The Secret of Victory — A.W. Tozer

David’s Cry for God’s Exaltation

In the 57th psalm, the one that was read last Sunday in our morning worship hour, I want to use a few verses, particularly one, beginning with verse 4. My soul is among lions, even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.

Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens, and let thy glory be above all the earth. They have prepared a net for my steps, my soul is bowed down, they have digged a pit before me into the midst whereof they are fallen themselves.

My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed, I will sing and give praise. Wake up, my glory, wake, slaughtering harp, I myself will awake early. I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people, I will sing unto thee among the nations.

For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds. Then he repeats the verse again. Verse 5 is repeated word for word, verse 6,. "...be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens, and let thy glory be above all the earth.".

This was written by David when he was fleeing from Saul and was surrounded by his foes. David, in that brilliant way he had of describing things, said that he found himself among lions, men whose teeth were spears and arrows and whose tongues were as sharp swords.

Putting God Between Ourselves and Our Enemies

He was surrounded by them, and he had the authority of King Saul back of them. They had back of them, and he had nobody but God. But he had enough. So David, being taught in the ways of the Spirit, did something that we probably wouldn't have thought of doing.

David immediately put God between him and his enemies. David knew that he must have victory, but he knew that if he was to have anything like permanent victory, that he couldn't ask God to exalt him. So he didn't say, O God, I am thy King, to be successor to Saul, the sinning king.

Now God, I want you to come to my rescue and crush these enemies under my feet. He knew better than that, so he prayed, or I don't know whether you would call it a prayer or not, it's an ecstatic exclamation rather than a prayer, Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens, and let thy glory be above all the earth.

Whatever happens to me, God, be thou exalted. Whatever these men with sharp teeth and claws and spears and arrows do to me, God, let thy glory be above all the earth. My heart is fixed on this, O God, my heart is fixed, and I will sing praise, because I want thee to be exalted, O God, above the heavens and thy glory above the earth.

Victory Through God’s Proper Place

Now, here is God's way of doing, and it's backwards to ours, and it needs a lot of attention. We need to sing about it and pray about it and preach about it until we get a hold of it, for we are very slow to learn.

God must himself be exalted above all, or else the victory of the King, David, would have been a treacherous victory. He would have been defeated, and instead of winning, he would have been defeated even though he had won over his enemy.

It would have been a treacherous win, a pyrrhic victory that would have cost him too much. So he put God where he belonged, high above all, exalted above all, and then David came out all right because he put God where God belonged.

Now, that's the little secret, and I could stop right here now and pronounce the benediction and we would have learned something, I'm sure, and we would have learned one of the most important things that's possible to learn.

Because the trouble with the world is, there is an inverted relationship between God and mankind. That's the whole trouble, that moral derangement. You see, God belongs above all. When we say we magnify God, we don't mean we make God big, you couldn't do that.

God is already vastly perfect, but we mean that we see him big. And when we say that we exalt him, we don't mean that we raise him, we mean that we acknowledge him to be as exalted as he is. And the trouble with the world now is, the trouble with the race of men, that we have not put God where he belongs in our thinking, in our conduct, and in all our philosophies and in all our attitudes of life.

Choosing God Over Money, Ambition, and Pleasure

Now there are millions who call themselves by the name of God, there are millions who pray to God, no doubt. But the true place of God in the heart is to be learned by where we put him when we're in trouble, where we put God when difficulties come, and where we put him at other times in our life.

Now, I want to ask you some questions here, and you can answer them for yourself. I don't ask that you should arise and ask for the floor and give a verbal answer. It wouldn't do any good, because we already know.

But I want you to answer for yourself. Who wins when it's a choice between God and money, with the average person, even who calls himself a Christian? Who wins when it's a choice between God and money?

I want to ask you, who wins when it's a choice between God and ambition? A lot of young people turn to the Lord when they're in their teens, and then they become ambitious and they find they have some talent, and they go on and develop that talent, and the world finds it out and sends for them.

Then they have to make a choice between following that ambition, which will take them to the world and away from the Church, or following the Lord. And I think a keen 97 percent of them will follow their ambitions.

Who wins when it's a question of fleshly enjoyment or doing the will of God? I would say that out in the world God has much at all and would never get a vote. But in the Church it would seem to me that God ought to get all the votes there are.

I don't see where there could possibly be any excuse for anybody voting on any other side but on God's side. And yet when it's a choice between fleshly enjoyment and God, the Church usually votes on the side of fleshly enjoyment.

Now we might as well face that. You see, I am not a backscratcher. You knew that before you invited me here, and I think that I have shown it by what I have said from this pulpit for the last year, that I am not a backscratcher.

God did not say, "'Toser, go ye into all the world and scratch the backs of my poor, undernourished sheep,' but he said, "'Go tell them the truth, preach the word to them, and tell them the truth.'. And I find that there are enough people who like that kind of thing to make a Church succeed.

There are enough people. Anyhow, I merely got off there, Natalie, because I wanted to remind you that I was saying that between fleshly enjoyment and God, we usually vote for fleshly enjoyment, provided we can somehow strike a compromise and have God, too.

Choosing God Over Marriage and Friends

And then between God and marriage. Now I have known one or two instances in my ministry, and I have read of a few here and there in books of Christian biography, where men and women separate because one or the other is not a Christian.

They are going together, and they decide to marry, and then one of them, as being a Christian, decides he or she can't do it. Somebody told me just the other night, some young lady telling me about going with a young man, and they were quite friendly, and there was some little thought, anyhow, that they might hook up for the rest of their lives, and because he wasn't the kind of man he should have been, she turned from him and said, No, and broke it off, and it's still broken off.

Now that happens once in the blue moon, but it doesn't happen very often. Usually a young man or woman follows the Lord blissfully and happily along. They're the first one to young people's service and the last one out.

They're the first one to take part and to witness and to testify, and all until they meet the man or the woman, as it may be, the boy or the girl, and then God gets shunned to decide while they decide whether they're to marry and whom they're to marry.

And if it's a choice between God and marriage, they marry. Then a choice between God and friends. There aren't very many people who will give up their friends for Christ's sake. There aren't very many people who will give up self for Christ's sake.

So now who wins when there's a vote between God and these things? Usually other things win and God loses. And that's why we're in the state we're in, you see. The curse doesn't come causeless, and neither does the blessing come causeless.

And we're living at this poor dying rate because we are violating the laws of the kingdom. Now if a young man wanted victory in his life and he wanted to know the secret of victory, when it came to a beautiful young girl, she's beautiful when she's dolled up ready to go, but he ought to see her in the morning.

Anyhow, when it comes between the choice between a beautiful young girl and God, the young man says, Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens, and let thy glory be above all the earth. And then the victory comes to the man's life.

And you would find many victorious young people walking about if they'd learned when it comes to their ambitions to say, God be above my ambitions, that thy name be above all my ambitions. God would give the victory, but God won't give it to you directly.

He has to give it to you by way of the throne. We have to put God where he belongs first, and then when we do, God blesses us and gives us the victory. But if we try to get the victory, as they say, unilaterally, that's a good word now, we go out straight on one direction to get the victory, we don't get it.

Humanism and the Inverted Order of the World

The world staggers on to no foreseeable future. We who believe that the Lord is coming back again and believe that there is going to be a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, we were looked down upon as being a little bit off in our heads.

They said, Everything will be all right, peace and brotherhood, throw your arms around each other and squeeze hard enough, and finally we'll all be squeezed together. Well, they're over there squeezing in the Congo now, and what's happening over there?

Everywhere it's the same. We're so busy being brothers that we're cutting each other's throats all over the world. Even in such places as the cities that ought to know better, New York and Washington and London and Paris, where everybody ought to be ashamed of themselves for acting the way they do.

Look at the way they're acting. We're having a mixed-up time of it because we are putting God down and putting men up. When humanism came along about a generation ago and made the human mind to be the criterion of all thought and put God down, and theology ceased to be the queen of the sciences and the queen of the sciences became science itself, or it became humanism or sociology, then of course we went down because we had not put God up.

If you exalt God, God will exalt you, but if you put God down, you will go down. And the world is in the mess it's in because God has no place in the minds or hearts of the people. And the work of God in redemption is to restore this inverted order and to put God up and put man down in order that he might put man up.

Christ’s Humiliation and Exaltation

Now, in order that he might do that, God came down, and he came down just as far down as he could get. It was impossible for him to get down any further than he got. You'll remember what it tells us over here in the epistle of Paul, that he considered not being in the form of God something to be hung on to, but he made himself of no reputation.

He voided his reputation, and that's the last thing anybody wants to do, but God could afford to do it, and he took upon him the form of a servant, and that was humbling himself. And he was made in the likeness of man, and that was still going down further.

And being found in the fashion of a man, he humbled himself still further and became obedient unto death, and that's another step down. Even the death of the cross, and you couldn't go down any further than that.

Now, there's a big word, wherefore, there, or a little word. Wherefore also, God hath highly exalted him and given him a name that is above every name, that the name of Jesus every knee should bow, things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth.

So you see, we are exalted when we have exalted God and gone down. Then God takes us and lifts us up. But when we try to climb up, it's the business of God to keep us down. If we will humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God, he will exalt us in due time.

But our carnal hearts want to be exalted right away. We want to get up there now. And God says, you can afford to wait, children. My son went down and stayed down thirty-three years, and then went still down further and further and further until he touched the utter bottom of all possible humiliation.

And then because he did that, I raised him and gave him a place at my right hand, fulfilling the text that he, they that honor me, I will honor. Jesus Christ honored God even in bloody death and degradation.

And because he did, God put him at the right hand and has given him a name that is above angels, for unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my beloved son. So remember, my friends, that redemption does a lot of things for us.

Redemption Requires Humiliation and Self-Denial

You and I are inclined to simplify or take the kindergarten attitude. We think that salvation makes us happy, and nowadays it's abroad everywhere. People are writing books about it, how to be happy and how to feel good inside.

Just take Jesus and you'll feel good inside, forgetting that the whole purpose of redemption is not to give you a tickle inside your heart. The whole purpose of redemption is to reverse the inverted order of things and put God where he belongs so man can be where he belongs, that can raise God and exalt him to the throne and put man down in the dust where he belongs in order that God may from the dust raise him to the throne.

But never, never does God raise a man to the throne except from the dust. Never does he lift him to his right hand except from the low place of humiliation. Now part of the story, part of the message of Christianity is, the integral part of it, letting him take up his cross and let him follow me, let him forsake houses and home and husband and parents and his life.

O God, it's a choice between me and my house, between thee and my house. All right, I'll take thee, God. It's a choice between my home and thee, I'll take thee, God. It's a choice between husband and God, I'll take God.

And you look after the husband, it's a choice between parents and God. Now I'm not talking out of the left side of my ear. I know what I'm talking about, my brethren. I went through it. I went through it when I was a lad, seventeen years old, I got converted.

My mother wasn't converted, my father wasn't, there were a lot of brothers and sisters buzzing around there, and the relatives weren't, and my mother looked down on a fanatic. She was a good, starchy Presbyterian, and looked down on a fanatic, and later got converted.

But she looked down on everybody, and when I preached on the street, she thought it was terrible. She said, Can you imagine my son preaching, and not only preaching, but preaching on a street corner? Oh, it was a terrible thought to her.

Later on, when she got converted herself and saw what the Lord was doing, why, she humbly admitted that the Lord had been right all the time. But you got to know these things for yourself, and I happened to know them for myself.

My parents, I had to walk out, I don't mean leave the house, but I had to live in a way they didn't approve. But the Lord saved them. It's wonderful to remember the Lord saved my father, and he saved my mother, and he saved my brother-in-law, and he saved two of my sisters, and all because I exalted God.

And when the choice came between my parents and God, I took God. When it came between my friends and God, I took God. Now what the Spirit is trying to say to you this morning and to me is that we are to exalt God above all things, and to live and to be so that his glory is exalted above the heavens.

The Richness of Full Surrender

This is the ladder by which you climb to the kingdom of power, and this is the lever by which you can move mountains, there's no question about it. And for each one of us there is yet a place of richness of inward experience that we don't know very much about, a richness of inward experience.

I have just been reading, in fact I'm in the process of reading the biography of Teresa of Avila. Now, Teresa was a nun, and we tend to avert our faces and walk by on the other side. But an awful lot of you Christian women would do well to trade with her, if you could, by the grace of God.

Not her crucifix and her holy water, she can keep those, they didn't help her anyhow, and she was sharp enough to know it. But her knowledge of God, my brother, her knowledge of God, the inward experience that she knew, the hope of glory, oh, there were an awful lot of Protestants before the Protestants ever came into being in North, an awful lot of Protestants before Luther's time, an awful lot of evangelicals who didn't know they were evangelicals.

I sometimes can quote back to our Catholic friends some of the sayings of some of their own people who were evangelicals and didn't know it, because they found God in Christ and they found salvation by grace without the works of the law or merits of mankind or the Saints.

Well, there is a richness of inward experience that the Saints have had down the years and that God promises to his children, and this is the secret of it, it's all by this. And there is a deep satisfaction to the total nature, and there is a usefulness in the kingdom of God, there is fruitfulness and growth, and there is a ravishing knowledge of the Most Holy God, a ravishing knowledge of God, I repeat, and it is when God is exalted and we are abased.

Now, I wonder if you can say this morning and mean it, be thou exalted over me, my God, be thou exalted at my expense, be thou exalted, O God, and let it cost me what it will cost me. Now, let me tell you something.

Surrendering Possessions, Friends, and Ambitions

God has too many bargainers, he has too many Jacobs who sit down with a lead pencil and figure out, if you will bless me, God, I will give you a tent. And Jacob lived like that for a long time, at any rate.

He became a better man later on, after God got everything. He didn't get only the tent, he got his wife and his children and his property, and he got everything, and it was all over there, and Esau was on his way to kill him.

And there was Jacob, not with his tent gone, but with everything gone that he hides. He just had what he was wrapped in, that's all. And there he was on the bank of the river, and he prayed to God, and God wrestled with him at night and changed his name from Jacob.

But we tend to vicar with God and Jew God down and try to get an easy way. Lord, I want to be blessed, but I don't want it to cost me this much. Couldn't we talk this thing over? No, says God. We can't talk this thing over.

My rules are my rules, and my word is my word, and my will is made known in the word, and there isn't anything to talk over. So you come my way and you will be blessed. Go your way and you'll lose everything.

Now, that's so simple that I can't see why the Church has missed it, but the Church has missed it. Let thy glory be above my possessions, O God. Why, people say that no Canadian is ever really what he ought to be until he has $25 ,000 in the bank's drawn interest.

I heard that up here, they didn't say that down home. They told me that up here. And that's okay, you can have it, and I don't mind at all. I wish it was $50 ,000, and you'd give half of it to have a new road church and to form missions.

But that's not the point. The point is, who do you work for on this? And if it were a choice between giving it all up or having God's highest will, which would you do? Most people would seek a compromise.

They'd take a little of God and a little of what they have. And there are friendships. Penny Long said, you know, that we found it hard to give up our friends in order to find a friend. He spelled the word friends with lowercase letters and the word friend with uppercase letters.

There is a friend that's thick as closer than a brother, you can capitalize that. Then there are friends, and we have them of all sorts and all degrees. Some friends who would do anything for you, and some friends who would grumble if they had to do anything for you.

But we have friends, and we've got to give them all up in order that we might have the friends. And when we have the friends, we'll have friends. You know, the Lord never takes anything away but what he gives something better back.

It's always so. I gave up the approval of my parents and the respect for a little while of my friends because they thought that I was going off a little, out in left field, because I was following the Lord and was down among those Alliance people.

My father said that my head had been filled with things. Well, my head got a little in it, but there wasn't much room for too much. But I hope my heart got a whole lot more. Well, I lost some friends, but I gained a friend.

And now I have friends around the whole wide world. I don't think there's an island or a continent anywhere that I don't have friends on it. And I mean friends that I know, people that I know and have talked with and prayed with and preached to, and they've preached to me, maybe.

And I was just reading a book, reading some 45 reviews somebody sent me from Germany. I didn't know there was any book of mine published in Germany, but here I found out there was, and it had 45 reviews from the magazines on it.

I had somebody translate them for me, and I didn't know what they were saying about me, or if it was good or bad. And it turned out to be good, at least we read the good ones. Now I have friends over there.

I have friends over there, and I wouldn't have the faintest notion how my German Christian friends would greet me. I haven't the faintest notion. And I would say hi to them, but I don't know what they'd say to me.

I don't know. But they're my friends. I gave up my little handful of friends for God's sake, and now I have friends all over Germany. And they tell me in India and Japan the Lord is letting my books have a sale, and I have friends there that I've never seen, as well as in Armenia and Spanish countries.

Well, I mention that only because I want you to know that when God takes away friends for the friend, he gives friends back again. But he gives you better friends than you had before. My friends now are Christian friends.

They're good people. They're not perfect people, but they're the best people on earth, nevertheless. I'd like to stand right out on the street corner down here at Bloor and Young or wherever your main street is, and I'd like to tell the round world that the best people in the world are Christians.

They are the best. Now, they're not perfect, and part of my job has been to chastise and to lay the lash on the Lord's little sheep occasionally in order that they might not lie around and wither up and go out by the green pasture.

But while I'm doing it, I love them and respect them as the best people in the world. Christians are that. So God will take away people that wouldn't do you any good anyhow, and he'll give you back the best people in the world for your friends.

Giving Up Comforts and Reputation

And then your comforts. Some of you never show up. We saw you at prayer meetings, I'd faint, and the pianist would tumble over in a dead heap because it's not comfortable for you to be there. You're not there because you stay by your comforts.

I don't know what there is on Wednesday nights on the T .V., as the Swedes call it, but that's no doubt one of the reasons. But anyhow, we give up our comforts, to lie down there and turn around three times and lie down in front of the fireplace of a cold night, you know, it's really something.

But Jesus Christ, our Lord, got up and went out into the cold, bleak world and gave his all, and so did his apostles and so have the Saints all down the years. So give up our comforts, and be thou exalted, O God, above my comforts, and be thou exalted above my pleasures, and be thou exalted above my ambitions, all these private projects that people are having, and be thou exalted above my reputation.

Now, that's always a pretty hard thing to die to. We desire to have a reputation, and when we find we can't get any, we want a reputation. We have a reputation for being happy that we don't have a reputation.

You see, that's the way it works. We find we don't rate, then we smile like St. Francis and say, Well, I don't rate, praise the Lord. And then people say, Isn't she saintly, she's happy because she doesn't rate.

But it's another way of rating, you see, it's just another way of getting your ambition fulfilled. And then there are my likes and my dislikes, and my health, and finally my life itself. I have had to shoo off and chase off and chase away all my life friends who were afraid I'd kill myself.

They say, Oh, I'm afraid you'll just kill yourself, you'll work yourself to death. Don't you worry about that, my brother, because working yourself to death in the kingdom of God is a wonderful way to die, but God doesn't let many people die like that.

Phinney, you know, used to teach in the Alliance that you ought just to get to repose and rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him, and you'll never die, you won't least die until you're seventy-plus.

But Phinney used to teach that you could kill yourself in the kingdom of God, and he said lots of preachers kill themselves serving a lazy church that won't help, and they die. And he said, The Lord will judge that church.

That was Phinney's belief. But don't worry about my health, because I've put my health on the line a long time ago. The Lord can have my health. Why would I want to hang around a dirty world like this after my work is done?

Why vegetate and hang around the last leaf on the tree in the spring, the last rows of the summer, withered and wilted and pathetically hanging on the end of the stem, waiting for the first wind? Why should I want to do it?

No. Give your health to the Lord. Get up and pour yourself in, pour yourself in, and in your life itself. People are so afraid. I know a preacher that, I think I told you this once before, but I've been here long enough to repeat now, but I knew a preacher, they came to him and they said, You've got angina pectoris, and if you don't take care, you'll die.

Giving One’s Life to God’s Work

And so he whimpered like a puppy that had been spanked, and off he went to California and retired. Settle down and live. They said to another man, another friend of mine, You have angina pectoris, and if you don't watch out, you're going to drop over dead.

Well, he said, That's all right. I want to die in God's kingdom and in God's work. So he went to work, and work he did, and kept on working. One morning his wife, who had gotten up to get breakfast, came back to Hunter's husband to bring him down to breakfast, the way some of you women have to do.

And there was my good friend lying on the floor, a great, tall, handsome fellow, stone-dead. He died between the time she got up, or at least she'd gotten up without knowing it. He tumbled out there.

But he had given his last breath to his God. He hadn't gone to California and pulled in his horns and said, I'm afraid I'll die. Die, brother, for God's sake, die! It's all right, you can afford to do it.

Christians can die when they can't do anything else. We can always die. And it's the last thing most people ever do, and it's not at all bad. Give yourself to God. Oh, God, be exalted above my health, be exalted above my life, and I don't worry about the length of my days.

A long time ago the Lord said, The number of thy days I will fulfill. I haven't given much thought to it since. The number of thy days I will fulfill, and as thy days, so shall thy strength be. I have those two texts, and the Lord gave them to me, and I've been living by them.

But we worry so much about our health. They don't out there in the world. A man who is the President or Vice-President of a big concern, he comes staggering home eleven o 'clock at night with a briefcase and says to his wife, I had an awful day in the office.

The doctor says, Now, if you don't look out, you'll die, you're in a terrible shape. And he goes right on living like that. Boy, to make sales so we can have a bigger yacht next year and a bigger car the year after that.

He goes right on for money. But when they come to a Christian and say, Look out, because you need to protect your health, he takes them for granted. I have a friend down in New York City now, McAfee, who was with me for 16 years, who was a bachelor, never married, a handsome fellow, but never married.

I introduced him one time, and I said, This man is a bachelor of theology. I said, One Northern Baptist gave him a bachelor's degree, and he thought he meant it. He just stayed single all his life. Well, anyhow, there are some people who take things too seriously.

When some doctor says, Now, ease up, ease up, don't take those meetings, don't go out there and preach an omission, say, Goodbye, Doctor, Lord, I knew the Lord before I knew you. Go ahead and you'll live anyhow.

I've found people that stopped and tried to protect their health and just tumbled over and finished off in no time. Well, give up your friendships, give up your possessions, give up your comforts and your ambitions and your reputation and your health and even your life, and you'll find that goblins will give it all back to you.

The Cost of Discipleship and Martyrdom

Now, this is very hard to comprehend, this kind of teaching, because it's not the kind of teaching we hear about now. We hear something else altogether. Breezy, self-confident Christians tell us about how wonderful it is to accept Christ and then have a good time all the rest of your life.

The Lord won't demand anything of you, yes he will, my friend. The Lord will demand everything of you, and when you give it all up to him, he may bless it and hand it back, but on the other hand he may not.

Do you remember Betty and John Sam of 25 years ago or so? They let them out, and they said, Now you give up this Christ business or you die. They said, We'll not give up Christ. All right. They said, Kneel down, they knelt down, bend your head over, they bent their head over, and John and Betty Sam were beheaded.

We have Christians who have been called upon to give all, but, O, they are richer than Midas, richer, richer than all the kings of the earth, richer, richer than all the misers of the world, because they were permitted to give themselves and to give themselves to God.

One of the Saints, I have some letters that he wrote, he was a great Saint of God, and the Lord had blessed him and given him a lot of things, but he had a desire, it was back in the Roman days when they were killing Christians, this dear old Saint had a desire to die as a martyr.

He wrote to his friends, Christians in Rome, and now he said, I want to ask a favor of you. He said, I have a yearning in my heart to die for my Lord, that I've lived for him and I've given my all. But he said, It's not enough.

I want a crown to set on all other crowns, I want to die for my Lord's sake. Now he said, the way things are going, I'll die. He said, they've got me sentenced, but if you intercede, you can get me off.

Now he said, what I'm afraid of is that you'll intercede. Please for Christ's sake don't do it, he said. Let me alone. He said, Don't go to the authorities and ask to get me off. You disappoint me and do me a disservice.

He said, I'm an old man and I've given my all, and now I want this crown, yet let me have it. Let me alone. He said, I hear you want to go intercede, don't do it. He said, I didn't, and he didn't, and the Romans did, and so that man got his crown.

Thank God. So that's the roster of the great, I might name them, the roster of the spiritually great. What made them like they were? Well, they all found a secret, O God, be thou exalted above all. Thy kingdom come and my kingdom go, and be sure of one thing, before his kingdom can come, yours has to go.