(Hebrews - Part 5): Ministry of Angels — A.W. Tozer

The Need for Whole-Bible Christianity

Now I want to read from the scriptures. This is the 5th talk on the book of Hebrews, and I take it that you want to be a symmetrical Christian. I take it that you do not want to become one-sided in your Christianity.

And if we are going to be saved from one-sided Christianity, we are going to have to study all the Bible and read it all from beginning to end, not once but as much as we can all the time, repeating it year after year, and giving attention to everything that God has revealed about himself.

If you want to know how one-sided you are, go through your Bible and notice the passages that you have marked and the ones that you have left unmarked. Then look at your Bible and notice the books of the Bible that are marked and dog-eared and thumb-printed, and then notice the books of the Bible that hardly have any marks on them at all.

It just shows that we choose what we like and neglect what we don't like. I say this because we are to talk about angels this morning, and nobody ever talked about angels in my hearing. I am the only man who has ever preached on the subject.

And I wouldn't preach on it except I find it here before me, staring out at me like a bright neon sign, and the Holy Ghost wrote this book and I can't possibly pass it over, because angels are not popular in Protestant circles.

Christ's Supremacy over the Angels

It's written here that that man, Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the brightness of God's glory and expressed image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high, being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.

For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee. And again, I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. Now he's quoting scripture here. He's again and again, there was a scripture passage.

And again, when he bringeth in the first begotten into the world, he saith, and let all the angels of God worship him. And of the angels, he saith, who makes his angel spirits and his ministers a flame of fire.

But unto the Son, he saith, thy throne, O God, is forever and ever. A scepter of righteousness is the scepter of thy kingdom. Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Therefore, God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.

Thou, O Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish, but thou remainest. They all shall wax old as doth a garment. And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed.

But thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail. But to which of the angels said he at any time, Sit on my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool. Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?

Thus saith the Holy Spirit in the latter verses of the first chapter of the book of Hebrews. Now, as I have attempted to make clear in my effort at expounding this book, I have found that the preeminence of the Eternal Son is the theme of the book, the preeminence of the one who is the brightness of God's glory and the express image of his person, that he above all other beings has preeminence.

He is shown to be preeminent above Abraham. He is shown to be preeminent above Aaron. He is shown to have preeminence above Moses as great as the man who built the house has over the house. He is shown to have preeminence above Joshua and above the priests of the Old Testament, and even above the high priests of the Old Testament.

And here he is shown to have preeminence above the angels. Now because we are Protestants, we miss a few things that we have carelessly, and I think sometimes in a vexed spirit, thrown out. If you cross over the tracks onto the other great division of the Church, so-called on earth, you will find that some of our friends make a great deal of angels.

You go through their hymn today, and they have a good deal to say about angels. And because they have a lot to say about angels, we Protestants take revenge by not saying anything at all about angels.

But the truth is that the Bible has very much to say about angels. Did you know that the word angel or angels or angels possessive occurs more than three hundred times by actual count in our King James Bible, and references are made to the angels where the word does not occur almost as many times more?

So that it seems to me that anything in the scriptures which gets three hundred references by name ought not to be neglected as much as we neglect it. We ought to know more about it than we do. And yet if I were to run up to the average Christian and say to him, what is an angel?

Why, he'd probably fall back on the old poem, the beautiful creature with wings that sits up in heaven and sings. But there's nothing in the Bible that says that angels have wings, and there's nothing in the Bible that says that the angels sing.

Now, that's a shocking thing, but it's true nevertheless. We give the angels a harp, or rather a trumpet, and start them off, but they don't. They may sing, and the chances are very strong that they do.

But it's very odd the Bible doesn't say that they do. And the Bible doesn't say that they have wings, though there are creatures in the scriptures that have wings, the cherubim and the seraphim. They're said to have wings.

Well anyway, the angels were very well known in Hebrew religion, and remember that the man who wrote the book of Hebrews was writing and pleading the cause of Christ to people with a Hebrew background.

And so he had to make a case for the Son of God that would put him higher than the highest thing that the Hebrews recognized. And next to God the Hebrews recognized angels, or at least heavenly beings.

So the man of God does not hesitate in writing to Hebrew Christians. He does not hesitate to compare Jesus with the angels and show from their own scriptures that Jesus, our Lord, is infinitely superior to the highest angels that inhabit the kingdom of God.

The Bible's Two Worlds and the Stamp of God

Now the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, along with our New, but we're confining ourselves for the moment to the Old because there was no New when the book of Hebrews was written. The Hebrew religion was divinely given, and because it was divinely given, it reflects accurately the two worlds as they are.

You and I, as I've said before, are victims of the scientific age. We're victims of the plastic age and the space age and the atomic age. We're a victim of the artificial age and the mechanical age, and our minds have been so stained with this kind of thinking to a point where we don't look out on God's world as simply as we should.

We don't look out as children look and see everything as a wonder. We see it through the socks, strain it through the socks, and see it through the glasses of some scientists and philosophers that have lived.

But the Hebrew Bible gives us the world as it is, and it reflects accurately the world as they are, the two worlds. If you were to go to the Bible and read it and meditate on it until you became biblical in your psychology, you would come nearer to being a true scientist than the man who puts God out of his mind and never read the Bible at all, and with his microscope and his other instruments tries to determine what the world is.

Always remember that the world was made by God Almighty, and it bears the stamp of deity upon it, just as if you were to go down into the States and you would find, and I suppose over Canada too, though I've not seen them here, I've not traveled too much in Canada, you would see buildings, certain buildings, and when you saw them you would say instantly, I know who the architect was, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Now my personal opinion is that he should have been raking the lawn when he designed a lot of his houses, but he did design them and you would recognize it because they have the man's personality on them.

If you go into an art institute you will see pictures there and you will recognize them if you're anything of a student of art, you will know immediately, I know a few, I think I would know Jean Curie, the Frenchman, any place, because he does something with light and color that nobody else ever quite managed to capture.

So the stamp of the man is all over his pictures, and so it is with hymns. I amuse myself sometimes by going through the old-fashioned hymn books and singing and mumbling and humming some of the hymns, and there's no name given and I say, Wesley wrote this, and I flip back and found it's Wesley, or I say, what, this is his, and I go back and usually find it's what, because they have stamped what they have written with their own personality.

And so it is with the world in which we live, the world visible and the world invisible, the two worlds I've called them, though they're probably only one, the visible and the invisible together probably make up the one world.

But you can look out on that world and you will see the stamp of God on it, just as you look at the Bible and you see the stamp of God here on the scriptures. And if you think enough and meditate enough, you will see a likeness between the Bible and the world itself.

There's a similarity between the two, enough similarity so you recognize the same architect and the same artist, and when you hear the notes blown out from the Bible and you hear the sound of the trumpet in the storm and the thunder, you'll recognize the same trumpet blast.

It's Jehovah watering his hills from his chambers, it's God Almighty in the lightning and the storm, and it's God Almighty in the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation. So you'll find a similarity there.

So I plead that we put out of our minds our modern Western mentality as far as we can, that we purge away from it, this artificial mentality, and that we try to think as God thinks and be Christ-like in our mentality.

The Nature and Ministry of Angels

Now the Bible reveals a great deal about angels, and it assumes the existence of them, an order of transcendent beings which it calls angels, and they are shown to be holy, the holy angels the scripture says, and they are shown to be sexless.

Jesus our Lord said that they that attain, speaking of people, they that attain unto that world will neither marry or be given in marriage, but will be in that way like the angels. Now they will not be angels.

I want you to get that straight. I know that sometimes we think when we die we become angels. No, no more than when a horse dies he becomes a buffalo. You don't change by dying. You don't change from one species to another, and you don't change from being human to being angelic just because you die or because you rise again from the dead.

Angels are one order of being, and men are another order of being. And God made man in his image, and it's not said of the angels that he made them in his image. It is said in the next chapter in Hebrews that Christ did not take upon himself the nature of angels, but he took upon himself the seed of Abraham, the nature of a man.

So there are sexless creatures there, holy creatures, and they have great power. They are said to excel in strength, and they are said to be multitudinous. God likes lots of things. I've often wondered why God wants so much of everything, but he seems to.

If I'd had it to do, I'd started the whole job of birth control and reducing the human race years ago. Of course, I'd want it to happen after I was born, naturally. But I'd have said, there are too many people everywhere you go that are talking about population explosions.

That's an awful word, population explosions, and we're having too many people in the world. We're supposed to have close to three billions of them now, and I remember when we were boasting we had two billions.

There are three, and close to three billions now. That's a thousand million, being a billion. And yet when God makes things, he makes lots of them, because God, being infinite and having everything in all power and all wisdom, doesn't have to settle for two or three or a half dozen or a hundred.

So when God created the angels, he created a multitude of the heavenly host and an innumerable company of angels. And innumerable means that they can't be counted. And then they have a substance like fire.

I've heard sermons preached on Hebrews 1, telling preachers that they ought to be fiery. And I believe in fiery preachers. I don't believe in preachers that come numbly to the pulpit and dully read something they've caught up.

I believe that a preacher ought to have fire on his soul, and I know where to go to get it. But when the scripture says that the ministering spirits are sent forth to minister, to them that shall be heirs of salvation, it doesn't mean men.

It says he makes his ministers a flame of fire, and it doesn't mean men. Minister is a word that we apply to men, and it's a good word to apply, but it also applies to angels. And he's talking about angelic spirits here when he says that they are made of fire.

You and I are not made of fire, except in the most poetic way. I'm reading the letters of Samuel Rutherford, and if ever a man was a man of fire, it was Samuel Rutherford. I love the poetry of Frederick Faber, and he was a man of fire.

And I have been reading the journals of Whitefield, and he was a man of fire. But I'm using those terms only in their figurative sense, not in their literal sense. But the angels seem to have been composed of fire and move up and down in fire.

Angels' Interest in Creation and Redemption

Now, I'm interested in the activities of the angels. What would they have to do, do you suppose, all these angels? Well, I notice they're interested in the affairs of earth, and they're not human, but they've got one human quality, and that is they're inquisitive about things that they don't understand.

Peter says that the angels desired to look into the mystery of the gospel, and they could not. And Jesus, our Lord, said that the Son does not know neither the angels in heaven, but only the Father, certain prophetic events.

So these angels are obviously interested in us. They're interested in people, and they had some function at the creation, for we read that the sons of God shouted for joy, and the sons of God there mean the angels, according to all the scholars.

And they had something to do with the giving of the law. You will remember that it's written that the law was given by the ministry of angels. One angel came to the Virgin Mary at the hour of the Annunciation and announced that she would have a son and call his name Jesus.

At the birth of Jesus there was an angel that came, and a multitude of the heavenly hosts joined him very soon. And when Christ was in Gethsemane, that tender passage tells us that when he had prayed himself to exhaustion, angels came and ministered unto him.

We read again that at Christ's resurrection angels were everywhere about. Sometimes it called them angels, and sometimes it called them people, because angels not having any physical body took on themselves visible forms, sometimes to be seen as men.

And then at the death of the righteous we learn that there are angels. You know, I think there's an awful lot of paganism yet in the Church of Jesus Christ our Lord. I know nobody wants to die, but for a real saint who has lived right, who has made everything right, and the blood of Jesus Christ that cleansed him from sin, and the Lord pleading his cause before the Father, and he's lived well and done his work, I don't think dying is the gloomy, horrible thing that it's made out to be.

And I don't believe that we ought to surround our loved Christian dead with all the marks of death. He's not dead, he's sleepeth, said Jesus. And when the poor fellow died that had been begging at the rich man's gate, he was taken by the angels into Abraham's bosom.

Imagine it, will you, a ticker-tape parade to welcome him into the presence of Abraham, his father. And the angels were leading the parade. Well then we also learn that the angels keep the righteous.

We don't believe in guardian angels in the Protestant circles very much. It's just a poetic thing and something for artists to draw pretty pictures about. But nobody believes in it much, but our Lord did say that their angels do always behold the face of our Father which is in heaven.

Biblical Encounters with Angels

And then in your reading your Bible did you notice that angels appeared unto Moses, and old Mr. Balaam, that greedy old pastor or preacher that wanted to obey God so bad, but he wanted money worse. And so he obeyed money rather than God and died fighting against God.

But that man Balaam, remember he was riding his little donkey along a narrow path, and an angel of God blocked the way. The donkey saw the angel and the prophet didn't. I wonder how many of us preachers wouldn't see an angel if he came and stood in the aisle.

Well, Balaam didn't, but the donkey did. And then there was Hagar when she had put her little boy out to die, and an angel came and spoke to her. And you remember Jacob as he saw the ladder raised, he saw angels ascending and descending.

I said the last time I mentioned that that the angels did not descend and ascend. They didn't come down and go back up. They went up and came back down. They'd been down here all the time. Only we didn't see them, you see.

Jacob didn't see them. The fellow that had done what Jacob did, he couldn't see an angel. You can put a film over your eyes until you can't even appreciate a man talking about an angel. But rather he'd talk about something more practical.

You will find in that great day that among the most practical beings in the world will be the angels of God. And then there was Elijah. I like to think how Elijah, the prophet of God, was a great, courageous man, but he was the kind of man that, as they say in baseball, he batted over his own head.

That is, he did things bigger than he could do. And one of those times he did something so big he killed 400 of the prophets of Baal, and Jezebel heard about it and sent word to him. She said, I'll have your head in the basket tomorrow.

Well, Elijah lit out, and he didn't wait around to debate the matter with. He didn't believe, as they would say now, that the matter was negotiable. So he was afraid that if he didn't win, he'd lose his head.

So he got out in a hurry. I can understand him. I can imagine Jezebel. I think I'd have done the same thing. And he ran a long time, and he got out there under the juniper tree, and he was frightened and miserable, and it had a letdown from the tension of that great experience on Mount Carmel.

And the Lord sent an angel and tapped him and woke him up out of his gloomy sleep. And he smelled something and said, I'm back home. And he looked, no, he said, I'm not back home at all. I'm way out here in the wilderness under this tree.

He looked around, and he said, I thought I smelled cake. He said, I do. And who do you suppose had been baking cakes? It was none other than an angel baking cakes for the prophet of God. And you know the story of Samson, the mother and father, and the angel that came to see them.

And you know the story of Zechariah and of Daniel and Joseph and Mary and Christ himself and the beggar and Peter and Philip and Watt and David and the shepherds and Paul and John and Herod. Every last one of them had experiences with angels.

Angels in Revelation and the Church

And you will say, well, what kind of a visionary are you, Mr. Tozer? When have you seen the last angel? The nearest thing to an angel I've ever seen is a pretty little girl. I'll admit that. A girl about that high is, to my mind, the prettiest thing God ever made in this wide world.

The next best and prettiest thing is a little boy. But that's the nearest I ever came to seeing an angel. So I am not speaking out of my experience or telling you that I have been in contact with angels.

In the first place, the scripture never says that I should try to get in contact with angels. But it does say they are here. And the Bible says it's here. When I come to preach the Bible, I'm going to say it's here, and I'm not going to skip it.

You come to the book of Revelation, the Bible mentions angels 75 times. Do you know, I think there are periods in the life of the Church when even angels won't make themselves known. But the coming of Christ, the first time they did, and at their death and resurrection of Christ they did.

And when the Church was in her purity in the book of Acts, they did. And they will again when he returns in the glory. Whenever the Church is revived, they will. So the drama of the last days, 75 times in the book of Revelation, the angels are seen.

And I'm sure that in the new heaven and the new earth and in the world to come, they'll be around everywhere. Now, generally assumed that we, the Protestants, that we evangelicals, for I am an evangelical, that we evangelicals are that we are synonymous with the religion of the Bible.

The Eternal Son Above All Created Beings

But I have noticed the Bible says an awful lot about angels, and evangelicals don't say anything at all. And so there's one point and place where we do not correspond. Now, when we come to the intention and purpose of the writer in bringing the matter of angels in, he did it in order to show that the highest creatures that the Hebrews knew, the most exalted and lofty beings that they recognized, were beneath the man, Christ Jesus.

So he goes to work quoting their own scriptures here. And he said there's a contrast between the eternal Son and even your angels, he said. You have a great deal to say about angels, and you believe in them, high and lifted up and powerful and mighty and wise, rushing to the help of God's people.

Very good. But this one I preach unto you is mightier than the angels. He has a name that is greater than theirs. So he shows in Psalm 2 7, Thou art my Son, God said this day have I begotten thee. Now he never said that to an angel.

Thou art my begotten Son. The angels were the created sons of God. You know the difference between Adam and us? The difference is this. By us I mean Christians. The difference is Adam was the created work of God, and Christians are the begotten work of God.

A Christian is not born again in the likeness of Adam, who was made of clay. He is born again in the likeness of Christ, who was begotten of God. There is the difference. God's created man fell, but God's begotten man did not fall, but remains eternally and forever the mighty Christ, unfallen, separate from sinners, higher than the highest heavens.

And then in Psalm 89 26, I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. This was never said, and never could be said about anyone except Jesus Christ our Lord. And in Psalms 97 7, he quotes, And let all the angels of God worship him.

Now for my part, you wouldn't have had to quote any other passage than this one. Jesus Christ is pointed to and pointed out. And they said, Look at him and behold him, and all you angels of God get on your knees before him and worship this one.

Now God never reversed that and said, O you son, worship the angels. But he said, O angels, worship the son. The point he's making here in every quotation is that Jesus Christ stands preeminent above all other beings, and he uses the angels as the highest beings that there are.

The angels are on their faces, and our Lord is on his throne, and that's where they should be forever. In Psalm 45 6 and 7, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever. And now I have been reading. Some of you will want to chase me out of town for this, but I read everything.

I've even read part, at least, of the Communist Manifesto. I read everything, though I reject what I don't like. But, and of course you know my opinion of Communism. It couldn't be any lower if it was a cutworm's instep.

I think so little of the whole business, and I'm waiting for God Almighty to reverse the order of things and drive the evil we call Communism out of the world. And yet I have, in my earlier times, read their literature because I wanted to know what they believed, the same as I have read atheism and all the other isms because I wanted to know what they taught.

Well, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever, in the book that I've been reading called the New English Bible. Now, if somebody wants to know what I think of it, I'm not able to tell you whether it's safe or not.

Some of my brethren say it isn't safe, and so I'm not recommending it, but I've been telling you that I've been reading it. And in Psalm 45, it's stronger than the King James Version. Thy throne, O God, thy throne.

God puts the word twice, and addresses Jesus as God twice, in the same verse that the King James only calls him God once. So at least in that instance, it is stronger than the King James in telling us that Jesus Christ is very God, or very God.

Now, you introduce any other being into that category, will you? Put any other being in that sentence. Thy throne, O angel. No, you couldn't say that, nor seraphim, nor cherubim. You couldn't put Moses there, nor Aaron there, nor David there, nor Daniel there.

Only Jesus Christ, our Lord, can have it said of him, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever. And in Isaiah 34, they shall perish, but thou remainest. In Psalms 110, 1, sit thou on my right hand. Who's speaking there?

It's Jehovah who is speaking, sit thou on my right hand. Now, there are those that tell us that Jehovah, that the Jesus of the New Testament is the Jehovah of the old. Don't believe it, my brother. He is the God, and he is co-equal with Jehovah, and he is co-eternal with Jehovah, and he is of one substance with Jehovah.

But Jehovah is the name of the Father, not the name of the Son. The Father said Jehovah, the Father said to the Son, sit thou on my right hand. So how could Jehovah, if Jesus were Jehovah, how could the Father, Jehovah, say, sit thou on my right hand, when he was talking to his Son?

No, no. Jesus is God, and he is very God of very Gods, begotten, not created, and he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. He is the Word made flesh to dwell among us, and he is deity in every sense of the word, but he is the second person of the Trinity.

He is not the first person of the Trinity. They who teach the scriptures ought to remember the cautious and careful explanation and warning given by the old creed that tells us that we should not confound a person, nor attempt to divide the substance.

It was not the Father that died on the cross, it was the Son that died on the cross. Neither did the Spirit die on the cross, it was the Son who died on the cross. Jehovah, Lord God, sent his Son, who was named Jesus Christ, and that Jesus Christ, the second person of the divine Godhead, by the Spirit offered himself without spot back to Jehovah again.

That's the correct theological position, and we ought to be careful that we don't confuse it. Jehovah said unto Jesus, sit thou on my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool. And only to an equal could the great God Almighty say that.

He never said it to an angel or to a seraphim. Indeed, the seraphims and the cherubim move about his throne and spread their broad wings, do the cherubim, and run straight forward and lift up their wings to do the will of God.

But they don't sit on God's throne. Only the Eternal Son can sit on the throne of the Eternal God. Well, angels exist, but you wouldn't think so in the average church. They do. This is a populated world.

Angels as Ministers to the Heirs of Salvation

I'd like to have you know that. It's a populated world. There are other creatures in the world beside you. They're here. I don't mean animals. I mean these creatures of God sent to be ministers to them who shall be heirs of salvation.

And you can see plainly how valuable you are as a Christian in the sight of God when God takes the very angels from the throne and sends them to be your ministers. He doesn't tell you to communicate with them nor to try to communicate with them.

He doesn't tell you to talk to them or to try to get in touch with them. He only tells you to recognize that the Father who loved you doesn't leave you alone in this dark world. I suppose that the most difficult thing to bear if you were thrown up into space, if you went up into space as Major Gagarin was said to do, I'd yet to be convinced.

But I suppose that the toughest and hardest thing would be to be so alone, brother, to be up there all by yourself now. So far from the little old world, the old earth where people are. You get too much of people, you know, and you like to take a walk somewhere where nobody is.

But you like to come back to them again, don't you? We're people and God made us gregarious creatures. That is, we live for one another and we love each other. Just to walk downtown when you don't know a soul, not a soul, is better than to be up there in space.

I hadn't enjoyed it more. Who was that that said, I am the master of all, I survey my right, there are none to dispute. But there he was all by himself. Selkirk wrote it, but it was Robinson Crusoe supposed to be saying it.

There he was all alone, by himself. Nobody was there but he. That'd be a lonely thing. And to be in this world and think there's nobody in the world, to me that would be unutterable anguish, unbearable anguish.

Just the sight of a human face, regardless of the color, which way his eyes ran, just the sight of a human face would be wonderful. I suppose you heard about the Russian rocket that was whirling around up there, and it was overtaken by an American rocket, and they ran together neck and neck for a while, and they got in conversation.

And one of them said, why do we not have a little talk while we're here? And the other one said, yes, why not? He said, after all, we both speak German. You know, both the Americans and the Germans learned their trade from, and the Russians earned their trade from the Germans.

But anyhow, to be up there where you couldn't talk to anybody, all the loneliness of it. And when Jesus Christ, our Lord, was alone in the garden, angels came and ministered to him. And when he was alone in the desert, angels came and ministered to him.

And when Peter was in prison, an angel came forthright and direct, slapped Peter on the side and said, wake up, Peter. Peter woke, said, come on, took him out. It's good to know that you're not alone in the world.

Our Heavenly Father has his beings here. I've never seen one, and I'm not going to try to hunt one, but I believe they're around about me. I believe they're here. Angels keep their wanted places, turn but a stone and start a waning, tis you, tis your estranged faces that miss the many-splendored things.

I believe if we, the children of God, were to begin to see the earth and the world and the things that are therein as God sees them, and we begin to get divine mentality and we begin to have a mind that was colored and touched and tinted by the scriptures instead of by science and philosophy and advertising, it'll be a lot happier people.

We wouldn't be as lonely as we are. We'd know that he's with us, always, all the time with us and in us. We would know that he has these creatures which we know so little but of which we could know more if we took the trouble, who are ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation.

Providence and the Hidden Ministry of God

What they do, I don't know, but I sometimes think. Let me tell you this little tiny story in closing happened to me. I was a Christian, young Christian, attending a certain church where it was pretty easy to backslide because there wasn't much there to keep you from it.

And I had no help of any sort, neither at home or anywhere else. One Sunday morning I woke up in a bad mood and I said, I'm not going to church today. I was for the moment in my heart backslidden. I said, I am not going to any church today.