Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
A.W. Tozer
Started reading
November 6, 2020
Please don’t fail to notice that Jesus could and did say: “I speak and I judge—and I speak from the Father.”
This, then, was what Jesus told His questioners: “I speak from the Father, and the things that I saw and heard, I tell you. You can trust me, because I came down from above and I represent the Father, and speak from Him, so that what He says has absolute authority—absolute and final authority from which there is no appeal.”
But when the Lord Jesus Christ has spoken there is no appeal. It is either Jesus or everlasting night. It is either listen to what He says or be forever in ignorance. It is either take His light, or be forever in darkness.
Well, I can startle you right here. I believe in Christian charity, but I don’t believe in Christian tolerance at all!
the idea that Jesus must tolerate everybody and that the Christian must tolerate every kind of doctrine.
I do not believe it for one minute—for there are not ten ‘rights’—there is only one ‘right.’ There is only one Jesus and only one God and only one Bible.
We cannot do better than to remember that when Jesus Christ has spoken, that’s it!
We who are evangelicals and conservative in theology are often accused of being ‘bigoted.’ I can only reply that science and philosophy are more arrogant and bigoted than religion could ever possibly be.
I can only say: Let us be tolerant of everything that we can, and let us be charitable toward all that we cannot tolerate, but let us not imagine for a minute that we are called upon to take a middle-of-the-road stand, never knowing exactly what we believe.
But of this he can be sure—our Lord will never, never say anything but what He has said. Never will He qualify. Never will He put in a footnote, to say, “I didn’t quite mean it like that.” He said what He meant. He meant what He said. He is the Eternal Word, and we must listen to Him if our discipleship is to be genuine and consistent. We ought to think with joy about those who are true disciples of Jesus Christ.
A true disciple has not taken an impulsive leap in the dark. He is one who has become a Christian after deep thought and proper consideration. He has allowed the Word of God to search his heart. He has felt the sense of his own sin and his need to be released from it. He has come to believe that Jesus Christ is the only person who can release him from his guilt, and he has committed himself without equivocation or reservation to Jesus Christ as his Saviour.
A true disciple does not consider his Christianity a part-time commitment, so he has become a Christian in all departments of his life. He has reached the point in his Christian experience where there is no turning back. Follow him for 24 hours of the day and night and you will find that you can count on his faithfulness to Christ and his joyful abiding in the Word of God.
I think first we must consider the person who becomes a disciple of Christ on impulse. This is likely to be the person who came in on a wave of enthusiasm, and I am a little bit suspicious of anyone who is too easily converted.
The time will come when he will think better of it, and he will give himself time to cool off. He will meditate and he will listen to the Word. He will give it serious thought, and slowly but surely, he will make up his mind that the way of Christ is the way he must take. When he becomes a Christian, you’ve got somebody.
Actually, I go along with the man who is thoughtful enough about this decision to say truthfully: “I want a day to think this over. I want a week to read the Bible and to meditate on what this decision means.”
I once said to Dr. H. M. Shuman, long-time president of The Christian and Missionary Alliance and a very wise old Christian philosopher: “Dr. Shuman, nobody will follow me. I can’t help but notice all of the big leaders with their charm and personality to spare—all they have to do is whistle, and there come the crowds.” Dr. Shuman said, “Just thank God that they are not following you. If they won’t follow you, just preach Jesus, and they will follow Him!”
That’s why I think Jesus was a plain-looking man, but when He opened His mouth, glory came out, and men and women either rejected the glory, or they followed the glory. But in any case, they knew it was glory, and they knew they could never be the same again.
I came to the conclusion long ago that if Jesus Christ is not controlling all of me, the chances are very good that He is not controlling any of me.
It may sound strange, but I have met Christian disciples who were half saved. Please don’t ask me to identify them theologically—I can’t do it, I don’t know. I am just glad that God is not asking me to please write some letters of recommendation for some people He can’t place.
But, as for myself, I don’t want to be a half disciple. I want my whole life—all of me—under the domination of the Lord Jesus Christ.
It was an old English preacher who used to say: “If Christ cannot be Lord of all, He will not be Lord at all!”
Now, brethren, I don’t want to be cruel but I must be honest. Jesus Christ wants to be and must be Lord and He must be head of and Lord of all departments of my life. You cannot have that girlfriend, or that wife, or that home, or that job, all shut up in a little airtight compartment that Jesus can’t control. He desires to be in control, and He must be in control of all of your life—or you will not be a disciple indeed!
A Christian is no Christian until he is all Christian, until he has reached the point of no return. Not seasonal, anymore—but regular at all times. Then, the Lord says, he is a disciple indeed. He is following on to know the Lord!
They tell of a boy on one of our mission fields who memorized the entire Sermon on the Mount. He did it in such record time and with such little effort that someone called him in to find out how he had done it.
Charles G. Finney taught that it was wrong, morally wrong, to teach objective doctrine without a moral application.
Are you being a true disciple? Are you obeying the truth as it is revealed by the Spirit of God? Are you enjoying the benefits of true freedom in Jesus Christ?
But the true disciple follows His Lord and goes on with Him.
Conscience is only a joke to many in our day.
I. The definitions of conscience. 1. Always refers to right and wrong. 2. In the Scriptures means an inward awareness. 3. The secret presence of Christ, the ground of conscience.
II. The Bible example of the operation of conscience. 1. The hypocritical condition of the Jewish religious leaders. 2. Their plot to use the woman to discredit Jesus’ teaching. 3. Their hatred was for Jesus—not for her sin or the broken law. 4. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone!” 5. The men leave, ashamed and silent, one by one. 6. Operation of the conscience—it smites the inner life and isolates, setting us off all by ourselves.
III. Examples of what men do with their consciences. 1. They turn aside from a good conscience. 2. Some allow their conscience to become seared. 3. Some are living with a defiled conscience. 4. The blessings of the conscience “sprinkled from evil works.”
IV. Conclusion: It may be fatal to silence the inner voice.
What is happening to us in the Christian church—that we no longer believe in the human conscience?
Why should the church be afraid to admit to conscience, when the Word of God has much to say about it, and reminding us that conscience is always on God’s side? It judges conduct in the light of the moral law, and as the Bible says, excuses or accuses.
Joke about politics, if you must joke—they are usually funny, anyway—but don’t joke about God, and don’t joke about conscience, nor death nor life, nor the cross nor prayer. We are fast becoming in our day the greatest bunch of sacrilegious jokesters in the world.
If you will go through your Bible concordance, you will find conscience is mentioned in very many places, and the idea which the word conscience embodies is mentioned throughout the Bible—not once, or ten times—but underlies the whole structure and is woven into the entire revelation.
By conscience, we mean that which always refers to right and wrong. Conscience never deals with theories. Conscience always deals with right and wrong, and the relation of the individual to that which is right or wrong.
When the Bible says we are dead in trespasses and sins, it means that we are cut off from the life of God, and that is all that it means. But that, in itself, is so bad that it is impossible to think of anything worse. But that same man that is cut off from the life of God, and so dead in sin, has within him a moral awareness.
If He said, “Stone her to death,” and they did so, the Romans would put Jesus in prison and that would be the end of Him. But if He said, “Let her go,” they could reply, “We always knew you were against the law of Moses,” and that would be the end of Him as a teacher in Israel. He would be completely discredited before the law.
That law of Moses that said “thou shalt stone the wicked woman…” was meant for holy people, not for the wicked.
Conscience-stricken, smitten inside, struck by a stroke from heaven, they walked out one by one, and sneaked away. That’s what conscience does. It is an inner voice, that which talks inside of you. It is one voice that we have all heard. Some people are still wishing that they could have lived in Jesus’ day, so they could have heard His voice and His teaching.
Also, in First Timothy 4:1 and 2, we are told frankly about certain ones who speak lies and hypocrisy, because their conscience has been seared as with a hot iron. So, there is the, conscience that has been turned aside, and here we have the reference to the seared conscience.
Now, I want you to know, brethren, that these who have the seared conscience fall away into false doctrine.
A false doctrine will fall harmlessly on a good conscience, but when a conscience has been seared, when a man has played with the fire and burned his conscience, seared it and calloused it until he can handle the hot iron of sin without cringing, then there is no longer any safety for that man. He can go off into strange cults, into heresy, into any one of fifty varieties of false religion.
Why is it that a man who went to a Sunday school, learned the Ten Commandments, knew the Sermon on the Mount, and could tell the story of Christ’s birth and crucifixion and resurrection from the dead, will turn to Buddha or Mohammed? The answer is that he fooled with the inner voice, and he would not listen to the sound of the preacher within him. God turned from him and let him go, and with a seared conscience he wandered into the arms of Buddha or the arms of Mohammed.
These are the men and women who are corrupt inwardly, and even their language is soiled. I am just as afraid of people with soiled tongues as I am of those with a communicable disease, for a soiled and filthy tongue is an evidence of a deeper disease that has stilled the conscience.
The writer in Hebrews 10:19-22 recommends “a conscience sprinkled from evil works.”
We humans ought to notice something very wonderful and very different about the Lord Jesus—He was genuinely what He was, and He was never anything else but what He was.
