Praying Church — A.W. Tozer

Prayer's Power, Misuse, and Perseverance

The latter part of the 16th verse, this statement, "'The effectual and fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.'. Then in the 4th chapter of the same book, 2 and 3, "'Ye have not, because ye ask not, or ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss.'.

And then in the 18th of Luke, he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray and not to think. This is the only parable that is explained before it is given them, so I'll not read it.

The moral, as they say, is given before the parable is told, and the moral is, men ought always to pray and not to think. Now there are three texts telling us three things, so that indicates, of course, that I am to speak on prayer, since all three texts have to do with prayer.

There is a great old Spanish brother by the name of Molinas, at least one great book, and in it he makes this statement, that prayer is an ascent or elevation of the mind of God, and that God is above all creatures, and the soul cannot see him nor converse with him if she raise not herself above them all.

Because God is above all, I must, in order to speak to him, raise my soul above all, and contemplate that which is above all. And now with that thought in mind, that prayer is an ascension of the soul to God, notice these three texts.

One of them says that prayer is a potent thing. I'm amused at the translators trying to translate in English what the man said here, but it all adds up to this, that it is a potent thing. Prayer has tremendous power.

Now this the Old Testament and the New Testament teach, but this also the Old Testament and the New Testament demonstrate. Then another text says that even though prayer is a potent thing, sometimes we do not have, even when we pray.

And the reason we do not have is that we have asked selfishly. Or that we haven't asked at all, that of course is part of the text. We either haven't asked, or having asked, we have asked with wrong motives.

And prayer with wrong motives is useless. But the third text says that nevertheless, even though there are times when prayer doesn't get through because it isn't the right kind of prayer, nevertheless, even though there are difficulties and discouragements, men ought always to pray and not to faint.

The Popularity of Prayer and the Problem of Pagan Prayer

Now I could sit down after having said this, and I have said considerable already, I think, because these three texts have said it, and I've repeated them with a minimum of explanation. Now about prayer, you know there's a great deal of prayer going on currently.

Societies such as ours in the United States and across the line into Canada, and I suppose all over the world for that matter, whoever we're influenced by some current philosophy or something else, we have our ups and downs.

If we were to take prayer and its popularity and have a graph, and start way over on this side of the tabernacle and end over there, and go back, say, over the last 50 years, you'd find your graph moving up and down.

There were times when prayer was at the peak of popularity, everybody was praying, and then there were times when it was considered rather old-fashioned, to think about it, and then it would go back up again.

Right now we happen to be in one of those peaks of the graph where it is quite the popular thing. Everybody prays. I don't know whether the gangsters have started praying yet or not, but I wouldn't put it past them.

Everybody else does. Movie actors who makes movies so filthy that police have to ban them in the cities will pray solemnly. Prayer just seems to be quite the thing now. Everybody prays. Between the First World War and the Second, it was philosophically bad to think about prayer.

It threw you over on somebody elsewhere, as you ought to be depending upon yourself. Then in the Second World War, there were no atheists in the foxhole, and everybody began to pray. The prizefighters even pray now.

A prizefighter prays that he might be able to paralyze the other fellow. Then when after it's a nip-nip and tuck and he's bloody but unbowed and the other fellow is lying over quivering in the corner and they're fanning him, putting ice packs on his noble dome, they say, Now all right you, would you say a word to your public?

He gets up and with much panting and breathing says, I didn't do it, God did it. I didn't do it, God did it. We've been praying. I've got praying friends all over and I want to take this opportunity to thank my praying friends for praying for me.

Amen. Well, God bless him. That kind of paganism belongs in New Guinea. It doesn't belong in the United States, but it's in the United States nevertheless. Can you imagine what kind of a God God would be?

Who would get into a prize ring and answer to prayer and unseen be the third man in the ring? And when the number one, the man who'd done the praying missed and didn't duck in time, why God would hit the other fellow so as to guard his friend.

That'd be a terrible thing to do. It'd be a sneaky thing to do to begin with and it'd be unlike God and unlike Christ and totally carnal and altogether out in left field. God would never be caught doing it.

So prayer is a common thing. Now everybody's praying, you know, people stop in the midst of any kind of wickedness and put up their little hand and pray. God's on everybody's mailing list. Everybody that wants anything, they go to God about it.

Prayer, Selfish Projects, and Discernment in Giving

I remember once reading an article about John D. Rockefeller and what a bunch of deadheads he had hanging around him and freeloaders always writing him for money. One fellow wrote him this, Brother King, if you want a copy of this for making money for the alliance missions, this works, you know, if you get anybody to go along with it.

This man wrote and he said, Dear Mr. Rockefeller, you're a rich man and you're a man who understands business. I'm not rich and I don't understand business, but what I want to ask is you lend me $500 and then invest it for me wisely.

And then after it has made a big chunk of money, take out your 500 and send me the rest. Now that's one way of getting money. And that's one of the wolves of the rich man. He's on the mailing list of every freeloader and bum, you know, from the rock bound coast of Maine to the sunny slopes of California, as the politicians say.

And now every sort of personal interest and selfish project, I say project because I've been up in Canada a year and a half, and that's what they say, but project isn't as American. Every kind of selfish project is being carried on, unscriptural, unspiritual and injurious it may be, but it's sanctified with a text and it may have no higher motive, you know, than to relieve some fellow from doing an honest job or making an honest living with his own two little hard patties.

He just won't do it, so he gets a religious job somewhere and he thought up himself that it has no place in the scriptures at all. He didn't learn from the scriptures and he puts that across and works all his lifetime and gets old on that.

Or it may have no higher motive than to provide him an opportunity to travel at other people's expense. That's quite a popular thing now. And yet the fellow will call prayer meetings and he'll even pray all night in order to get that prayer answered for asking God to bless a project that God never thought of.

Jesus said that here are these trees and every tree that my father didn't plant will be cut down and thrown into the fire. My dear people, we ought to be generous and we ought to give generously. But let me say to you most solidly this morning that if you waste your money contributing to the delinquency of religious bums, you will pay for it in the day of Christ when he asks you what you did with your money.

You're not only to give, but you're to find out where you should give and give it where it counts and give it where God is doing something. Put your money where obviously the cloud and the fire are. And don't waste it giving to fair-haired curly-locked boys with a good soft voice who have no higher motive than to get out of a job.

A fellow one time had a letter, sent a letter around, and evidently sent it around to all of his mailing lists, and I happened to be one of his suckers. And I got a letter and it said, just a form letter, nicely written, you know, and he said, I feel deeply, I feel called to make a missionary journey.

He said, I must go, the heathen are perishing, we must get the gospel out, and therefore would you put a dollar in this envelope and send it in. If all of my friends to whom I write will send the dollar, I can make the missionary journey.

So he said, if you will send in enough, I want to go to Bermuda. Can you imagine it? I send out to my mailing list from Toronto and say, I want to go to Florida in midwinter. What ridiculous kind of business is it?

But that fellow's on, he's praying, oh Lord, bless my trip to Bermuda. And I'll take my bathing suit along just in case. Well, now about prayer. There are personal, intimate things that we ought not to pray about in public.

Personal Prayer and Corporate Prayer

I'd like to pass that little word on to you. As a pastor of about 43 years, I have learned the hard way that there are some things you just don't talk about in public, you don't bring them in. We should talk those over to God.

There isn't a thing, not one lonely, tiny little thing that God isn't interested in that affects you. He's interested in everything concerning you. John Wesley prayed for his horse and it got well and he rode off to his next appointment.

The Lord will hear prayer for almost anything that is not selfish, because the Lord loves you and he loves everything about you and he loves all around you and belief and above you and you move around in a glow of God's love if you're his child and everything that touches you touches God.

But there are things that ought to be talked over between you and God and not be brought into the Wednesday night prayer meeting. I've seen many a prayer meeting bogged down by personal details that never should have been brought there at all.

I remember one time being in a prayer meeting and a dear old brother, a godly old scholarly looking sweet old man by the name of Brother Adams, he was leading it, he's long been in heaven, but he was leading the meeting and he said, now we'll have prayer requests.

And there was one prayer request after another was made and one little old lady said, Brother Adams, would you pray for my twitching eyelid, it's bothering me. And he solemnly took time out to pray for her twitching eyelid.

Well now if I'd been leading the meeting I'd have said, honey, rub it, rub it. That's the best way to handle a twitching eyelid. Don't waste God's time near my time to the time of this company of assembled saints praying for a twitching eyelid.

You rub it, it'll get all right. And we just ought not to waste prayer meeting time bringing in personal things. We ought to pray for the great big things. I'm going to tell you what they are shortly here.

But then there is a second kind of prayer and that is what we call corporate prayer. That's the kind of prayer that should have an aim that affects the whole Church of Christ, not only the Christian Missionary Alliance, but the whole Church of Christ.

That should be what I call strategic prayer. Do you remember once a group of people in the New Testament met and prayed for a man? And it was a rather a personal deal because Peter was in prison and his brother James had been killed with the sword.

No, James, one of the other men, had been killed with the sword and Peter was in prison waiting also to get the sword. So they went to God about Peter. Now that affected Peter, but oh, it affected everybody else.

Peter's job wasn't done yet. Peter was so important. Peter wasn't the first Pope, but Peter was so vastly important to the Church of Christ at that time that he was indispensable for a moment and they couldn't give him up.

So they met and prayed, Oh God, here, this affects all the Church and the Church for all the centuries to come. Get Peter out of prison. Peter got out of prison and they didn't believe it. You remember because they had, some of them had prayed with the ones that had believed, believed it, but the ones that had just been going along for the ride, they didn't believe it.

And when they saw Peter, they had been mumbling, but they hadn't been believing. And when they saw Peter, they said, it's his ghost. They said, he's dead and this is his ghost. They've already beheaded him and here he comes with just his ghost.

But that was strategic praying, my friends. They were praying strategically. They were doing something that would not only affect a man and particularly a man's twitching eyelid, but that would affect the whole Church of Christ.

And I believe that corporate prayer, the prayer of the body, prayer of people when they meet ought not to be wasted on details, but that it ought to be given over. For instance, our Congo situation is so tragic now and so, so critical.

When we meet to pray, we ought not to pray that my foot will stop hurting. And in these tribals, we ought to pray, Oh God, have your way in the Congo. That's strategic praying. We ought to pray strategically and we must pray in harmony with our work.

That is, we can't, as William Law has said, we ought not to pray one way and live another, but we ought to pray in harmony with the way we live and in harmony with what we're doing. And then we ought to bring our doing in harmony with our prayers and our living in harmony with our prayers.

Pray according to the will of God and then bring what you're doing and the way you're living into harmony with your prayers. Now there are two desires that should burn in the children of God. I want to give you these two desires.

Recovering a High Vision of God

These are prayer requests that can be made in private. And God knows that I, for one, try often and much and earnestly to pray these two prayers in private, but they are legitimate prayers for the corporate body, the Saints, when they meet, the company, the assembly of God's redeemed people when they meet, ought to keep praying these two great kinds of prayers, these two great prayers.

One is a restoration of the vision of the Most High God. Now I am getting along and after a while I'll be middle-aged, and I don't want by any means to become a fanatic and go out on a limb and sit out there and twang a little harp before my time.

There are too many of the Lord's dear people, when they get along a little, they get out on one thing and they sit and twing, twang, and they think it's a whole symphony and it's just one little note, twing, twang.

Well, now I don't want to do that, and I don't think I'm doing it. I believe that I have surveyed the whole Church of God, and I know something of Church history and the development of the work of God through the years, and I believe I know something of the Scripture, and I'm in a position, I think, wisely to tell you these two things.

One of them is, I've said, the restoration of the vision of the Most High God. You see, we have too low a view of God now, and that is why the Church has such a low place. The Church rises or falls altogether depending upon her view of God.

If she takes a high view of God, her people are inclined to be reverent and worshipful and solemn and grave. If she takes a low view of God, they become funny and flippant and foolish and live worldly lives and give up to the flesh.

If she takes a high view of God, she simplifies her church services immediately. If she takes a low view of God, she has to drag in every kind of theatrical cut in order to keep her people coming. It depends upon her view of God.

The old Presbyterians used to have such a high, noble view of God. What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever. Many of that school of thought held high views of God. Brethren, do you know the result of that?

The result of that is that generation after generation following generation they stayed true to the faith. But as soon as we take a low view of God and get to thinking of God cheaply as they think of him now, cheaply, that God is a pal or that he's my partner or that he's the big Joe upstairs or that he's, call him by some other name, a living doll, one girl said he was.

Well now, as long as we think about God like that, we've never seen God. Imagine Moses trembling in the fire and smoke on Mount Sinai, referring to God in any other way than in awful, solemn terms. What we need in the United States is a revelation of what the philosopher called the mysterium tremendum, the tremendous mystery, and what the Bible calls Jehovah, high and lifted up.

And Isaiah saw him with his train filling the temple. The trouble with you dear young people, and God knows I love you as I've told you before, I do, I love young people, I love the twinkle in their eye, I love their little giggles, and I love everything about kids.

I love youth, and I don't like the word youth at all, but I love young people. I love them, but they're being cheated in this awful hour in which we live. They've never seen God, and they've never seen very many people that have.

And so you poor kids are victims of an elder generation that never saw God. And so they've had to teach you trash and drag in every kind of crap to try to keep you happy. And if you tell me the truth, you don't respect them for it.

You go along with it, but you don't respect them for it. My brethren, we need to see God again. The glory of God and the return of that glory, this is an imperative, and anything else is secondary to it.

It is more important that God be glorified than that men be saved. It's more important that God be glorified than that his work be carried on. It's more important that God be honored in his universe than that I be saved.

But here is the wonder of wonders. God in his love and goodness has so arranged it that the more he's honored, the more people will be saved. So that it isn't an either or. I either win souls or I glorify God, but the more I glorify God, the more souls will be won.

Evangelism as an Extension of Existing Religion

And if a baptism of clear seeing were to come to the Church of Christ in America, sinners would come, and you wouldn't have to talk like them in order to win them. You wouldn't have to go out on that false philosophical boat with holes in it that will sink one of these days, that I have got to come down and be like them in order to win them.

I don't have to do anything of the sort. Paul made himself all things to all men, but all he meant by that in the wide world was that he'd sow tents or he'd go anywhere. He never meant that he was going to cheapen himself and come down to the level of cheap sinners in order to win those sinners.

No, he was that dignified man of God, then walked about with a glow on his face. And in those early days, the Church dwelt on Solomon's porch and no man durst join himself to them. Nobody on Solomon's porch was running out and learning to talk like a beatnik in order to win a beatnik.

On Solomon's porch, they were there in a glow of glory so that people were afraid to come near them. They said, look, God is on those people. And they fell on their faces and said, God's in this place.

What we need is to have a vision of God again. And by vision of God, I do not mean anything to the visible eye. Anything you see with your visible eye, you can safely ignore because that merely matter.

Matter. But I'm talking about the inner eye. You see with your inner eye, you have an eye inside of you, and with that, you are to gaze upon the holy face of God. And we are one more time to see God. And you know, the first corporate prayer was, Our Father which art in heaven, and the first request was, Hallowed be thy name.

That the name of God should be hallowed in the sinful world is more important than anything else. It's more important than can be. It's more important than any church on the continent. It's more important than any school or any project that we're doing that the name of God be glorified.

But the beauty of it all is that if we're to see God big, and think of him big, and honor him, all these other projects, as we call them, if they're his projects, will glow and grow like the lily of the valley.

You don't say, I must either work with Canby or I must glorify God. No, glorify God and watch Canby grow. Glorify God and watch the Alliance grow. Glorify God and watch your church grow. But we try to make it grow and forget God.

Restoring the Church from Worldliness

God isn't in half of the things. A fellow told me the other day about being with a certain man. He was one of the Christian businessmen, brethren. I worked with him a lot and loved him, and certainly this isn't true of very many, but it was true of this one.

He wanted to sue a fellow, a doctor, and this doctor went to him and tried to talk with him. He had printed some chapter or other, and it had supposed to reflect on this man, and hadn't, but he said it did.

And he came to see him, this Christian, and he said, now, I'll sue unless something is done. And this doctor said, well, now, brother, he said, we're brethren. He said, surely God's children. Oh, leave God out of this, he said.

Leave God out of this. This fundamentalist, this evangelical, this man who bellows about being born again, he wants to leave God out of it. Brethren, anything you leave God out of will rot in your hands.

Anything you leave God out of will die before your eyes. Anything that God isn't in will be burned in the fire. Don't leave God out of it. God must be in it. And whatsoever ye shall ask, in my name that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son, said Jesus.

God answers prayer for the glory of the Father through the Son. And no project and no organization and no need, nothing is valid till the glory of God has been restored to mankind, until we think of him reverently, until we think of him high and lifted up, until we understand that he is the great God Almighty and Jesus Christ is the Lord.

Jesus Christ has been reduced and reduced and brought down and brought down until nobody fears the Lord Jesus anymore. He is simply a big brother, easy to get along with, without very high standards. And we can live in the flesh and go along with the world, and then when we're in trouble, run, whiffering to our big brother and he'll help us.

Oh, what a neat, what a neat trick of the devil, to get people to live like the world and the devil, and then think they can run to the Lord when they're in trouble. Why, the Lord isn't a garage you go into when you've had a fender dinged.

He isn't the hospital you go to when you've had a heart attack. He is the Lord. God has made this man both Lord and Christ, and has set him at his own right hand, and there he has all authority. When John saw him, he fell at his feet as if he was dead, and took the hand of Jesus to raise him back from the dead again.

A low view of God means a low living church. High views of God mean correspondingly high living church. And we need, how desperately we need, to see the church brought back again. And that brings us now to our second thought, that the second great desire should be a deliverance of the church.

The Church's Babylonian Captivity and Need for Revival

Now again, I do not want to be nostalgic. I never knew better times than I know now, so I'm not looking back on any departed glory. And I don't date back so far that I remember Finney and Augustine, by any means.

But I will say this, judging the scripture, judging the church, our church, you say, what church, Brother Tozer? You're referring to the liberals? No. What are you referring to? I'm referring to us land people, for instance.

And then I'm referring to all of the other evangelicals, who are all tied with the same stick, or blessed with the same grace, and hold the same doctrines generally. The church now, when I say the church, she ought to be and must be restored from her Babylonian captivity.

For the church is in Babylonian captivity, as Israel was, and he is in Babylon. You remember Israel in Babylon. She stayed there 70 years, and there came along a man by the name of Ezra, Nehemiah, and some others, and they took them back into the land again, built the temple, dedicated it, and started again to live as they should have been living all the time.

This was a parenthesis, 70 years out of the land. I believe the church of Christ now, the church, the evangelical church, the fundamentalist church, and the borderline church, that doesn't know whether it's liberal or evangelical.

I believe the church is in Babylonian captivity. But the Lord didn't desert Israel while she was in Babylon. He kept her there. He blessed her. He had her whole, so she came back. The covenant held. She wasn't lost.

She was still God's covenant people, but she was out of the land. And being out of the land, she was away from the place of power, and away from the flame, and away from the sacrifice, and away from worship.

She was scattered through Babylon. Then when they brought her back, she built her temple and went to worshiping again. I believe the church now needs to be delivered from her Babylonian captivity, her disgraceful fornication with the world, and brought back into the place where the church should have been all the time.

Now, some people call that a revival. I don't talk much about revival. I used to, when I didn't know anything about revivals, preach about them. I'd read Finney, you know, and then preach on revival. But I've got humbler since that day, I hope.

And I don't preach on revival, but I do believe that it would bring revival to the church of Christ. The church would be revived if she was brought back again to the place she should be, back to her New Testament position, back to living her morals in line with the New Testament teaching, back to the methods of the New Testament, and back to the objectives of the New Testament.

Nobody has any right to institute any program that is a New Testament in its origin. And then nobody has any right, having instituted a program, ever to carry it on by any other methods except those given us out of the New Testament.

Methodology that doesn't originate in the New Testament is a deadly thing, and you ought to get away from it as far as you can. Methodology that goes according to the laws of psychology and salesmanship and all the rest, it's a poor, cheap substitute for the Holy Ghost, and we ought to reject it.

I tell you, until this is accomplished, until the church has been restored, until we've been brought back again to the place where we can live as New Testament saints, a good deal of our work will go down the drain.

Evangelism and Missions Cannot Replace Spirituality

Somebody says, what we need is evangelism. Do you know what evangelism is, my dear friends? Evangelism is simply an extension of the kind of religion you now have. The evangelist can only reproduce himself.

There's a law in the Bible, after he's kind, everything produces after it's kind. And the evangelist goes into a neighborhood, he can only make converts in his own image. That's all he can do. And so evangelism is simply extending the degenerate Christianity that's now everywhere abroad.

Now, by degenerate, I don't mean there's not some life in it. There was life in Israel when she was in Babylon, but she was out of the land. There is life in the evangelical church. If there wasn't, I'd leave it.

There's life here. There's life here in this body. And I believe there's a life among you people of God. This is not to talk you down and unchurch you. It's only to say we're not where we ought to be.

We're taking, we're judging each other by each other in ourselves, by the rest, and we have adopted a low dead level by comparing each other with each other. And we haven't seen samples in recent time of holy men and women.

I saw the other day a scrapbook given me by Mrs. McGarvey, or lent to me to look over, and there were the old saints there, way back to the beginning. Hess, and Brother Richard's father, and Dr. Simpson, and those were men of, they were head and shoulders above the average.

There were giants in the earth in those times. And now, and they naturally reproduced themselves. But now we're slidding badly down, and our evangelism only reproduces and turns out a great mass of people that are just like us.

The children that were born to Israel in Babylon were born in Babylon. They were born, and there was some life there, but they were born in Babylon. And then somebody else says, well, then what we need to do is to get busy on missions.

Now, the treasurer of the Christian Missionary Alliance is here, but I have to say this anyhow, that, and he agrees with it, I'm quite sure, I'm only kidding. I know he agrees with it. You know, there's a notion abroad that if you've got an old dead church, where instead of having sheep, you've got goats, and instead of having saints, you have people that are hypocrites and no good livers and all the rest.

If you just start a missionary program, boom, up you go immediately. That missions is the panacea for all backslidden churches. And if you'll just start a missionary program, you'll have a revival immediately.

My dear brother, that just isn't so. There is nothing in the New Testament to teach that. And dear reverend brother, if you've tried that in your church, and it hasn't worked, remember that it didn't work because it wasn't so.

And if you have instituted a spiritual program for missions in your church, and the church has been blessed, then that still doesn't prove it works. It proves that the same yearning after God that led you to institute the missionary program in your church also led you to God.

One is not the cause of the other, but the both are the cause of a deeper, or the result of a deeper cause. So now, what are missions? I never knew whether to say was or were. I don't know whether it's singular or plural.

Whichever it is, anyhow, missions. What's foreign missions? It's simply going to another country than your own and preaching the gospel. And a missionary is an evangelist who's gone abroad. An evangelist is a missionary who's preaching at home.

And what proof of evangelism is true of missions? A degenerate church goes to Cambodia or Timbuktu, makes some converts, establishes a church, they will carry their own concept of Christianity to, where did I say, Cambodia or Timbuktu.

And the church there will be what they made it. And if they're occupying a secondary low place at home, they'll carry that same secondary concept over there. I've been disappointed to the point of being disgusted.

Some of the information we get from the field, somebody dies. And they'll say, and at the funeral, a trio sang, there's no disappointment in heaven. Can you tell me what excuse in the wide world of God anybody with the IQ of six and seven eighths, what excuse he would have of going to Cambodia or Laos or wherever it is, and I don't mean those fields, and transplanting a cheap, low, almost vulgar song from the United States to that country when we have a whole bushel basket full of great hymns that they could translate into the languages over there and teach them theology while they're singing.

That's only one sample. And we make them in our own image over there. So what we need to pray for is that God will raise up missionaries of such a superior spiritual quality that when they go over there, they'll produce converts of a superior spiritual quality.

But somebody says, Mr. Tozer, now wait a minute, you mean to say there's a difference? When you're born again, aren't you born again? And isn't every Christian like every other Christian? How foolish can you get?

There's such a thing as being still born. We had seven and they were all live born. But there's such a thing as having a stillborn baby. There's such a thing as having a baby that lasts a few minutes.

A dear lady told me on this that she was in her forties before she had her first baby and then it died. Well, now that's too bad. And I'm sorry for that. That baby lived just a little while. It's in heaven now, thank God.

But it just lived a little while. Well, there it is. There are babies born healthy. There are babies born not healthy. We had a baby born. It weighed 10 pounds and 14 ounces. Well, now that boy, he came into the world bouncing, bouncing.

But my younger brother was born to my mother when she was in middle life. And he was quite a long, several weeks old before they could take him off a pillow. They carried him about on a pillow. His head was all pulled off on one side.

He came into the world a sickly baby. Our boy Roland came into the world a bouncing, healthy 10 pounder. And so Christians can be born into the kingdom of God and they're different kinds of Christians.

Some are born well. Some pray through and repent and change all their ways and leave the world, die to their flesh and believe on Christ and take him as their Lord. Man, they're big Christians in no time at all.

Others come in under poor auspices. They come in where they barely get in and they're weaklings. And they live and die weaklings and beget weaklings after them. So missions and evangelism won't do. Missions and evangelism ought to grow out of spirituality, not produce it.