Five Rules for Christian Living - Part 2 — A.W. Tozer

The Five Rules and the Divine Image

There was a time in the development of the Church of Christ on Earth when the Saints spoke very much of what we call grounds for holy living. And their preachers were said to have accrued to those who adhere to these rules.

They did the same, each Christian for himself. Holy souls, there have been autobiographies toward basic relations. So God veils himself in his creation and walks forth and rides forth upon the wings of the wind with the garments trailing.

And we call those trailing garments nature, his creation. Then, however, because they are made in the image of God, I think not too much emphasis can ever be placed upon the doctrine of the divine image.

...as originally given, that are so inaccurate and unscholarly, and confused that they give but an imperfect conception of the perfection of the original. So we, because of sin, personal sin, of nature and of conduct, our sin in Adam, grotesque, badly have been meant by the original image of God.

But for the sake of that image, we are all men. Then, the next is all Christians. ...attitude toward to love them because they are children of God. Our attitude toward God, fourthly, we are to fear him in that he is the high and lofty one that inhabits eternity.

The age of days to everlight. And then, since we are here on earth, we are for the time being within the framework of human government. Therefore, we have certain attitudes that we must make toward a constituted authority called the king here.

And that is, we are to honor them because they are children of God. Now, the first two I dealt with, venerate all created things and honor all men. Now we come to hood. That is, the brotherhood of the redeemed Christians.

Loving the Brotherhood of the Redeemed

This cannot mean, cannot possibly mean, love the people of your renomination. Thus, to interpret it is to violate it. It cannot mean love the members of your church. That is, it does mean that, but it cannot possibly.

It cannot certainly mean love the group that holds with you on some question. Such as baptism, interpretation. It means love the brotherhood of the redeemed. It means love the born again brother who wears on the hot days and preaches in.

It means love the man who is a careful advocate in Holy Week, even though we of the more liberal interpretation of things smile at it. Every Friday is Good Friday and every Sunday is Easter. But he is in the brotherhood and therefore we are to love him.

It means to every Christian that he is a Christian indeed. Matthew therefore is expressed in these two words, really one word, love, love them. But I am forced to say here that that word love may mean a score of things and it does mean a score of things, depending upon who uses it and the association in which it is found.

It changes its color with the association. Wherever it is, it takes on the form of the persons who use it. And here it means the principle of goodwill, and it means more, but we'll start there. Love always means to hold towards them an attitude of complete goodwill.

Always and only their highest welfare. Now that is a kind of love, not all there is to it, but that is a kind of love. It's a principle of goodwill. I think that's too well known to need repeating. But this principle of goodwill is a strong thing and it's a determining thing.

And it keeps the Christian on the track, the right track, with regard to his brethren. And it means as he is on that track and is loving the brotherhood, he cannot possibly wish to anything but good. And then it means more than that.

Love as Desire for Fellowship

If we make love only, then we rob it of all its enjoyable qualities. Because love is more than heat as well. A heat that desires to be nearer its object. For instance, the scripture says, Me and I will draw nigh to you.

Why is God saying to us, draw nigh? Obviously because he wants us near him. And we're always being exhorted to come to him, to live with him, to stay by him, to be where he is and to let him be where we are.

And why did God go looking for Adam in the cool of the day, back yonder in the tragic circumstances that surrounded the fall? It was because God wanted to be where Adam is. And love may be detected by the fact that it desires to be near it.

And if it does not desire to be near its object, then it may be some kind of an ethical principle, a negative ethical principle, but it is not love in the biblical sense of the term. And then it is an emotional heat over flaws and weaknesses.

Even God says that he knows our frame, and he remembers that we are. There may be honor at the saint. I say there may be honor at the saint somewhere. No, I won't even go there. But it's conceivable that we could imagine there being somewhere honor at the saint.

That could walk straight into the presence of God and him, without embarrassment, and know that God saw no fault in him. But I have never met one, and if ever I met one who said it was true of him, I would know that I hadn't met one.

We would have never seen one, never heard of him. Saint Augustine and all of the rest knew that their right to fellowship the most holy God was blood of Jesus, and it was only through the blood of the everlasting covenant that they dared enter and that they fell.

God is forced to overlook certain flaws in us. He's bound to do it, otherwise he'd have no friends among us. Even Abraham, his friend, he had to overlook flaws and weaknesses in that friend, so that love will overlook weaknesses.

No homely daughter was ever known to be homely by her mother or her father, because love covers up homeliness. And no woman ever yet married a homely man. And no man ever yet married a homely woman. Strangely enough, there are lots of homely men and women that the emotional glow that came upon them completely hid from each other what everybody else knew.

Now he never yet saw anybody that didn't look good to him. He never looked on a face that wasn't sweet. He never heard a voice that wasn't sweet. Never, because God's great blazing heat of love disguises the harshness of our faces, the homeliness of our faces, and the flaws of our characters, and hides them from himself, knowing he, by grace and through the blood of the Lamb, is in process, or they are in process, of perfection.

There will be a day at them, unembarrassed, and they will look in his face, unembarrassed, and his nature will be on their foreheads, and they will follow him as the angels. But that time is not now. We can fellowship with God as the angels, but always God must know the fact that we are but dust.

And love always does that. And extending that now to the brethren, love overlooks flaws and blemishes in our brethren, in those who are true Christian brethren. And then love also is an emotional heat that will lead to sacrifice on the part of the one who feels it for the person that they love.

Sacrifice and suffer we have, we need, back than the cross or even before the cross when our Lord Jesus Christ, for the joy that was, and for the completion of the work that he had come to do, allowed himself to be mistreated and maligned and cursed.

He suffered, not that he had to do it, but he suffered. I remember hearing a great preacher when he was going in the days of his great preaching, Paul Rader. I remember his preaching on the text, He took that verb, brought, and said, What brought him speedily over the powers of earth and things that could bring and compel and showed that none of them could have brought?

And then said, What brought him? And answered it, Love brought him. And nothing else could bring him. And love brought him where they constrained him. He couldn't resist and didn't want to resist. And so love will lead people to something else in the wide world and then continue to do it and want to do it and wonder why they want it.

It will go so far as to give its life for its object. It would be a cliché for me to remind you that there are tens of thousands of mothers who have given their lives for their children. And not only mothers, but fathers too.

And Jesus, we were friends who laid down his life for his brethren. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. Now the attitude we are to take toward our Christian brethren, we are to hold it toward them all the time.

It's never to be varied. And it's a love that is impossible to feel toward the person out of Christ. Because it is a love given particularly to God's children. Because they are God's children. He that loveth him that beget love also from him.

Holy Fear as Reverence for God

Now, the next is fear God. Astonished reverence of which the great Faber writes, and it may grade up from its basic element the terror of the guilty soul before a holy God. It may grade up from there to the rapture of the worshiping saint.

I don't want to be dealing in superlatives altogether. I doubt whether up until I was well on into my ministry I ever moderated or put in anywhere a qualifying phrase. Everything was emphatically what it was without qualifying.

But I have long learned that that isn't a wise way to look at the world or anything else for that matter. And there are very few on the planet. But I'd like to say that I believe that I can. That the reverential fear of God mixed with love and fascination and admiration and devotion is the most enjoyable thing and the most ocean a human soul can know.

Without it I could not exist long a Christian. I guess there are persons who without an is are strong enough simply to live by ethics. I remember Benjamin Franklin. No Christian at all, never was. Whitfield prayed for him.

He told him he was praying for him, but he said I guess it did no good because that was when he wrote his autobiography. But Benjamin Franklin drew what we call now a graph or a chart. Square and many little squares.

And on those little squares he wrote virtues, honesty, faithfulness, charity. And I guess there were a dozen or maybe 25 of these virtues as I remember his chart. And he had a calendar somehow or other.

And when he would violate one of these virtues, he'd write that down. And they're in the square. He had gone a day or a month or a year without having broken any of his self-imposed commandments. Why then he considered it.

He had no spiritual experience, no sense of the divine, no mystic overtone, no worship, no fear of God before his eyes according to his own testimony. And yet he lived like that. All I can say is Moria Ben.

Because I don't belong to that breed of man. I can only keep right by keeping the fear of God on my soul and the fascinated rapture of worship. Apart from that, I don't know any rules at all. ...has a great trembling and hiding of the guilty man to the ecstasy of the saint.

The Fear of God Is Not Fear of Punishment

But this God is a missing quality in the Church today. And his absence is a foretaste and a sign. There are those who are trying very desperately bad to reintroduce the fear of God into the Church. And they're doing it by threatening men and by pointing to physical dangers that assail us.

May I repeat what I think I must have said somewhere back down the weeks as we dealt with all this. May I repeat that the fear of God never can be fear of danger. That the fear of God can never be induced by threats of punishment.

It is told to induce the Biblical fear of God by threatening a man. You can scare a man white to make him do right. Any thief will behave in the presence of the policeman. But the fear of God is all together.

It has absolutely no relation or if so a remote ancient relation with the fear that comes as a threat of danger. You see my friend, great many are, they spring up out of fear of punishment. And as soon as the danger of repentance is removed along with it.

As the old Omar Khayyam said somewhere that he repented so many times. But when spring came, rose in hand, he tore his garments of repentance. And so when I swore that I would obey God in an hour of fear or in the threat of danger.

The apprehension or punishment, it's one thing to be morally afraid. That's one thing. Nothing else to know the fear of God. When the Bible says there's no fear of God before their eyes. It doesn't mean that they're not scared.

Not accusing them of being cowards. Or is he saying that they are so brave that they have no fear. He is saying there's no fear of God before their eyes. There may be fear of death. There may even be fear of hell.

But that's not the fear of God. The breathless adoration. The awesome fascination. The lofty admiration of the attributes of God. The senseless, breathless silence. So that God is near. That's the fear of God.

And it hovers like the cloud over Israel. It lies upon us like a sweet invisible mantle. It conditions our emotional life. It gives meaning to every text of scripture. It makes every Sunday and every Wednesday and every Monday a holy day.

It makes every spot of ground a holy ground. Fear of God. But this is what we do not have today. There's a great deal of preaching that is fulcrum to get leverage on man. Using the fear of communism. Or the fear of civilization.

Or the fear of invasion from some other planet by the mysterious saucers. This fear is upon man. And it is upon man. And Jesus even said men's hearts shall be failing them because of fear coming on the earth.

But that's not fear of God. Fear of God is a spiritual thing and can only be brought by the presence. When the Holy Ghost came at Pentecost, there was great fear upon all people. Yet they weren't afraid of anything.

The child that is made perfect in love has no fear because perfect love casts out fear. And yet he is the man of all men who most fears. For the fear of God is not to be afraid of God. It is to be so aroused that we bite our tongues.

And we say silence becometh my soul before thee oh God my help. Now this accompanies a person. So far as I know John wasn't much afraid when he ran away from Jesus when he was arrested. He was scared and ran.

He was afraid of getting chucked into jail or maybe crucified. So he ran away. That was the fear of punishment. The fear of danger. But when he saw a man standing with a white robe and girded round the breast with a golden girdle and with feet like under burnished brass and with a sword proceeding from his mouth and his hair and snow and his face shining like the sun in his strength the awe and reverence and fascination and fear concentrated in his life so completely that it knocked him unconscious.

And this of the most high God whom he later found was Jesus Christ who had the keys of death and hell. He had to come and lift him up and bring a life back into him. John might have lain there, maybe died there out of shock.

And yet he wasn't afraid. He wasn't afraid in the sense that he feared punishment would threaten him. It was another kind of fear. It was godly fear. It was a holy thing. And this is what's missing in our terrible day.

Why Ritual Cannot Produce Holy Fear

Brethren, you can't superinduce it either by dressing up in statues and talking in a language nobody else understands except the preacher. You can't induce it by organ music and light streaming through artistically designed windows.

You can't induce it by biscuit and claiming it's God. You can't induce it by any amount of mumbo-jumbo. To feel in the presence of this kind of paganism is not the true fear of God. It's a superstition.

The sons and daughters of Baal felt the same way about Baal. Brethren, the fear of God is a beautiful thing for it is worship. It is love. It is a high moral happiness that God exists. It is so great that the soul feels that if God were not, it would cease to be.

It could easily pray, Oh my God, as thou art, let me die. It could easily pray, Oh my God, continue to be the God thou art or annihilate. Can't think of any other God but thee. It is to be so personally and hopelessly in love with the person of God that the transfer of affection could never even remotely exist in the human mind.

That's the fear of God missing in our terrible day. And because it's missing, we're sewing up the veil of the temple again artificially, trying artificially to induce some kind of worship. And to get people scared, we threaten them with bombs and flying saucers.

Honoring the King and Established Authority

I think the devil in hell must laugh. God must grieve. For there's no fear of God before the right. Lastly, honor of the king. And here's the reason for everything appears. See, everything is so well laid out in the kingdom of God.

Every little plot of ground is like a beautifully laid out garden. It's not a wilderness, but a beautiful garden. It is seen here that we venerate all things because they are God's creation. We honor they were made in God's image.

We love all Christians because they are God's children. And we are, in the time, make us love Christians. And we fear God just because God is God. We honor the king. Now, I must talk a minute on that and close.

What does it mean, honor the king? I thought maybe the word honor all men and honor the king, but I find in the Greek the same word. Honor all men, honor the king. How can it be? That we are told to honor all men.

That would include the king. Therefore, why waste words? The answer is that there are two different degrees and kinds of honor. Honor or something, you see. There is some reason back of honor. Honor is bestowed, not arbitrary laws.

And the honor we give to men is given to them for the cause that they are men. The honor of kings, those in authority, is an honor that's bestowed on them for the reason that they are rulers in a God-loved nation.

So it's two different kinds of honor. It's honored on a different level. We give a king two honors. By a king, of course, I do not mean a king called by that name. I mean any appointed, elected, or otherwise constituted authority.

We honor a king first as a man. We honor President Eisenhower. You can't look at his smiling picture without loving the man. We honor him because he's a man. God made Eisenhower. I think he did a good job of it.

But he made him, and he made his brothers, and he made his parents. He made Eisenhower, all right? We honor Eisenhower because he's a man. The degree of honor we give him, and that's the highest degree.

And in the long run, that's the last honor and the highest honor we can give him. Because he is in the framework of constituted society, ordained of God, because he is our not ruler, chief executive, we honor him as such.

So kings are honored not because they intrinsically have anything any other person doesn't have. The little housewife, lovely little woman with the two pretty kids there in England, we honor the queen.

But any mother in the wide world of any skin color, we honor also. Because she happens to be head of a great commonwealth. So she gets two honors. A woman, we honor her as a queen. We honor Governor Stratton as a man among men.

We honor him as a governor over us. So we honor constituted authority because God ordained it to be so. I don't think there's much else to say. There we have it. These are the five rules, and they're not a yoke on our neck, nor ours.

The Five Rules as a Call to Surrender

They are the kind words of God telling us how we are to live. Toward creation, venerate men, honor. Toward God, fear. Toward our Christian brethren, toward established government, honor that eventuates in obedience.

That if we trusted God Almighty and the power of the unmoving Holy Ghost to fulfill this in us, we know of Christianity in the 20th century such as hasn't been seen. Isn't it worth our praying then, and yielding, surrendering?

Isn't it worth our asking God at any cost that so be entombed with his universe that the raindrop or the trembling leaf or the cry of the bird thrills us with a veneration for all God's world, that the sound of a human voice, though speaking a language we don't understand, thrills us with the thought here's a man once made in God's image, the sight of a Christian face, for there are art in all of us with the thought here is one born of the Father, my own kinful.

And the presence of the law reminds us of the goodness of God in organizing society for us together so our houses are safe and we can walk the streets with a relatively high degree of safety. Amen. May God help us.