The Deeper Life - Part 2 — A.W. Tozer

The Call to Go On Unto Perfection

Now, this morning again, I want to talk on the deeper life, what it is, and how we may enter into it. And I have for a kind of text the first two verses of the sixth chapter of Hebrews. Therefore, leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptism from the laying on of hands and the resurrection of the dead and of eternal judgment.

That exhortation, let us go on unto perfection. Now, I wanted to, and have been, wanted to talk and have been talking about the deeper life, but I find that the expression is used to cover almost anything and everything.

And I want it to be understood that by the words I do not mean a life deeper than the scripture indicates. I have said many times and repeat that I do not want anything that cannot be found within the framework of the revelation, the Christian revelation.

I do not want anything that's added. I don't need it, I do not want it, I'm not interested in it. That is why I never buy books nor go listen to lectures on how to wake up your solar plexus and tune in to the cosmic process.

All that is extra-scriptural, and any of it that's good is found in the word of God, and any that isn't in the word of God isn't good. So I let those fellows talk to people who don't know the word, and I stay by their word.

I have said in conversations with people, in private conversations, that I am a Bible Christian, and that if an archangel with winds spread as broad as a constellation were to come and, shining like the sun, offer me some new truth, I'd ask him for a reference.

And if he couldn't give it to me and couldn't show me where it's found in the Bible, I would bow him out and say, I'm awfully sorry, I don't bring any references with you. So what I'm talking about is not a life deeper than the scriptures indicate, but merely one that is in fact what it professes to be in name.

The Biblical Meaning of Being a Christian

Now, a Christian isn't one who has been baptized, necessarily, though a Christian is likely to be baptized. A Christian is not one who receives the communion, either one or both, of the elements. A Christian may receive communion, and if he's been properly taught, will.

But that is not a Christian, necessarily. A Christian is not one who has been born into a Christian home, though the chances are more likely that he will be a Christian if he has a good Christian background.

A Christian is not one who has memorized the New Testament, or who is a great lover of a Christian song, or who goes to hear the Apollo Club sing Messiah every year. Now, a Christian may do all of those things, and I think it might be fine if he did.

But that doesn't make a Christian. A Christian is one who sustains a right relation to Jesus Christ. We enjoy, Christians enjoy, a kind of union with Jesus Christ, a right kind of union. Everybody sustains some relationship to Jesus Christ, but everybody has a relationship to everybody else, and everybody has a relation to Jesus Christ.

You see, the relation he sustains may be one of adoring faith and love, it may be one of admiration, it may be one of hostility, it may be one of complete carelessness, but it's an attitude of some sort.

A relationship of some sort exists between every human being and Jesus Christ. That is, every human being that ever heard of Jesus Christ. But a Christian is one who sustains a right and proper relation to Jesus Christ, a biblical relation to Christ, one that is right.

Judicial and Vital Union with Christ

And that Christian sustains two kinds of relationship, or rather, the union is two kinds. It's judicial and vital. I'll explain those two words. In Romans 5, we have the judicial relationship everybody sustains toward Christ.

Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Then in the book of Ephesians, the first chapter, that very oft-quoted passage, he has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ, according as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, and so on.

Now, I only quote those not to give them exposition, but only to point up the fact that we sustain toward God in Christ a certain judicial relationship, just as your son in the home has toward you a certain legal, judicial relationship.

Being born into your family, of your wife, you have legal obligations, and you can get in trouble with the law if you deny them. All law recognizes a certain right. The courts recognize that right. A relationship that is there between you and your son.

It is not only the relationship of father to son biologically, it is a judicial relationship. You are accountable before the law not to neglect him, abuse him, starve him, or run away and leave him. You've got to look after him as your son.

Now, there is a relationship which we sustain toward God in Christ. It is the relationship of son, children to the father. We are children of God. There are so many verses that deal with that that I don't need to quote any one of them.

You as Bible students know that. Then there is a vital relationship which is another matter altogether. It is possible for a man to adopt a son. Husband and wife have no children, and after a lot of waiting around, they decide that they're going to adopt a boy.

So they adopt that boy. Now, under law he has exactly the same relationship to that man as if he were his own son. As the legal father before the law, he has the judicial relationship that makes him responsible for the care of that boy.

He is responsible to feed and educate and bring up and shelter and care for that boy until he comes of a certain age. So that the relationship is judicial, that of father and son. But he has no vital relationship with that boy.

He did not come from the long-age old life stream of that father. He came from some other life stream and was adopted into the family. So he has a judicial, but not a vital relationship to that son. But a Christian has a vital relationship to God and to Christ.

Abiding in Christ and Moving Beyond Mere Salvation

He said, as I shall show tonight again, I am the vine and ye are the branches, and the branch is a branch because it sustains a vital relationship. The life of the vine is in the branch and the life of the branch comes from the vine, and the two are united.

That's a vital relationship. So that a Christian is one who has been judicially, legally made a brother of Jesus Christ and a child of God. But he is more than that. He is one who has been vitally united to Jesus Christ by the power and motions of life, so that he is vitally, livingly related to Jesus Christ.

That's where we begin, and my brothers and sisters, that's where almost everybody ends in our service. That's where almost everybody ends. So Bible schools and Bible conferences and books and printing houses all are dedicated to the constant repetition of the fact that we are judicially and vitally related to Christ in salvation.

And that's as far as we go. But there are other relationships which we can also bear toward Christ, and that's what the writer meant in the Hebrews when he said, Let us go on unto perfection. And that's what was meant in the 1 Corinthians 3, when the men of God told them that they were carnal and that they ought to move on out of that carnal state into a spiritual state.

The Volitional Relationship: Making God's Will Our Own

There are at least three other relationships that everybody ought to bear toward Jesus Christ. Not only the one that you entered into when you believed on Christ and were born again, judicially, and not only the volitional one, which you entered when you were born again, for that's how you entered, but there are three others volitional, intellectual, and emotional.

And I want to talk about these relationships, this kind of union with Christ. I say that our union is judicial and vital. It's that by virtue of our faith in Christ. But there is a volitional relationship, too.

And what do I mean by that? Well, it's not as bad as it sounds. I know we preachers have a way of making things awful, and then it takes ten minutes to get the people's minds back again. By volitional, I mean that relationship of our will to God, so that every known will of God should be mine.

Every known will of God. Everything that God wills, I should will. So that I will not only be judicially, legally related to him, not only vitally related to him in life, but that I will, in my mind, in my volitional life, be united to him by doing and knowing and willing exactly as he does.

Now, that's what I mean by let us go on. Most Christians do not go on to make all the will of God their will. They sing very tenderly, that rather dubrious and pretty little ditty, O sweet will of God, still bind me closer.

I like that, too, don't get me wrong. I like to hear it once every year or so. But O will of God, still bind me closer. We can sing that and have moist eyes, and yet be selfish and self-willed and not make the will of God our own.

The will of God must be known and then must be adopted as my will. And then I begin to sustain a relationship of will, a volitional relationship toward Jesus Christ. How do I know the will of God? By listening to stories told by preachers?

No. How do I know the will of God? I know by prayer, by the Bible study, and by experience. I go to the scriptures and I read it regularly. I go to prayer and I ask God for grace to help me to understand it.

You know that song, Break Thou the Bread of Life? We have it in three stanzas in our book, but I read it in the Baptist hymn book this morning. I had it propped up while I was eating my gruel and looking at it, and I find there's another verse in there.

I do not recall the verbatim wording of it, but the third or fourth stanza of that hymn prays that the Holy Ghost might enlighten the world so we can understand it. That's the part we don't sing. I don't think there was any sinister in that.

They just have to make room so they chop verses. Or stanzas and they chop that one. Well, my brethren, I believe that the writer Break Thou the Bread of Life knew what she was writing about when she said, Give thou the Spirit, Lord, dear Lord, to me, that the Lord might give the Holy Ghost as a light upon the scriptures.

So if we pray and have the Spirit of God give us illumination, and we read the word of God with avidity and relish, and then we watch our spiritual experiences, they'll soon begin to crystallize within us a will that is God's will.

I wonder if that's what Jesus meant when he said, But ye have the mind of Christ. There is a mind, there is a set of an infinite number of attitudes and relationships within the heart, and these are all wrong to start with.

And they don't all get corrected when we get converted, either. And they don't all get corrected after we've been to Bible school. They get corrected only by working on them, by prayer, by study, by spiritual experience, by the illumination of the Holy Ghost, whose attitudes begin to become spiritual instead of carnal.

They begin to get right, straightened out. Then there is a second relationship that I would mention to go on to, and that is an intellectual relationship to Jesus Christ. Now, of course, there is a sense in which devolution and the intellectual come as soon as we're converted, but there is another one sense in which they do not, but weight development and growth.

The Intellectual Relationship: Developing the Mind of Christ

So by the intellectual, I mean that we should think the way Jesus Christ thinks, that we should think scripturally, that we should see things the way the Lord Jesus sees them, that we should learn to feel the way the Lord Jesus feels about anything or anybody, that we should love what he loves and hate what he hates.

Now, some of your hackles will get up here, and you will say, Mr. Tozer, do you think God hates anything? Sure, I do. He says so. Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity. Therefore, though God thy God hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows, it is a psychological impossibility to love anything without hating its opposite.

If I love holiness, I hate sin. If I love truth, I hate lies. If I love honesty, I hate dishonesty. If I love purity, I hate filth. Can't help that. Don't think that's bad. Hate is only bad when it's aimed against people, made in the image of God, or when it springs out of some unworthy or low motive like jealousy or envy or anger.

But we should learn to hate what Jesus hates, and I'm sure that if we had the mind of Christ intellectually, so that we judge things the way he judges them, that there would be less need for preaching separation from the world than there is today among the Christians.

Talking about getting the mind of Christ and having the intellect sanctified, I would talk again about two men. I think I gave this either on the air or here at the church within recent months, but you can open a window any time to get light, and this is a window, an illustration.

They tell me that there were in England two men, both of them Englishmen, Keats and Milton. In my earlier Christian life I read them a great deal. Then I got away from Keats. I still admire him very greatly for the marvelous music of his poetry, but there's nothing of God in it, nothing of Christ, so I don't find it very helpful anymore.

Milton, of course, would be all right. I think we'll read Milton ahead. But here's what the critics said about these two men. They said, Keats was an Englishman, born of English stock, reared in England, and I think never left England, and died when he was in his twenties, an Englishman of the Englishman.

But that Keats had read Greek literature so much that he had developed a Greek mind, and that his mind was not an English mind. It had nothing of the restrictions and strengths and weaknesses of the British mind at all.

It was a Greek mind. He thought like the Greeks. They said of Milton, Milton was an Englishman, born English of the English, lived in England all his life, or perhaps a few trips abroad, but not many.

He lived and died in England, and is one of the second of all the great English poets. Yet they said Milton read the Bible so much, memorized it so much, and lived in it so much that he was a Hebrew in his heart, and that Milton had a Bible mind, and that it got into everything he wrote.

He couldn't knock off a common sonnet, fourteen lines, but what somewhere in it would be the rilton rhythm of the Hebrew melodies. Older New Testament, because I understand the New Testament was written in Greek, I also understand that it's Hebrew in its thought pattern.

Now there we have two minds, both of them English, living in the same country, and eating the same kind of foods, and seeing the same scenery, and having the same kind of basic education. And yet one of them became a Greek in everything but nationality, because he loved Greeks so much.

The other became Hebrew, Bible, as in Hebrew, because he loved the Bible so much. That's what I mean, that illustrates it at any rate. You can have a Christian mind, a Bible mind. You can be Bible-minded in the sense that it is not George Washington, or even Abraham Lincoln, incidentally.

He bowed to the fact he was born in this state. Nor Benjamin Franklin, or any of the rest of them. Not Longfellow, or Whittier, or Byron, and certainly not Whitman. But the New Testament, even though you're an American, you're a New Testament, you have a New Testament mind.

I believe that that's what the Holy Ghost wants to do. I believe that he wants our intellectual relationship to Jesus Christ to become so close, so intimate, so all-embracing, that we'll think, as Jesus thought, I say, and love as he loved, and hate what he hated, and value what he valued, and have the mind of Christ in us.

And that doesn't come by believing on Jesus Christ, buying a Schofield Bible, and singing choruses. Brother, you've got to go beyond. Let us go on. Those things are all basically sound, and right, and good, and I have no objection.

Buy your Schofield Bible, and it did, in the early part of this century, wonderful yeoman service in helping us stand against liberalism and modernism. But it has its limitations. Its limitations consist of an excessive emphasis upon the judicial relationship to Jesus Christ, and very little about going on unto perfection.

But that's the same criticism that I bring against most of evangelicalism today. So I say, there's a volitional and an intellectual relationship to Jesus Christ which we Christians should go on to cultivate.

The Emotional Relationship: Loving Jesus Christ

Then thirdly, there's an emotional relationship, that is, a love attachment to Christ. Do you love the Lord Jesus Christ really? Do you really love him not? Now, I know we sing that we do, and we sing things that aren't very true sometimes.

Do you really love Christ? A half-comical answer given to Moody one time when he inquired of a man on the street, Do you love Jesus? He answered, I have nothing against him. And I think that is above as far as a lot of people go.

We have nothing against Jesus, but to say we love him. Ask the young mother with a three-month-old baby, just maybe howling with his first little tooth, and able to smile all over his face when he looks up at his parents.

Ask the mother, Do you love your baby? You know what will happen. She'll break out, and every inch of her face will wrinkle up into a smile. Do you love your baby? Sure. Of our Alliance missionary who's been in China a long, long time.

His name was Jacobson. He's retired now. He'd been in China, oh, I don't know how long, years ago. There, while in China, children were born to them. Then they were sent home. They came home by way of the West Coast to San Francisco.

At every port of call, the children would say, Is this America, Daddy? Is this America? No, he'd say, This isn't America. And after three or four such disappointing incidents, he said, a set of sun, the boat came in to the harbor of San Francisco, and there they saw the golden gates.

Some of you have seen the golden gates of San Francisco. And he said, way there was the shoreline and two peaks, with the sun shining down bright on them. He stood on the deck and looked, and the little children said, Daddy, is this America?

He said, suddenly he went all to pieces, letting himself go in a welfare of homesickness and patriotism and love and memories, and said through his sobs, Yes, yes, children, this is America. He didn't know how much he loved her.

He didn't know how dear her rocks and rills, her woods and temple hills had been to his American heart until he'd been shut away there so long, and his first sight of his homeland broke him all up so he cried like the child that he was for a moment.

Ask that man, Do you love America? He'll grin at you sheepishly and tell you that story. Yes, he loves America. Do you love Jesus, really? Well, I think it's possible to be a Christian, that is, to have faith in his power and his work and his atonement.

I think it's possible even to have a vital relation to him in the new birth, and yet not have cultivated his fellowship to a point where we love him very much. We're not done yet, we're not finished until the love attachment to Christ has become so strong that it burns and glows and consumes.

And I read the writings of the old mystics and the old devotional writings and hymn writers of the Middle Ages and later. I get sick in my heart, and I tell God, I tell him, I tell him, God, I'm sorry, I apologize, and I'm ashamed.

I don't love thee the way these love thee. Read the writings, read the letters of Samuel Rutherford. If you haven't, you should. Read those letters and then see how sick it'll make you. You fold that book shut and get down on your knees, very likely, and say, Lord Jesus, do I love thee at all, considering that this was love, then what have I?

What have I got? No, there should be an emotional relationship to Jesus Christ, a relationship of love. Thou hast left thy first love, said the Lord Jesus, and maybe that's what it means, that you've allowed things to cool you off.

So like the young husband who really loves his bride, but he's so busy making a living for her that he neglects her. And I wonder if Jesus might not have had something like that in mind. You're busy for me, you're dashing here and there in my service, but oh, you've left your first love.

Right here I ought to break this off, but I won't, because I'll be preaching next Sunday. Here. What is this Christian, then, who has gone on until he sustains toward our Lord a right, a scriptural, a spirit-inspired, volitional and intellectual and emotional attitude toward the Savior?

Freedom from Earthly Loves

Well, he is one who has been freed from earthly loves and fears. I want you to put that down. He is one who has been released from earthly loves and fears. What do I mean by earthly love? I mean any love out of the will of God, any love that we would not allow God to take away.

If you have anything in this world, or anybody in this world, that you would not let God take away from you, then you don't love him as you should, and you don't know anything about the deeper life and experience.

For the deeper spiritual Christian life means that I am delivered from earthly loves to a point where there is no love that I would not allow Jesus Christ to take away, be it money, be it reputation, be it my home, be it my friends, be it my family, whatever it may be.

There is nothing. The love of Jesus Christ has come in and swallowed up all other loves and sanctified them, purified them, made them holy, and put them in their right relationship to that all-consuming love of God so that they're secondary and never primary.

If there's anything... Now, think with me a little bit. Do you believe you were left in the Alliance Church, and you believe you know something about the deeper things of God? All right, I want to ask you this question.

Is there anything or body on earth that you love so much that you'd fight God if God wanted to take it? Then you are not where you should be, and we might as well face up to it and not pretend to be something we're not.

Complete freedom means that I want the will of God only, and if it's the will of God for me to have these things, then I love them for his sake. But I love them with a tentative and relative love, not with an all-poured-out love that binds me as slave.

It means that I love nothing outside the will of God, and that I love only what and who he wills that I should love. And you can love everybody. I think Paul loved Timothy and Silas and Titus and the rest of them with a love that glowed like a furnace.

But he didn't love them to a point where he couldn't separate from them, or where he would fight God for them. He only loved them in the margin of his heart. He loved God at the center, and he loved them for God's dear sake.

Loving Family and Possessions in Their Proper Context

This Christianity. You say, you mean to tell me that I'm not to love my baby? No, I mean to tell you that you are to love God so much that you love your baby in its right context. You mean to say I'm not to love my husband?

No, you're to love him, but you're to love him in right context, in right relationship. My old mother-in-law had a baby that died, and she was going through fire and water and blood and tears and toil, I'll tell you.

And coming through the wonderful spiritual experience, she had to sit up in bed, weak and weary as she was, and make the baby's coffin. The husband made it out of wood. She made not silk, but whatever she could get ahold of to line it.

So great was the need. Not poverty, maybe, but at least it weren't rich. When the funeral was held, she was stripped by the grave of the rest, and when everybody was expecting her to break down, she said, Shall we sing together?

And she let off in the dark solitude. Some people went away and said, Mrs. Scott had moist eyes and said, There's faith in life. I can give her newborn to the grave, dancing praise, God for whom all blessings flow beside.

If you love anything enough, if there's any question about whether God can have it or not, you know nothing about the deeper life. You're a slave. You're a slave to that love, whatever it is. So if we've been freed from every earthly love, then we have no unsatisfied longings, and we have no wishes and no dreams.

I never used the word wish, never. Years ago, I quit it. And if it ever breaks out in my speech or preaching, it's only colloquialism. I never mean it. Wish is something I never use. If God wants me to have it, I'll pray for it.

And if he doesn't want me to have it, I don't want. Earthly fears. The Christian who goes on gets freed from earthly fears. I was thinking of this the other day. I still think a little at times. And I was thinking, you know, those two chains bind the whole human race, loves and fears.

Freedom from Earthly Fears through the Will of God

We love something and can't get it, or we love something and we're afraid we're going to lose it, so we're bound with that chain. Or we're afraid we'll get something we don't want. We're afraid we'll lose something we have.

We're bound with that chain. Fear and love binds humanity in two golden chains. And the gospel of Jesus Christ never is finished until it goes on to set us free from loves and fears. We'll love our family more than we ever loved them before.

We'll love our country with cheerful devotion. We'll love every good thing there is in the world, but we'll love it in its right context, and we'll love it for Jesus' sake. And we'll love it and hold it this way so we can let go of it any second for the Lord's sake.

That's to be free from earthly loves. Free from earthly fears means that I choose the will of God now and forever. It's my treasure. It's my whole beatitude. The only fear I have is the fear to get out of the will of God, and that won't bother me any.

It won't bother me. Outside of the will of God, there's nothing I want, and in the will of God, there's nothing I fear. For God has sworn to keep me in his will. If I'm out of his will, that's another matter, but if I'm in his will, he's sworn to keep me.

And he's able to do it, he's wise enough to know how to do it, and he's kind enough to want to do it. So really, there's nothing to fear. I get cheated around with my family and friends by the Maccafee, especially he likes to do it.

But I don't really think I'm afraid of anything. Somebody says, but you'll die of cancer. Maybe so. I'm going to have to hurry up, though. I'll die of old age first. But I'm not too badly worried, because a man who dies of cancer in the will of God, he isn't injured, he's just dead.

He isn't injured. You can't harm a man in the will of God. If old Socrates, a heathen stoic, could die saying, no harm can come to a good man in this world or the next, he could see it, a pagan. Why should I tremble and walk softly through this world, looking over my shoulder furtively?

Rather, should I, by the grace of God, say, Lord, I believe at least as much as a pagan. I believe no harm can come to a good man in this world or the next. But I'll lose my job. Well, you'll lose your job then, you won't lose your head.

But if you, I'll lose my head. Well, if you lose your head, you won't lose your Savior. Can't harm a good man. So a man gets free from fear. I pity the preacher that's afraid of his congregation or afraid of his superiors and his denominations.

Maybe I'm a little abnormal on that, but I never knew up to now, so help me God, one single twinge of fear of my superiors, and only rarely do I ever get self-conscious before a congregation. If there's somebody who really is a great preacher present, and I know that my poor little sermon will sound rather amateurish by comparison, and I sometimes don't care to preach before great preachers, but I'm not afraid of them.

I'm just, what would you say, a child. But nothing can harm you if you're in the will of God, so that if you'll do these two things, let the love of God burn and burn within you until it consumes everything, then you will never be a slave to any earthly yearnings.

You'll have them, and you'll have earthly loves, and you'll have people you love and care for and would weep to part with. Jesus wept beside the grave of his loved friend Lazarus. There's no harm in weeping when we must say goodbye, and you can have your dislikes.

I had a needle put in my arm. A fellow came clear out the house one time from somewhere around over the city, I don't know where. Somebody sent for him, I don't know who, McAfee, I guess. He said, come out and see me.

Well, he came out, and he came up the terrace to my room, sat down beside my bed. He was a heart specialist, and when he came in, he had this huge rocket in his hand. It was a long sucker affair, and I saw it.

Brother, did I argue him down? And he said, no, I'll give you this, and you'll sleep, and you'll be all right. It'll just be a sedative. And I said, you won't give me that. And he said, well, if you're going to make so much of it, probably you'll be worse off if you took it.

So he said, goodbye, and left. And I go, all right. So I don't say that the deeper life, the spirit-filled life, means that you won't be normally human. If the lightning strikes near you, you'll jump.

And if somebody comes at you with a needle, you'll shrink. You're human. But that's one thing. It's quite another thing to walk around chained by human fears, chained by the fears of death and the fear of sickness and the fear of poverty and the fear of friends and the fear of enemies.

God never means that these children should thus be afraid. All that I've preached to you now isn't a dream. It isn't a misty ideal that nobody can reach. It's the normal Christian life, and anything short of it is abnormal or subnormal.

Shall we not obey God and go on to perfection? I believe you'll want to, or I wouldn't be preaching to you. May God grant that together we may press on out into the deep waters, gay waters to swim.