The Man Who Met God in... — A.W. Tozer

Are persons most difficult to love. And to re-imagine as one of them, I love them all of them. A great, big, wonderful audience. I figure that this will be a pretty much captive audience. And I mean by that that I will be speaking to them every morning for the three mornings that I shall be here.

Before I am patient to speak, I want to make a few preliminary remarks which will not be repeated for the reason that the messages that I want to bring to you are repeating service. They asked me to come and do the same thing here.

That will mean, of course, that only a few of you will have heard this. But it doesn't make too much difference. I only have one to say different things. If these messages are not directed to, not slanted to, we have lost our reputation and profession.

Truth Incarnated in Christian Life

A Christian truck driver wouldn't have to do that. There are no graces necessary, necessary medicines, and not needed. He's about the man of God. He can be used in any place. He's good anywhere. He's like gold.

He can be turned into anything you want. Provided it's gold. Now, in order to, instead of creeping to theories, although there's much theory in the Bible, that is, there is much that is, well, not theories, much is abstract doctrine.

People get out from their human characters, demonstrate New Testament truth. The key to the hour is the incarnation of truth in human life. We have to have our theology with feet on it, hands and heads on it, and see it incarnate.

Moses' Crisis Encounter at the Burning Bush

That's God in the fire. Possibly the man who thought like God. A lot of you can repeat it, but I'll not read it, but I'll read it again. Third chapter of Exodus. The prophet of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian.

And he lacks ties with the deserts and canyons of the mountains of God, even to Horeb. The Lord appeared unto him, and said, I have an image of a great sight, why the bush is not burnt. He said, dare I not?

He lays down upon one pair of God's shoulders this much responsibility. Clearly under God the prophet of slavery. They get that the HD is something else. There's only one way to be courtly up there, I guess.

Centuries and great kings and education have done it. By the way, you get the sheep. And he went to school till the sheep and the salamander could have been a poet and an artist and all that. Still he wasn't ready.

God had to do something for him, which he did in this experience here. He had to give him a sense of sacredness. God stunned him and beat him down. With an encounter, a crisis of encounter, this had to come to the man.

He had the doctrine, he was smooth, and he had had lots of time to dream and to think, but he still wasn't ready. God could make him ready only by bringing him to himself in the crisis of encounter. He had to meet God.

God revealed himself to the man. At the bush alone, in the running brow of Sinai, he experienced God. God revealed himself as fire. I'll mention that a little, talk a little about it. They say that God is inscrutable and ineffable.

He's a lot of other things, but he is those two things. I'd like to say this to you, but I can't because I haven't the time. But this rationalism that's passing for Christian theologism irks me, because we are trying to figure God out with our heads, and you can't do it, my brethren.

God rises infinitely above the possibility of ever any man grasping him intellectually. Knowing that he is ineffable, cannot be spoken forth, inscrutable, cannot be reached, dwells in life that no man can approach unto, God sets him by figures and similitudes.

Fire as a Biblical Sign of God's Presence

It seems to me his favorite one is fire. Do you remember that God came to Israel, the fire by night and the bush and the cloud by day? Later on when the temple was built, he dwelt between the wings of the cherubim as a fire.

They call it the Shekinah, the presence of God. And then at Pentecost, the Holy Ghost came upon those hundred and twenty. He perpetuated that idea of God as fire. For in each one of those, the disciples went out with a flame of fire on his forehead, the same fire, the presence of Almighty God.

It's a mild, irrational impulse, as some people believe, but the very presence of God is the fire in the scripture. It was to show Moses who he was and bring him into an encounter with himself in experience.

Now, if there are any inclined to be shy away from the word experience, I'm not one of them. I believe in experience. You know, experience has been defined as conscious awareness of something by somebody.

And that's how we know. That's how we know of this awareness of something by somebody. The somebody was Moses, and the somebody that he was aware of was God, and it was conscious. He wasn't unconscious.

He didn't seep through into his subconscious. He was awake and aware of what was going on. It was this encounter with God that changed him so he never was the same man. Moses experienced God, and from here on there was no longer theory, no longer knowledge by description.

It now became knowledge by acquaintance. The Scottish philosopher Carlyle once was walking with a new minister in the Kirk, and he linked his arm in the minister's arm and said, Reverend, what this parish needs is somebody who knows God otherwise than we do.

I'm convinced that a great many of us, even evangelicals, know God only by hearsay. He is what we know him to be, or hope that he is, rather than what we know him to be by spiritual encounter. And I think in tragic evangelical circles it's this one, that we have used doctrine as a substitute for spiritual experience.

Doctrine as a Highway to Knowing God

Spirit should be the outgrowth of doctrine, but we make doctrine terminal, and if we can recite the notes of the Schofield Bible, we're all set. And we have it, but a lot of people stop right there and need to experience God.

Bible doctrine is a highway to lead us to God, but there are many evangelicals asleep beside the highway. Because they're on the highway or near the highway, they call themselves evangelicals. To me an evangelical is somebody who not only believes the credo of the Christian, but who experiences the God of the Christian.

And I believe that there ought to be some prophets rise in the church and declare that God can be experienced, that we can know God, that we don't have to make God a logical deduction, that we can experience God as we can experience.

My son came to meet me with four grandchildren at the airport last evening, and they were my grandchildren. I could prove they were by deduction, but when they grabbed me, I knew they were my grandchildren by experience.

God can be known deep in the heart by spiritual experience. Well, God wanted to say some things to Moses, and he did. He took all the self-confidence out of the man and beat him down and then raised him up.

It's always God's way. Some of the things that I think he taught Moses there, and I think he wants to teach you and me, if we're going to be used at all of God, I'll give you now. One is that the fire dwelt in the bush.

The Indwelling Christ and Union With God

And the bush was at the mercy of the fire. It accepted the rule of the fire. You know, when you hold a creed, that's all very well, but you'll never amount to anything until the creed. As long as you hold the doctrine of God, that's all very well.

It's better than being an atheist. But until God holds you as an extension of his own hands, you're not yet where you ought to be. And this indicated here in a beautiful figure, if not in the type, that the fire dwelt in the bush.

Now, I'm a great believer in the indwelling Christ in you, the hope of glory. Not Christ with you only, though that's true, but Christ in you, which is the hope of glory. The problem of personality, interpenetrating personality, isn't a heavy one for me.

I get blessed on lots that people don't understand, and I admit I don't either, but they look good to me. And God blesses me, as the brother said, without much provocation. I get help, I get a lot of help, and there are a lot of problems that I don't have.

An Anglican pastor came to me once and said, Closer, I'd like to ask you two questions. One, how do you explain the problem of the eternal God entering time? And the second one is, what's meant by the light that lighted every man?

And I said, Doctor, as for that first problem, I don't have the question, the answer to the question, I don't even have the question. It isn't even a problem to me how the eternal God can enter time's low tabernacle and become flesh to dwell among us.

So I waved him off right about the second one, then I did have an opinion on that. But the problem of how personality interpenetrates personality was settled. That is, my head got hold of it, by the iron in the fire.

You put the iron in the fire and blow the old fashioned bellows, and pretty soon you have the fire in the iron. You do not have the loss of either personality. The iron is still the iron, and the fire is still the fire, but you have them fused in experience.

And if the fire goes out of the iron, so God enters the human breast and fuses his divine, uncreated personality with the created. And they do not become metaphysically or ontologically one, but they become experiential.

The fire, the glowing incandescence of the presence of God in the breast of a man, he becomes a little like God. There is much of God in him and about him, and yet he is not God, and God is not the man.

Forever and forever, God remains the man, and yet their personalities are united. Now, God was trying to say that to Moses, and he is saying that to us. That's what we need for Christian workers, any kind of Christian workers.

Sanctification as Purification by Divine Fire

And then I noticed, secondly, that the bush was purified by the fire. I suppose that if you pass around the questionnaire and ask your definition of sanctification, there are 700 of me, they tell you, and we'd have 700 definitions.

For that reason, I cannot possibly allow myself to get involved in boots over the word. But I believe that God wants his people to be holy, I do believe that. But I do not believe holiness is ever God.

God is holy and only God is holy. And where God is, there is holiness, and where God is not, there is just us. There's no use to try to make it any otherwise. The bush was purified by the fire. You ever stop to think that all the fungi and all the larvae and worms and all perished off of that bush?

There wasn't a single thing there but bush and fire. The presence of God burning in the human breast purifies that breast, and as long as it burns there on him, those evils that used to follow us around and be part of our personality will be burned away and they'll be nothing to show where they used to be.

I don't know much about medicine, you know. I'm a priest here, and of course I read the Reader's Digest. It's an awful lot of medication. It's a tremendous amount of medical education. But I read that there are heat-proof, there are heat-proof microbes that you can boil them for two hours and they still come up smiling, they don't die.

Nothing, nothing can stand raw fire. Nothing, nothing can stand raw fire. All life dies before the flames. Evils in the breast that can stand the presence of all kinds of revival meetings and religious meetings.

There are sins that can get on a board, that can take the Lord's Supper, that can get baptized, but there are no sins that can stand the presence of the indwelling God. Now, the third thing is that the bush was transfigured by the flame.

The Fire That Gives Significance and Protection

That bush was a bush of corn and a cheesy bush, and there were millions of them growing around there, and Moses had seen them by the hundreds. But this bush is the most famous bush in all history and still remains the most famous bush in all history.

Its glory was a derived glory. God did not make the bush great. He simply got in the bush and was great in the bush. And so the attention was drawn to the bush. The Sunday school teacher was teaching about the bush, and he said, you know, Moses was a great scientist.

He was an observing man. And when he saw the fire burning in the bush, his scientific spirit came out, and he said, now I'll go and turn them this, imagine that. Those poor kids had to listen to that kind of stuff.

The simple fact is, anybody with an IQ above six and seven would have turned aside to see a fire in a bush that's come down miles from human habitation. Moses did. He turned aside to see that bush, that transfigured bush.

And it became, it took on meaning and significance there. It itself was related by nature to all the other cheesy bushes. Yet nobody ever talked like me, and they all talk about that one bush. Why? Because it had the fire in it.

You know, one of the snow is the anonymity of the average man. Emerson said the average man and woman is only one more. And you go out on the highways or down to the street corners or into the far jungle areas, wherever you will, east or west, north or south, and you find thousands of people crawling like animated clothespins over the face of the earth.

They're born, they live, they suffer, they have a bit of joy, then they die, and the place knows them no more. They're full of significance and without meaning. But when Jesus Christ lays hold of a man, the first thing he does is to give him faith.

He amounts to something, he gets a faith. God gives a man a faith and dwells in the man, and he becomes transfigured in the fire. This man, touched by the mighty Christ, now takes on significance and meaning.

And the humblest new convert in the valley of the Danis or Manis in New Guinea is more in the kingdom of God than the Churchills and all the rest of the great. Because they've taken on a meaning that they never had before and that nobody can have except by the fire.

Well, I was going to say, I'm watching that clock, that the fire protected this bush. I think I'll mention it just briefly. People could bother that bush as long as that fire was in it. You ever think of the hungry goat browsing at twilight?

He didn't go near that bush. He'd go over and browse on another one, but he didn't go near that one. And he buzzered lightning to look around. They were lighted on that one. There wasn't a bug that could crawl up it, nor a caterpillar that could.

It was perfectly safe as long as the fire dwelled in it. Now, I believe in separation, but I don't believe in insulation. And I believe that it's the will of God that his evangelical believers, his children, should insulate themselves from others.

If you speak to a man, how can you speak to a man about the Lord? If we withdraw our holy scripture about us and wrap ourselves in our heaven on us and expect to get there finally when we pass custom, I wonder then, are we going to help anybody all insulated like that?

No, no. We are to be separated, but certainly we're not best to be wrapped in cellophane. This is another historical error. You know, they said, I've got my fire, and now I'm going to have to cup it and keep it.

So they cupped it, and so the wind wouldn't blow it out. And they went to the monasteries. It was a great mistake. Now, I honor them for their intention, but it doesn't speak to the knowledge of the scripture.

Simeon Stylites was an example, and probably the most horrible example, of an effort to keep him close, to get up on a pillar 30 feet high and stayed 30 years. There he was, and he never came down even to take a bath and everything.

They fed him up there. I'd let him starve him down if I'd had it to do myself. But they got it up to him, pulled it up by a rope. Now, he thought he was being holy. The Son of God, who walked among men, among publicans and sinners, and talked to a fallen woman, he was holy and pure because the purity was inspired in him.

And so a childish and army lassie passing around war tribes in a saloon is just as pure and just as salvation as if he were somewhere in a convent. We do, in fact, pure. We do not become safe. We become safe by the indwelling fire.

I'm perfectly convinced that when God dwells in a human breast, nothing can harm that individual until God wants him in heaven. I'm not much of a friar, you know. I was born 30 years too early. I flew down yesterday.

I flew out of what they call in Toronto a gray drizzle. It was good to me. I flew out of that. As I walked up the plane, I said, Now, Lord, I'm in your hands. It's either Chicago or glory, one or the other.

And I have no reason to believe that a man or a woman is perfectly safe out of the fire of God's presence. And then lastly, I'm going to get too early. I'm still circled, but I'm going to do it. Most important for us in our work as believers that Bush became beautiful in the fire.

The Beauty of the Lord in a Transformed Life

Moses, many years later, probably 80, probably 40, 35 years later, the beauty of the Lord, our God, be upon us. And I wonder if Moses was not thinking of the beauty of God in that bush. A wonderful hour when he saw God and met God in the fire.

Let the beauty of the Lord, our God, be upon us. The Greek philosophers, for all the fact they had no revelation, sometimes in their blindness, they did blunder close to truth. Beauty was a part, somehow it was near God.

They believed that virtue, that somewhere there was a central virtue. For intellectuals, somewhere there was a central intellect. And they believed there was a central beauty somewhere. Well, Moses knew there was.

He is the Lord, our God, be upon us. And here was an acacia bush that nobody would have brought home and planted in his yard. Now, this one was beautiful because it was aglow. It was a bush burning, and so it was beautiful.

The old day old beauty, uncreated, ever ancient, ever new. The beauty of God was there. And when Jesus came down from man, his garments smelled of myrrh and aloes and cashew out of the ivory palaces. We just had a hectic Christmas period, but if you got past the lights and Santa Claus and the rest of it, you could see the beauty of Jesus.

All the fragrance, the aloes and myrrh and cashew from his holy garments. He as though he was slain on a hill outside. The fragrance of his life had made the world smell a bit better. This dirty world in which we are here, well, there's an attractiveness about true Christianity.

The Unloveliness of Western Christianity in Missions

And I don't mind telling you, I'm not as happy a man as I ought to be, irresponsibly happy. I pray God will never allow me to become an irresponsible, happy jingle bell Christian ought to be. I think we ought to take the weight of the world and of the Church on our shoulders.

And we have to be miserable, frankly, and dedicated to God and suffer through it. And one of the things I'm miserable about part of the time is the unattractiveness of Christianity in our day. The tragedy of unlovely orthodoxy, of unbeautiful Christianity is without doubt what it is today.

Now, I heard the talk last night given by Brother Blockner, and he tipped us off that he would say things that we didn't believe. And I tried my best, but I couldn't, that I didn't agree with him on. But he was talking, he gave us a brilliant semester of commissions all over the world.

One reason I believe they exist is this. This mess we're in all over in missions everywhere, is that we have taken a decadent, degenerate Christianity and we've transplanted it on foreign soil and we believe that we're doing God's service.

My friend, it doesn't make a man holy to cross the water, whether he goes over on the Queen Mary or whether he flies by boat. He's just the same man when he gets over there as he was when he was here.

You can put a donkey on an airplane and fly him to Germany, it's still real. And you can put a holy man on a plane and when he gets over there, he's neither less nor more holy. We in our society, the Christian missionary alliance, we do everything but bow down to missionaries.

They're sort of a Virgin Mary to us. We get on their knees to them. But I've been around for, oh, I forgot how many years, too many. But I've been on a mission board and I know missionaries pretty well and they are their people, the same as we are.

And they will transplant and take with them over yonder the same brand of Christianity. If they were brought up on cheap religious fiction, they'll soon be writing cheap religious fiction for the literature.

Or nationals, excuse me. And if they sung bouncy choruses over here, they'll be writing bouncy. And instead of having pure Christianity, God dwelling in a human breast, we'll have the unlugged loveliness of a Western Christianity transplanted on Eastern soil.

I don't believe in it and I wouldn't give a dime to support it. I believe the great tragedy of the hour is unattractive, unbeautiful, unlovely Christianity. And the sorrow is that most people don't know how unbeautiful it is.

They see the ugly thing that passes Christianity today and think that's all there is. Actually what we want is the beauty of the Lord our God in human breast. A winsome, magnetic saint. 500 promoters and gadgeteers and religious engineers.

Used to be, you know, give a man a songbook and turn him loose and you had an evangelistic campaign on your hands. And the missionary over there did perform surgery and a pair of pliers to pull out teeth and you had a missionary.

And nowadays you've got to take onyx to get through. It's a big, ugly, top-heavy thing. And sometimes I wonder if it won't be the will of God being down and start over. But how will we start? We'll start with saints, my brothers and sisters.

The Need for Saints Who Resemble Christ

I believe in saints. The comics and I've met the promoters and I've met the founders who put his name on the front of the building, founded it. And I've met converted cowboys, not too well converted, and converted pugilists that all got converted but they're fish.

I've met all kinds of weird Christians throughout the United States and Canada. But my heart is looking for saints. I want to meet the people who are like the Lord Jesus Christ. A good many years ago over in the state of Ohio, I heard an old gentleman losing his lector.

Now the odd thing about it is I don't know what he said. I don't remember what he said. But all I know is what he looked like. He looked like my conception of Jesus if Jesus had lived to be old. What a beauty.

I sat entranced by that beautiful face. But I don't remember too much of his sermon. Dr. Jonathan Goforth, the great Presbyterian missionary. Later on I was preaching in Toronto. He came out and said, Dr. Jonathan Goforth has died.

He will lie in state in such and such a church, passed by by the hundreds and I imagine thousands upon thousands to look at the face of the man who had looked like Jesus. Ever written a great book? I don't think he ever did.

I've never seen it. He'd never painted a great picture. He'd never founded anything particularly. Had lived what he believed. And the fire glowed in the bush until Dr. Grace told more than his tongue could tell.

And so they went past and looked down on that dead face. Not even the way the beauty of the Lord God that had been so long burning in that personality. That is what we need, my brothers and sisters. That is what we need.

A Call to Young Christian Workers to Become Burning Bushes

So to you, particularly to the young people going out into religious service, I would say that you are called to be a burning bush. Called to be a bush that has fire in it. This is the world sundown and there are just alone looking for somebody that looks like God.

Somebody that has fire. A lonely man somewhere is looking your direction. And it's my conviction that un-Lenity has done more to turn more people away from Christ than all the liberalism in the world.

Though I'm not a liberal. I'm an Evangelist. I pray a little and stretch it and put a few footnotes around it. I'm even a fundamentalist. But I believe I'm an essentialist, a believer in historic Christianity, the faith of our fathers which is living still.

And yet I believe that until Evangelical Christianity gets through and meets God in the fire, that's God burning and glowing within it. We're going to have all these troubles and we're not going to solve them by confidence.

I'm sorry. We're going to solve them. You're going to do a lot here and I'm for you. But you're not going to solve this one basic problem unless you solve it. For it's not techniques to follow, methods to be followed.

It's the man and his God. God and the man. The man in God and God in the man. The fire of the Holy Ghost burning in the breast of the man. And brother, if that burns hot enough, it'll burn through an awful lot of problems that you won't be able to solve in a thousand panel discussion.

That's all for this morning. And may God help us as we go out from here to serving in his world. We may remember that the most important thing is that we should have met God himself in living spiritual encounter.

Father, we pray that thou will be pleased to bless these words. Thou knowest how our words fly about like birds around a chimney. But Jesus, take the word, at least the text, and carry it home to our hearts.

We pray thee a great longing, a great desire by the Holy Ghost through the blood. All our self-confidence is gone and we rest not yet these things.