, thou feelest in thy will only
a naked intent unto God.
Have you got that tonight?
Naked intent unto God.
This brings the cross into your life.
You're going to be that kind of Christian,
and you're not going to let anybody stop
you or fool you, and you're going to
keep right on, and if you don't feel
like it, you're going to believe anyway, and
you're going to pray right on through with
a cold, naked intent unto God, believing the
truth.
Oh, I have this to say.
God will out of your stormy grief he'll
raise a basket.
Out of the tomb he'll lift you into
the sky.
Out of the darkness he'll lift you into
the light.
Old Moody went down to here and lay
on his little tummy on the floor in
the kitchen.
I understand there was another cook's home, and
prayed that he might be baptized with the
Holy Ghost, but he got nowhere, and then
went out from there to a city news,
and when the blessed Holy Ghost fell on
him, he cried, Oh, God, stay thy hand
or I'll die.
Out of his stormy grief God raised him.
It's always so.
But the cheap saintless and the undersized pygmy
Christians, they won't be happy unless they can
be happy.
They just won't.
They just demand it.
I wouldn't put it past some of our
so-called evangelical leaders to send for perfumed
feathers to tickle the chins of the saints
to make them happy, to make them laugh.
They'll do anything in the world to make
people temporarily tickled except for Jesus and himself.
But if we get himself, we'll get all
the joy and delight and all the rest
with it.
I'm a hard man in some ways, but
there are times when the joy of the
Lord lifts my heart very, very high.
There are times when I sit down here
looking as if I was dead, I suppose,
they say I do, colorless and unemotional, but
in my heart there's such a joyous look
towards God that I could scream out my
joy.
Well, my friends, what about it?
It's 8.30 and I'm going to quit.
Do you want what I'm talking about?
Do you want to move on past the
low level of the common Christian and go
on to know him and the power of
his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering
and the excellency of his knowledge and the
increasing flights of spiritual elevation?
If you do, I've taken you a little
further tonight than I think you do or
you wouldn't be here.
Now, let us pray.
Now, before I pray, I want again tonight
to know who wants me to pray for.
You're a little puzzled.
You're even a little upset.
The neat little step-by-step, step-by
-step formula that you have been traveling on
has sort of bothered tonight with this kind
of preaching and you're wondering whether you ever
want to come back, whether I'm a little
lost and I've been or just lost.
But in your heart of hearts there's just
one thing you can recognize and that is
a cry, Oh God, I want thyself.
I want thyself.
I want thyself, Isha, Isha.
I want to know a husband in my
heart.
I want to know what the old prophet
and what the Holy Ghost meant when he
said, Thou shalt call me no more, Lord.
Thou shalt call me Isha.
For I will be a husband unto thee.
And you want to know that the eternal
husband, the spiritual bridegroom of your heart, that
you do know.
You're not so sure about all the doctrines,
but there's one thing your heart cries after,
Oh my God, that's what I want.
And I want to pray for you.
And if I pray for you, now remember
this, I'm going to pray that God will
be as rough as he has to be
and will be as hard on you as
he used to be, that he might bring
you through out of this fleshly morass in
which Christianity is wallowing now, up the sunlit
highlands.
And it may be tough on you.
Maybe someday you'll have to go back and
write a letter home and straighten out things.
Maybe someday you'll have to pay up where
you didn't pay.
Maybe someday you'll have to quit certain things
that you've been very close to.
But anyway, you're going to put everything under
your feet and say, Oh, that's what I
want, Brother Tozer, that I remain no human.
I don't care what it costs.
Pray for me.
Who raised your hand?
God bless you, sir, and you, who else?
Put the hand up.
Yes, I see you.
And you.
Yes, who else?
Put the hand up.
Yes, sir, I see your hand right there.
And you, sir.
Oh, Lord Jesus.
Lord Jesus, how nice to be living in
a world where peril and danger is already
upon every hand.
And life is short and time is fleeting
and judgment is coming and Satan is busy
and all the fiends are squaring themselves across
the path for trying to prevent us from
going ahead.
But we hear you calling from the mountains
each and we want to know thee and
the power of thy resurrection and the fellowship
of thy suffering be made conformable under thy
death.
We want to know the beauty and wonder
that is thee and we pray for thee
to request a prayer.
Oh, Christ Jesus, Christ Jesus, Christ Jesus, thou
who didst come in olden times in the
form of a dove and sat upon Philem's
fire and thou who didst come to Peter
and to the Moravians and to the saints
of New England, thou who didst come, O
Lord, in spots here and there in Borneo
and Korea, oh, withhold not thy glory from
us.
We cry, show us thy glory, Lord, show
us thy glory and teach us how to
go on and now grant, we pray, that
this may be a good week and if
the devil makes it the worst week we've
ever had, we'll understand it.
We'll have a naked intent and determination and
we'll calmly, quietly believe even though we should
be attacked, even though the darkness should cuddle
over us, we'll know it's the cloud of
unknowing.
It's the dark night of the soul that
precedes the bright morning of the heart.
And we won't be frightened, for we know
thou didst go through the garden and through
the cross and into the darkness and out
of the darkness and into the tomb and
out of the tomb and into the glory.
So wilt thou lead these and lead us
and lead this church and, oh, we pray,
bring us to a place where soon we
may be under grace, spiritually prepared for a
mighty outpouring of the Holy Ghost, an outpouring
that shall bring in reality that which everybody's
talking about and nobody has.
And we shall come back to New Testament
spirituality, back to Book of Acts Christianity again,
and maybe out from us here there shall
flow streams into the desert way and fire
that shall touch churches and groups everywhere.
Bless us as we wait, and above all,
ensure us thyself, thyself, Lord, and show us
thy glory.
Hide us in the rock as thou passest
by and show us thy glory so that
all the glory of this world shall appear
as ashes after that wondrous sight.
This we ask in the holy name of
Jesus.
Now, as we close, I'm going to ask
Brother Ray to sing a little solo for
us.