Tozer Speaks: Volume One: 128 Compelling & Authoritative Teachings of A.W. Tozer

By A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith

Tozer Speaks: Volume One is the first volume of a 2-volume set that contains compelling and authoritative teachings of A.W. Tozer in an easy to read format.

A.W. Tozer's sharp and incisive preaching and writing style will startle some readers. Others will chuckle. But everyone will agree, "No one could say it like Tozer!" Contained within this gem and treasure of his work are selections from his pulpit ministry: messages on the Holy Spirit, sermons from the Gospel of John, essays on spiritual perfection, sermons in Peter's First Epistle, sermons on well-known and favorite Bible texts, sermons relating to the life and ministry of the Christian church, sermons on the voices of God and his calling of man. An unnamed layman at A.W. Tozer's Southside Alliance church in Chicago once stated, "Dr. Tozer had not been with us long before we knew we had a prophet of God in our midst. It was then that we felt constrained to begin putting his Sunday morning and evening sermons on tape."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moody Publishers
• Release date: Apr 14, 2010
• ISBN: 9781600662812

A. W. Tozer

The late Dr. A. W. Tozer was well known in evangelical circles both for his long and fruitful editorship of the Alliance Witness as well as his pastorate of one of the largest Alliance churches in the Chicago area. He came to be known as the Prophet of Today because of his penetrating books on the deeper spiritual life.

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Tozer Speaks

128 Compelling and Authoritative Teachings of A.W. Tozer

VOLUME ONE

Tozer Speaks

128 Compelling and Authoritative Teachings of A.W. Tozer

VOLUME ONE

Book 1 Selections from His Pulpit Ministry

Book 2 Ten Messages on the Holy Spirit

Book 3 Ten Sermons from the Gospel of John

Book 4 Essays on Spiritual Perfection

Compiled by Gerald B. Smith

A division of Zur Ltd.

Tozer Speaks, Volume One

ISBN: 978-1-60066-281-2

© 1994 by Zur Ltd.

First WingSpread Publishers Edition 2010

All rights reserved

Scripture taken from

The Holy Bible: King James Version.

Cover Design by Viscul Media Design, Inc.

Tozer Speaks previously published as The Tozer Pulpit in two volumes

Book 1 previously published as The Tozer Pulpit

Book 2 previously published as The Tozer Pulpit, Volume 2 and as

When He is Come and The Counselor

Book 3 previously published as The Tozer Pulpit, Volume 3 and as

Faith Beyond Reason

Book 4 previously published as The Tozer Pulpit, Volume 4 and as

I Talk Back to the Devil

Contents

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

Book 4

---

Book 1

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Book 2

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Book 3

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Book 4

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Book 1

Selections from His Pulpit Ministry

1. The New Birth: A Major Miracle of God’s Grace

2. The Psychologist Can Never Explain the New Birth

3. We Ride a Sick, Fallen Planet—But God Still Calls

4. Extract Sin From Man, and There’s God’s Image Again

5. A Coming Day When God Will No Longer Love Lost Men

6. Rejection of God’s Light Brings the Worst Darkness

7. No One Rejects Christ on Philosophical Grounds

8. Something Wrong With a Secret or Silent Christian

9. It Doesn’t Take Science to Prove God and His Word

10. Science and Philosophy More Bigoted Than Religion

11. We Have Surrendered the Human Spirit to This Present World

12. Modern Fools Lock Up Their Hearts With Their Wealth

13. Your $10 Bills Won’t Come Back to You in Heaven

14. Nothing Can Destroy Christianity If We Live Like Christians

15. You Can’t Elect to Worship God on Just One Day of the Week

16. Where God Is Not Worshipped There Can Only Be Discord

17. Reverence and Boasting Cannot Be Found on the Same Platform

18. The Great Danger of Pride and Arrogance Among Christians

19. A Defeated Spirit Easily Gives in to Discouragement

20. God Looks for Men Through Whom He Can Do the Impossible

21. There Is More to the Ministry Than Being Able to Talk

22. The Minister Ought to Speak As a Prophet for God

23. Social Compassion for Mankind Does Not Make a Preacher

24. Christ Did All the Dying So We Romp on Our Way to Heaven

25. Absolute Freedom Found Only in Doing the Will of God

26. With God, the Kingly Idea Is Not a Bad Thing

27. The Bible Does Not Teach Universalism and Second Chance

28. Man Will Have to Account to God for His Moral Choices

29. The World Has an Inadequate Concept of Judgment

30. Jesus Christ As Judge: A Neglected Bible Doctrine

31. Christ Qualifies Both As Saviour and Judge of Mankind

32. It Is Man’s Conscience That Puts Hell in Judgment

33. Don’t Let the Devil Make a Joke of Conscience

34. Do You Give Heed to the Inner Voice of God?

35. The Practicing Sinner Must Be a Practical Atheist

36. The Crooked Foundations Will Betray Man’s Civilization

37. Faith in God Is More Than Sensitivity to Religion

38. Christians Belong to God and Each Other in a Unique Way

39. Jesus, the Lamb of God, Tested on Earth for Thirty-three Years

40. Judgment Awaits Those Who Despise the Blood of Christ

41. How to Keep From Having a Nervous Breakdown

42. Sad, But True, That Christians Can Be Careless and Carnal

43. People Don’t Go to Hell Because They Are Rich or Poor

44. Do You Need the Sensational to Keep You Satisfied?

45. There’s a Gloomy, Low Key in Too Many Churches

46. Solve the Problem of Sin and You Solve the Race Problem

47. Not a Newspaper in the World Gives Me a Word to Die By

48. Christians Are So Well-Fixed, Heaven No Longer Beckons

49. Is Your Hope of Heaven a Valid and Eternal Hope?

50. Only the Christian Believer Actually Dares to Die!

Introduction

A. W. Tozer was basically a preacher of the Word of God.

His editorship of The Alliance Witness and his ability to write books that attracted a great throng of readers were, in his sight, incidental to his preaching and teaching ministry.

Volumes already in print featuring the best of Dr. Tozer’s editorials and his own writings on a variety of theological subjects will continue to speak for themselves.

But this book comes to you with a presentation for the very first time of Dr. Tozer’s creative pulpit material, faithfully giving you his own thoughts and colorful expressions as he spoke them in his Chicago pulpit.

None of these are complete sermons, of course. They have been extracted and edited and compiled from sermon tapes, in order to provide a maximum of enjoyment for those who closely followed Dr. Tozer’s career to the time of his death in 1963.

Dr. Tozer’s ministry continues true to form in this presentation. You will chuckle—you will bristle—and you will blush for man’s weakness. But you will also worship—and you will think again of the meaning of reverence—and you will rejoice as you weep in the contemplation of Jesus, your victorious Elder Brother!

This book is not neutral—don’t spend your money for it if you major in tolerance, compromise and the contemporary gray areas of theological position. Dr. Tozer was many things to many people—but never neutral!

The material in this book has grown out of the willingness of the laymen in the Southwest Alliance Church of Chicago to share the taped sermons.

In tribute to Dr. Tozer’s long ministry in the Chicago pulpit, one of the laymen said: Dr. Tozer had not been with us long before we knew we had a prophet of God in our midst. It was then that we felt constrained to begin putting his Sunday morning and evening sermons on tape.

Chapter 1

The New Birth: A Major Miracle of God’s Grace

When Peter wrote, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, he arrived at a major miracle of the New Testament!

Now, I want to bear down, and pause, and walk around her bulwarks, and behold the gates and walls thereof—this major miracle we call begotten again.

This, like a great many Bible teachings, has fallen into cold hands.

We feel as if we were in a mortuary instead of the church of the living God. Instead of a man just having come fresh out of the tomb, we feel as if we were in the presence of a corpse just brought in from the street.

This is what I mean: the words born again have become words that mean precious little.

I revolt from the use of the hyphenated adjective among us, when we say: Yes, he’s a born-again man. I revolt from it not because I don’t believe it, but because I always shrink from hearing dead men talk about living subjects.

There isn’t anything quite so chilling, quite so disheartening as a man without the Holy Spirit preaching about the Holy Spirit.

And I revolt from hearing the hyphenated adjective born-again tossed around lightly by people with their manufactured smiles, and just heading for the nearest restaurant!

Now, Peter talked about a major miracle, that is, being born again—begotten again!

I don’t mind telling you that it is my earnest faith that all that is worthwhile in Christianity is a miracle.

The trappings and paraphernalia and outward dressings of Christianity are unnecessary—we could get along nicely without them.

But there is a series of miracles, throbbing and beating within the divine message of God, and within the hearts of those who believe truly—and that’s about all there is to the Christian faith!

Supernatural grace has been the teaching of the Church from Pentecost to the present hour.

It is sad that some men are being forced from the churches in which they have preached because they have insisted upon preaching the supernatural quality of the acts of God.

This church is founded on it. We believe it.

We believe that pure religion is a continuous perpetuation of a major miracle, and we cannot settle for just the mental quality of things.

Now, mentality is here, and it’s a part of us, and God redeems it, too.

But the new birth is a miracle, a major miracle. It is a vital and unique work of God in human nature.

It is the creating of a new man in the heart, where another man has been. It is the putting of a new man in the old man’s place, and we are born anew!

Chapter 2

The Psychologist Can Never Explain the New Birth

The miracle of the new birth was foreshadowed in the Old Testament.

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. There was at least a hint of miracle within the human breast. Not the reasoning of yourself into a position, but something happening that could not be explained.

Let me take time out to say something here that isn’t in my notes at all.

Just as soon as psychologists can explain what happens to a Christian believer, that believer has been unfrocked!

Just the moment that a man’s experience in Christ can be broken down and explained by the psychologists, we have a church member on our hands—and not a Christian! For that which must happen in the new birth can never be explained by psychology or psychiatry. He can only stand off respectfully and say: Behold the works of the Lord. He never can explain it.

Coming into the New Testament, there is no longer any hinting or suggesting about the miracle of the new birth—it is boldly and openly here.

Our Saviour said that if we come to Him and are not born again, we cannot enter the kingdom of God—that we must be born from above.

In John 1:12 John says: As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God,… which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Now there is a work that is a miracle!

Paul told the Corinthians: If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

You couldn’t make it any stronger than that!

Then Peter gives us his word: Being born again of the Word of God which liveth and abideth forever.

James affirms in his first chapter: Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

Now, that’s as plain as it can be made.

If you were setting out to teach a major miracle within the human heart, you would use those very words to express it.

If you wanted to strip it down until it stood stark and unqualified before you, as a strong, vital teaching of the Word of God, you would use those words concerning it.

In other words, the Holy Spirit could not have said what He was setting out to say and have used any other words. These express it, and they tell us that there is a supernatural grace, that there is a work which we may call a major miracle, a work that is as truly a miracle of God as was the first creation.

The New Testament draws a sharp line between those who had become Christians by any other method, and those who experienced regenesis.

In that great and terrible day, there will be those white with shock when they find that they have depended upon a mental assent to Christianity instead of upon the miracle of the new birth!

Chapter 3

We Ride a Sick, Fallen Planet—But God Still Calls

Man is so constituted that he continues to dream of a shining world, although he must constantly confess, We know not whither we are going, and how can we know the way?

Why is it that the shining world of which men have dreamed, and that every man secretly believes is somewhere before him, is nevertheless lost to men?

It can only be because we are out of the way.

The world we inhabit is a lost world.

It is a sick, fallen planet upon which we ride.

In a translation of the eighth chapter of Romans (Romans 8), the Apostle Paul says:

This world of nature was condemned to be without meaning… in the hope that not only mankind, but this world of nature, also, might be set free from bondage to decay….

The sacred revelation declares plainly that the inhabitants of the world are also lost, by a mighty, calamitous visitation of woe which is still upon them.

But, it also tells this glorious fact—that this lost race has not been given up!

Thankfully there is a voice that calls, a voice that entreats. If we were not lost, there would be no voice behind us saying, This is the way, walk ye in it.

If we were not far from home, there would be no Father’s voice calling us back home.

All of these voices blend into one, whether it be the voice of God’s love, or the voice of Jesus’ blood, or the voice of conscience, or the voice of the dead or of the living, or of the lost or of the saved.

It is the distraught heart of God seeking His lost race.

So, the holy writer says the lost planet is full of vanity and has lost its meaning—so that even the world around it is crying, like a woman in travail; waiting as it were to be born again into the liberty of the sons of God, and saved from decay and corruption.

I say that we have not been given up. That is plain from the Book of Genesis. Recall that the sound of God’s gentle voice was heard saying, Adam, where art thou?—and that voice has never died out!

The echo of that voice sounding down through the years has never ceased to reverberate, to echo and re-echo from peak to peak, from generation to generation, from race to race, continent to continent, and off to the islands and back to continents again.

The voice of God is entreating us. With everything inside of my beating heart, chastened and criticized by everything inside of my mind, I believe in the voice of God sounding in this world, calling men!

Chapter 4

Extract Sin From Man, and There’s God’s Image Again

There is a color, or at least a complexion of theology, that squirms uneasily as soon as you say anything good about mankind.

They are prepared to say you are liberal, or a modernist, or a borderline liberal, at least, if you say anything good about mankind.

My brethren, except for the results of sin, it would be very difficult to over-praise human beings. Consider what we are, what we know, and what we can do.

Man was made in the image of God, and while sin has ruined him and condemned him to death forever unless he be redeemed through the blood of Jesus Christ, mankind is a being only one degree removed from the angels.

But sin, God knows, is like a cancer in the very being of man.

Man, made in the image of God, is now a dying man. He is sick unto death, because of the poison of sin.

But extract and take out that sin and you have the image of God again. And Jesus Christ was the image of God because He was a man without sin. No modernism there, no liberalism there—that’s Bible!

The man who denies that fallen man bears upon him something of the ruined relic of what he once was is no true friend of the Bible.

God sees in Jesus Christ what you would have been! He sees that in His perfect humanity, not His deity—for you and I could never be divine in that sense.

Why does God love sinners?

He loves them for that which He sees in them of His lost and fallen image, for God can never lose anything but Himself, directly. He loves everything else for His own sake. So, you are loved of God—but you are loved of God for Jesus’ sake!

God loves lost men, not because He is careless or morally lax, but because He once stood and said: Let us make man in our image.

The Scripture says that God made man in His own image, and when Jesus Christ was incarnated, He was incarnated in the body of a man without embarrassment and without change.

Why could it be so?

It was so because that Man was an image of the God that created him, and said: Let us make man in our image.

Never while the stars burn in their silence can it be said that God loves the sin in the sinner.

Never can it be said that the holy God loves an unholy thing—and yet God loves sinners!

Chapter 5

A Coming Day When God Will No Longer Love Lost Men

Thou art the covering cherub…. Thy wisdom and beauty were created in thee in the day thou wast created."

Consider the fact that there was a day when God loved the devil as He now loves the angels and archangels—because at that time He saw in the devil traces and proofs of His own wisdom.

I believe God loved that being because it was, not an image of Himself, as man is, but a reflection of what God could do and an evidence of His artistry—His moral artistry, and His omniscience, too.

But the devil sinned.

The devil sinned in a way not quite like man’s sin. He sinned in some way that erased forever everything of which God could be proud and in which God could rest, so that God no longer loved the devil.

He sent no redeemer for him. There isn’t anything in Satan that could remind God of Himself.

The last trace of that which might have reminded God of Himself has been washed out in the filthy bilge water of iniquity that century has added to century. God no longer loves the devil.

Now, this is my speculation, and if you don’t agree, let’s not fall out over it.

I believe the time will come when God will no longer love lost men.

God loves all lost men now—in prisons, in asylums, in saloons, in houses of ill-fame. He loves them now because the last trace has not been erased, and He still remembers that His Son on the tree had a body like theirs.

The day will come when he that is filthy will be getting filthier still—and therefore, the day will come when lost man will no longer be loved by God Almighty.

God grieves over lost men now because man can still pray and believe and hope and dream and aspire, and there is still something to remind Him of the Man who died on the tree. But when that is all gone, there will be nothing left for God to pour His love upon.

What a warning to a man selling out to sin and to the transfiguring power of evil and iniquity, which in the end makes him a devil and not a man—and thus beyond the love of God!

Chapter 6

Rejection of God’s Light Brings the Worst Darkness

Our Lord has been completely frank with us in the New Testament. He has spoken with loving, loyal words and backed them up with His own blood.

He spoke with authority when He said that men are by nature darkness, and in darkness, and that the Light will not always shine.

He doesn’t apologize, or water it down, or put any notes in the margin, saying, I didn’t mean quite that!

Jesus taught that the Light will not always shine, and that it is possible to reject the light and shut it out.

Then He says, When that time comes, how great is that darkness! And that is not a question—it is a statement put in the form of a question, followed by a lightning flash of exclamation.

There are two degrees of darkness, according to our Lord. First is the darkness that is absolute—where there has never been any light. That is the darkness of the heathen. But the second is another degree of darkness and more intense—the darkness that follows rejected light.

The darkness of the night before the sun comes up is one thing. The darkness of the hermit who hides in caves among the cobwebs and bats and will not come into the light is something else again.

A man, lost and stumbling in darkness, says, It is night, and I fear to move, lest I fall over a precipice or into a river. I must stand still—I have no light!

There’s hope for him, because given a little time, the sun will rise.

That is the darkness of the heathen.

But the darkness of those to whom Jesus spoke was not the darkness of the man in the night who was waiting for the sunrise. It was the darkness of the man who had fled from the sun-up and was hiding in a moral cave, refusing to come out where the light could get to him.

Where does Christianity destroy itself in a given generation? It destroys itself by not living in the light, by professing a truth it does not obey.

It destroys itself by ignoring the connection between the theology and the volitional life of the Christian believer.

So it is refusal to walk in the light, rottenness within, carelessness, worldliness, evil, refusing to let the Light of God find and change my dirty little nest of iniquity.

That’s what is destroying us, sir!

What the combined forces of hell can’t do, the church can do. Love of money, love of the world, unconfessed iniquity, private sins that no one dreams we have—these are destroying the Church of Christ.

These are the words of the Saviour: When the light that is in you turns to darkness, how great is that darkness!

Chapter 7

No One Rejects Christ on Philosophical Grounds

Israel did not reject the Lord because of philosophical reasons. Israel’s rejection was for moral reasons.

Now, people attack me for making statements like this. They write and say: Why don’t you modify your statement? You are always making flat statements!

I’m telling you this, and it’s a statement that I need not modify. I do not believe there is anybody that ever rejects Jesus Christ on philosophical grounds.

The man who continues in his rejection of Christ has a pet sin somewhere—he’s in love with iniquity.

He rejects Jesus on moral grounds, and then hides behind false philosophy—philosophical grounds.

This is the man who calls me, or some other pastor, and says, I want an appointment.

So we give him an appointment, and he sits there and says, I’m having intellectual difficulties about the Pentateuch. I have intellectual difficulties about Jonah and the whale. I cannot believe that the world was created in seven days.

If he was an honest man, God in heaven would respect him. But my Bible tells me that when you preach Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost will take Jesus and bring conviction on men, and convict them of sin, and righteousness, and judgment.

I believe that every one of these who are having intellectual difficulties is hiding because he is morally reprobate. When we fall in love with our sin, we can imagine and manufacture 10,000 syllogisms to keep us away from the cross.

How wonderful it is that when a person gives up his sin and puts his pride under his feet, and looks at the light, the whole body and mind are flooded with light. I have talked with people who have come out of rationalism and atheism and all the rest—and they smile at you with clear eyes and say, Oh, it’s wonderful now, the light has flooded in.

A blind man can argue that there is no sunshine, but when he gets his sight, the sunshine floods in.

Jesus said: For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light lest his deeds should be reproved.

Now if that means anything, it means that our Lord teaches that people who reject Him reject Him for moral reasons. This is the condemnation—that light is come into the world, and men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.

Israel not only disregarded the light—but rejected the light. Jesus called the men of His day stiff-necked and hard of heart. They had a perverse antipathy to the light because it interfered with their iniquity.

And that’s our difficulty today!

Chapter 8

Something Wrong With a Secret or Silent Christian

We have all heard at some time about persons who were supposed to be secret or silent Christians.

I have heard men say we will be surprised when we get to heaven and find people there who were secret Christians but who never talked about it.

It is my opinion, brethren, that the silent Christian has something wrong with him.

There is an abnormal psychology called manic depressive, where people just go into silence. They won’t talk—they just sit quiet. They just shut up, and that’s all.

There is something wrong with the mind that doesn’t want to talk. God gave you a mouth, and He meant for you to use it to express some of the wonders that generate inside your being.

When we come to God in Christ, and we give ourselves to Him, one of the first things we do is to say, "Abba, Father!’ Someone describing the Quakers said they don’t talk about their religion—they live it. Oh, how foolish can we get? The things that are closest to our hearts are the things we talk about, and if God is close to your heart, you will talk about Him!

Think of the old dowagers who sit around the canasta table and smoke cigarettes by the yard—they never bring up the subject of religion.

If anyone says, Why don’t you talk about religion, or God, or faith? they have a reply: Oh, that’s something too sacred to mention! So, they excuse themselves on the grounds that some things are too sacred to talk about.

Actually, there are some things they have never seen and can’t describe—that’s their trouble. There are some places they have never been—so they are on unfamiliar ground. That’s their trouble.

Oh, this quiet religion that says: "I haven’t anything to say… oh, no! I worship God in my heart.

No you don’t, brother! The heavenly beings said with their voices, "Holy, holy, holy!

The Bible links faith to expression and faith that never gets expression is not a Bible faith.

For we believe in our hearts, and utter forth with our lips that Jesus Christ is Lord, and we shall be saved.

You say: Well, I worship God in my heart. I wonder if you do. I wonder if you are simply just excusing the fact that you haven’t generated enough spiritual heat to get your mouth open!

Chapter 9

It Doesn’t Take Science to Prove God and His Word

Young people are concerned and some people are worried, they say, about whether we have the infallible Word of God.

As far as I’m concerned, grant me God Himself, and I’m not worried about His writing a book.

Grant the Being and Presence of God, and that settles it!

I receive a lot of magazines, most of which I dutifully and joyously never read. I looked at one recently after I came home in the evening, and it had a question and answer department in it.

One question was: Dear Doctor So and So: What about the whale swallowing Jonah? Do you believe that?

And the good doctor replied: Yes, I believe it. Science proves that there are whales big enough to swallow men.

I folded the magazine, and laid it down, for that man had come up to bat, but he had struck out beautifully.

For I believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, not because a scientist has crawled in and measured a whale’s belly, and come out and said, Yes, God can do that.

If God said that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, then the whale swallowed Jonah, and we do not need a scientist to measure the gullet of the whale.

Why are we fussing around finding out the collar size of a whale, or how big his neck is? Grant me God, and you can take care of all the whales!

Whenever I find men running to science to find support for the Bible, I know they are rationalists and not true believers!

Grant me God and miracles take care of themselves.

Is healing for us today? someone asks. My answer to that: Is God still alive? And the answer is, Yes, God is still alive! All right, then, healing is for us today. Whatever God did and was able to do and willing to do at any time, God is able and willing to do again, within the framework of His will!

So what we need to do is get acquainted with God.

A little boy thinks his father can do anything. Now, he can’t, but the little boy thinks he can. If the father tells the son, I personally whipped Adolph Hitler, trimmed his moustache off, and have him in a cage in Caledonia, that’s what the little boy is going to tell his chum across the street.

He will say with confidence, My Dad told me, and my Dad can do anything!

Now, in an infinitely higher and more perfect and holy sense, it is not whether we can understand it or not, it is whether God said it or not. And if God said "I am, I respectfully bow and say, O God, Thou art!"

I don’t start running around and questioning God’s ability to do anything. Letting God prove Himself through the channels of our lives is the answer. Grant me God, and the task will not be too big!

Chapter 10

Science and Philosophy More Bigoted Than Religion

Science and philosophy are more arrogant and bigoted than religion could ever possibly be. They try to brand evangelical Christians as bigots.

But I have never taken my Bible and gone into the laboratory and tried to tell the scientist how to conduct his experiments, and I would thank him if he didn’t bring his test tube into the holy place and tell me how to conduct mine!

Studying the philosophers may clarify my thinking and may help me and broaden my outlook, but it is not necessary to my salvation.

The scientist has nothing he can tell me about Jesus Christ, our Lord. There is nothing he can add, and I do not need to appeal to him.

I have studied Plato and the rest of them from the time I was knee-high to a rubber worker in Akron, Ohio. But I have never found that Plato added anything, finally, to what Jesus Christ has said.

Jesus said: I am the Light that lighteth every man. I am the Bread that feedeth every man. I am the One who came from the heart of the Father, and I am the Eternal Word which was in the beginning with God, and which was and is God, and that’s who I am.

So, we are assured in the Word that it is Jesus only and He is enough.

It is not Jesus PLUS a lot of other religions.

It is not Jesus PLUS a lot of other philosophies.

Jesus will never qualify or compromise anything He has said.

The honest heart that comes to Him and does not understand may need a day or a month or a year or ten years to help him prove and help him understand.

But that heart will be assured that Jesus will never change His stance. He will never, never say anything but what He said.

Never will He put in a footnote to explain, I didn’t mean it quite like that. He said what He meant—He meant what He said. He is the Eternal Word, and so we must listen to Him!

Now, what I always want to know is why did He say it, and what did He mean. A generation that knows only what God said will be followed by a generation that doesn’t believe what God said. I am in favor of a generation of Christian thinkers—Christian philosophers, if you please—and by that, I mean that the children of God should have hold of the truth of God.

Paul spoke out against science falsely so-called, and against the vain philosophy of the world. Yet, Paul has been reckoned by men who are supposed to know as one of the six great thinkers of all time.

Paul would have cancelled himself out if he had denied the place of deep thought and of penetration and understanding in the things of God.

Chapter 11

We Have Surrendered the Human Spirit to This Present World

Of all the calamities that have been visited upon the world, the surrender of the human spirit to this present world and its ways is the worst, without any doubt.

That we who were made to communicate with angels and archangels and seraphim and with the God who made them all, that we should settle down here as a wild eagle of the air come down to scratch in the barnyard with the common hens—this I say is, the worst of anything that has ever come to the world.

The tyranny of things, of material things, temporal things, things which are and then cease to be—this has become a tyranny.

No oriental monarch ever ruled his cowering subjects with any more cruel tyranny than things, visible things, audible things, tangible things, rule mankind.

Think again of what a calamity this is. The soul of a man, made in the image of God, coming from another world as a kind of guest to dwell a while and then go away—that this royal visitor from another world should accept this temporal, passing world as its final home, and gear itself down to it, judge itself by it, adopt its ways, collaborate with its inhabitants, and give itself up to the enjoyment of this world—I repeat, that there never has been any woe ever visited any world as bad as this.

It seems incredible that we who were made for many worlds should accept this one world as our ultimate home.

The reality of the other world—this invisible world that is near to our world—comes to us sometimes even in the midst of our twentieth century noise and confusion. The reality comes to us sometimes in the night season when we are alone.

Man was made in the image of God and is a fallen star, a fallen being, that has left its place in the celestial world and has plummeted down like a falling star. Now, in this world, he has all but forgotten the place from which he came.

That’s why the devil sees to it that we seldom get alone with time to think and meditate on the reality of the other world.

For when a man really gets alone, he senses often that this life in this world isn’t it—this is not the end. He says to himself: Now, I like it here. It has its points and there are many arguments in favor of it, but there is something in me that tells me that this isn’t it. There is something else—and something better!

At such a time, too many people break it off abruptly, and refuse to think about it at all.

A Christian is one who dedicates himself to God to inhabit another world, and that’s why we get called many of the names that we do!

Chapter 12

Modern Fools Lock Up Their Hearts With Their Wealth

Many of us are forgetting the caution of the Lord Jesus that we ought not to set our hearts on earthly things.

He warned that there is a very real danger involved and He said plenty about it in the New Testament.

Jesus said that when wealth becomes our heart’s treasure, our very beings may well be imprisoned within our wealth.

This is the danger: the same heart of man that was made to commune with God and hold fellowship with the Divine Trinity, to soar away to worlds unknown and behold God upon His throne, that same heart may be locked up in a bank vault or in a jewelry box or somewhere else here on earth!

The fashionable woman longing to make the list of the Ten Best Dressed—she lives for her jewelry and glamour. And when she puts those jewels into a box at night, she surely imprisons her heart in the same box as she snaps the lid.

So, too, the businessman who doesn’t know how to use the money God allows him to get, and who makes an idol out of it. When he snaps the door of his box in the bank vault, he puts his heart there and locks it up.

It is little wonder that Jesus has had to warn us against the mere accumulation of lower forms of treasure. He gave the example of the man who accumulated corn, and then naively told his soul to rest, because he had many barns, and lots and lots of corn.

Someone has said that the man thought his soul could eat corn.

But Jesus called him a fool, and reminded him that he had to die, and his store of corn, which had a legitimate and proper value on earth, could do him no further good because he had neglected the higher values. He had no store of eternal treasures laid up above.

Actually, that foolish man’s heart was locked up in his barns and granaries!

If you are wise, you will transmute any unit of goods or wealth upwards to another level of value. And the same for your talents, and gifts and abilities, and brain and strength and nervous energy.

For instance, our missionaries go to the end of the earth with the message of Christ’s love and salvation. These are the ultimate values they are seeking—the heathen, headhunters, pagans turning to Jesus Christ, putting away their idols and their sins and believing in Jesus with bright, shining faces; singing the gospel and going to heaven, one by one. These are the values!

You do this, and when you get to heaven, you’ll find all your wealth again, but not in dollars or gold or silver or pearls. It will be the wealth of human beings made in the image of God, and translated and changed and purified by the grace of God!

Chapter 13

Your $10 Bills Won’t Come Back to You in Heaven

If you will study the words of Christ in the Gospels, you will find that He taught a most wonderful possibility for humans—the transmutation of our earthly wealth into a store of higher and eternal values which will abide forever.

I take that word transmutation from the old medieval concept of the alchemists that some day they would come up with a formula for changing a base metal such as common lead into a precious metal such as gold.

That’s what our Lord taught about our possessions—the changing across to something else.

Now, let’s get something straight at the outset. When Jesus said that His disciples could lay up treasures in heaven, He did not mean to imply or infer that if you give $10 to foreign missions this year, you will have $10 waiting for you in heaven! You actually would not believe some of the gross misinterpretations which have been placed upon this teaching in order to get people to part with money for religious purposes.

I have seen a printed certificate issued by a certain tabernacle and which purports to be a bond issued against the Bank of Heaven. They printed it with all those fancy little curlicues, with gold and gilt edges, and stamped with an official-looking seal that really made it appear bona fide.

While I didn’t memorize the wording of the text on the printed bond, it was something to this effect: You pay into this church the sum of $100, and then, when the Lord comes, you take this bond with you, and you will get your $100 back, plus 100 percent interest.

Yes, I tell you, I saw that certificate as it had been issued. People often say to me, Now, Brother Tozer, be charitable! But I can’t be charitable with a skunk! That kind of thing needs to be exposed before the whole wide world.

That is religious racketeering, pure and simple!

What kind of a low business is this, that a pastor could encourage a man or woman to come with a gift of $100 for the purchase of a church bond, and then say: Now, keep that handy, so that when the Lord comes you can take it with you and get it back with 100 percent interest?

Balaam was a Sunday school teacher compared with that schemer, and Judas was a Christian gentleman!

What Jesus taught was the translation of the kind of wealth we have here on earth upward into spiritual and eternal values.

Who supported Moffat and Carey and Livingstone and Jaffray and Christie? Those names will never be known on this earth, but they were faithful followers of the Lord who had learned the joy of converting earthly possessions into eternal realities.

I think, too, of the sacrifices of godly men and women in our churches, men and women who are too wise to try to keep everything for themselves after they have met the demands of the family budget from month to month.

This is the true secret of taking a low common value and translating it upward onto a higher level.

Chapter 14

Nothing Can Destroy Christianity If We Live Like Christians

I don’t think Communism is the great danger to Christianity. I don’t believe that Communism can ever destroy Christianity, if Christians will really live like Christians.

Neither do I believe that all of the liberals and modernists put together can kill Christianity. They’re trying—but they can’t succeed!

The atheist and the unbeliever, the pagan in his darkness—I have some understanding for these. But the liberal—he’s the man who has put his own eyes out, and I haven’t much sympathy for him. But he can’t destroy the Christian church or the evangelical witness of Christ.

They couldn’t destroy Christianity in the Roman empire. Every time they killed ten believers, one hundred others came forward and said, Kill me, too. History tells us that.

The emperors threw so many Christians to the lions in the pits that they began to get embarrassed, and said, What are we going to do with these fools? We kill ten, and a hundred others stand up and confess that they are Christians, too.

So, they had to call it off. And they said, Let’s try to save face. Don’t kill so many—the place is getting too bloody.

Christians were willing to live like Christians, and to die like Christians. Christian blood was the seed that made the church grow.

That’s why I say that Communism can never destroy the church of Jesus Christ. And you need not worry about the true Church behind the Iron Curtain.

My brothers and sisters, there have been periods down through the years when Christians met in damp basements, among the flat worms and cobwebs, and worshipped their God. Then they had to sneak out to their jobs, and at night, like Gideon, went again to some hiding place and prayed and sang in a low voice, and read any portions of Scripture they could get.

They kept the fire alive in the midst of the fiercest and most brutal persecution.

The fire of God can’t be damped out by the waters of man’s persecution.

It is only when the church is rotten inside that she can die. If the church in Russia is dead today, it is not because of Communism—though Communism is from hell, there’s no question about that—but hell can’t destroy the church.

I say, if the church in Russia is dead—and I don’t think it is—it is because the institutional church had died from within.

The tree that is blown down in the storm is rotten in its heart or it wouldn’t be blown down. And the church that falls because of persecution is a church that was dead before it fell.

So, I haven’t much worry about Communism. Neither have I much worry about liberalism.

Some of my poor, tired brethren, faint, yet pursuing, are still running after the liberals—taking a pot shot at liberals wherever they can see the white of an eye.

But I don’t bother them, because they are dead, anyhow.

Chapter 15

You Can’t Elect to Worship God on Just One Day of the Week

I find I can’t join the positive thinkers and stay always in the realm of roses and symphony orchestras.

I have to be faithful to what I know to be true, so I must tell you that if you will not worship God seven days a week, you do not worship Him on one day a week.

There is no such thing in heaven as Sunday worship—unless it is accompanied by Monday worship and Tuesday worship, and so on all down the line, right through the week.

Too many of us try to discharge our obligations to God Almighty in one day—usually one trip to church. Sometimes, nobly, we make it two trips to church, but it’s all on the same day when we have nothing else to do—and that’s supposed to be worship. I grant you, sir, that it can be true worship, provided that on Monday and Tuesday and the other days you also