A Man Who Exalted God — A.W. Tozer

David’s Prayer in Psalm 57

The 57th Psalm. David is praying, Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me, for my soul trusteth in thee. Yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpassed.

I will cry unto God, most high unto God, that performeth all things for me. He shall send from heaven and save me from the reproach of him that would swallow me up. God shall send forth his mercy and his truth.

My soul is among lions, and I lie 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.

Awake up my glory. Awake, psaltery and 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 in verse 11, verse 5, word for word. Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens, and let thy glory be above all the earth. Now, this man David, thank God, was in trouble most of the time, and the way he got out is the way we can get out.

We can learn from him. In this instance, David had just escaped from Achish, king of Gath, and had fled to that famous cave of Adullam. And all the beatniks, those who were in debt, and those who were disgruntled, and those who were discouraged, and those who couldn't fit in, they came to David.

That's the way he started. Most religious denominations start that way. And David was in trouble, and being the poet that he was, he put everything in vivid figures. He was among men whose teeth were spears, he said, and arrows, and their tongues were sharper than swords.

And they had digged pits, booby traps, every place for David, all around. And he was in real difficulty. And of course, he wanted to get out, as who wouldn't? But David, being a God-taught man, a man after God's own heart, didn't make the mistake that a lot of us make.

He didn't pray, Oh God, exalt me. Oh God, show the people that I'm thy servant. Lift me up above my enemies. He said, Be thou exalted above the heavens, and let thy glory be above all the earth. David knew that the worst thing that could happen to him was for him to be exalted.

He knew that that would be a treacherous shortcut to victory. He knew that if he put God between him and his troubles, his troubles would dissolve, and he'd get out all right without any harm to him. So he began to praise God, and he exalted God, or prayed that God might exalt himself above the heavens.

God’s Glory as the First Principle of Creation

Now, in this, David was soundly theological. That is, he was theologically sound. Because the great difficulty, some young man came down and asked me after yesterday morning's sermon, why we should hate sin.

Well, that's a big question. It's like the young fellow that took the text, I have somewhat to say unto thee. It opens a very wide field for discussion. But there is, when God made the heaven and earth, he made it to be like this.

He was to be first. First in sequential order, as he certainly is. He's the first cause, and above in rank and station, exalted in dignity and honor, to have first place in the hearts of all moral creatures.

This was the way God created the heaven and the earth. Now, it wasn't an arbitrary thing on God's part. He didn't say, I'm going to create me a world to praise me. But God being who he is, and what he is, in creating moral beings and an environment for them to live in, God had to, and I use the word had, and mean it must, it must be according to the nature of God.

That he must be first. His glory must be above all the heavens. And I want to shock you, I don't think I've done that yet, and so I want to shock you by saying this, that all you missionaries and preachers and soul winners ought to remember one thing.

The glory of God is your chief objective in life, not the winning of souls. The winning of souls always comes second to the glory of God. But God being who he is, and the kind of loving God that he is, has so arranged it that the more he is glorified, the more people are saved.

So that it works better to glorify God first. The first prayer was, hallowed be thy name. For God to be exalted, for us to put God up, put God first. Let God have first place in our thinking, first place in our living, first place in our lives, in our home, in our business, in our profession.

God first, the triune God first. This restores the health of the universe, for the trouble with the fallen world is that it's inverted. God is made to take the second place. Now he never takes second place, but he's made to take it in the minds of fallen men.

And they're exalting themselves all the time, always exalting themselves. If they give 25 cents to the Red Cross, they wear a red feather to show they've given an order. And we're always exalting ourselves, and the result is God is always given second place.

And this is unhealthy. This brings disease to all the part of the world that it touches. And the purpose of God now in redemption is to restore that right order, to put man at the foot of the throne and God on the throne.

Sin as the Inversion of Divine Order

In everybody's heart, you know, there's a throne. Either God sits on it or the man sits on it. And the trouble with the world is every man sits on his own throne. Sin was defined by the man Isaiah as being this.

He said, all who are like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way. The turning to my own way instead of to God's way is the essence of sin. It's rebellion, unbelief, selfishness, and self-will all rolled into one.

And that's what's wrong with the world, that's what's wrong with the United Nations, that's what's wrong with the West, and that's certainly what's wrong with behind the Iron Curtain crowd. God gets no place, or if he does, it's a second or a third or a fourth place.

Now David, in a jam, knew that the way to get out was to begin to put God where he belonged, above the heavens, exalt him above the heavens, and then God, in pleasure for the place God was, David was giving God in his heart and in his mind, came to God's defense, to David's defense.

Now, God's place among us, I want to talk about that just for a little bit. Now, there are millions who call themselves by the name of God, and by the name of Christ, and who pray to him a certain amount, I suppose, but the true place in the heart is always found, not by what we say, but by what we do.

And I want to ask you this question, I want to ask you, who wins? Not out in the world now, we leave the world for the moment, and we leave the liberals for the moment. Usually when we get up feeling bad, we take, we preach against the liberals.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes had his theological students say in the autocrat of the breakfast table, he had a journal, and the journal said, feeling bad this morning, liver troubling me, decided to stay in and write a treatise on total depravity.

And when we are not feeling well, when we're not feeling well, we take it out on the liberals, we leave them for the time, and talk about us, about the evangelicals, about those who believe in historic Christianity.

The Bible is the inspired word of God. Now, I'm not making charges, I'm asking questions. When it comes to a choice between God and, say, money, where does God rate as a rule? Now, most people tithe because they've learned that it's economically profitable to tithe.

People say that I get to go further on my nine-tenths than I did on my ten. Well, any businessman, if he found that out, would give a tithe immediately if he knew he'd come out better. And then our ambition, and our fleshly enjoyment, how we rationalize to our ambition, and to please ourselves, and give God second place.

And then when it comes to marriage, I've long ago quit. A lot of preachers spend a lot of pious time talking to young couples, trying to straighten them out. I don't know, you can't talk to people when they're in love, you can't do it.

They come to you, and they're all starry eyed, and you can see Adam and Eve, and all, everything between in their eyes, and they're going to get married anyhow. And I never knew anybody changed their mind, their minds because some preacher had talked to them in the study.

But when it comes to the choice between God and marriage, between God and the one you feel you ought to marry, or want to marry rather, who wins, God or the young lady? And when it comes to a choice between God and our friends, and especially when it comes to a choice between God and self, well, the world staggers on, and I think that that's why the evangelical church is staggering on, because we will not give God the place that's his by right, by right of who he is and of who we are.

The Consequences of Exalting Self

And whenever the human will enters, this monstrous inversion is found out in the world of nature up among the Sputniks, and the stars, everything's all right because they have no will. But as soon as we get where there's a moral will, we have trouble.

Not among the angels, for they're not fallen, but among fallen men and devils and many other creatures that may be fallen who have moral perception. Always this monstrous inversion. God always gets second place, or third place, or tenth place, and other things are put above him, and yet at the same time these persons may be very extremely religious.

Now for each one of us there will be no peace. There'll be no inward peace until God is exalted over us, and we are based. There'll be no peace. Now we can read all the books in the wide world, and we can read the scripture through once a year, and we can sing our way through the Presbyterian book of praise or the Methodist hymnal, or whatever book you like.

I happen to like those two. And we can be just as religious as as Mohammedan. When it's all over, we'll never find peace nor victory until God is given the place in our hearts that he has in his universe.

First place, high over all, exalted above all. Now this truth runs through all the teachings of Jesus Christ our Lord. If any man would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me, he said.

We've made taking up the cross to be a very poetic thing, but taking up the cross meant that we'd stop making plans. The man who took a cross in the old Roman days didn't have any plans. Somebody else had made his plans for him.

But he came to an old monk in the old days, and said to him, a man of God he was certainly, and said to him, now you teach the deeper life, the life lost in God. Tell me, what does it mean to be crucified with Christ?

Well, he said, let me see, I'll give it to you like this. He said, the crucified man only faces one direction. He said, he's not chasing all around, he's facing one direction. And he said, second thing is about a crucified man, he hasn't got any plans.

And third, somebody else makes all his plans for him. He went on, I don't remember all he said, but I thought that that much was plenty. That the crucified man is looking straight one way, and he has no, he's making no plans.

Surrendering Plans and Ambitions to God

You know, these are the days of projects and enterprises, and ambitious little fellows who haven't stayed in Jerusalem, as Dr. Bell said last night, until they're endued with power. They go out in the power of educated flesh, and put on a project.

Then they ask God to bless their project. Now, they'll even pray all night. They'll even send to a mailing list, and say on such and such an hour, you pray for my project. But it's their project, nevertheless.

They haven't died. They're making their plans. But according to this old brother, when you go onto a cross, you don't make any plans. You wouldn't have made those plans in the first place. Somebody else made them for you.

So when God makes your plans, and you forsake all, and even houses and lands, and even family if you have to, I had to forsake my family to get converted. I came out of a pagan home, a moral home. My mother was a moral woman, and taught morals to her family, but it was a pagan home.

And when I got converted, I had to break with my family. They all got most of them converted later on, but to start with, I as a 17 year old boy had to break. You have to give up things, and put God first.

Personal Communion and Exalting God at Any Cost

Well now, what's the Spirit trying to say to us? I think this morning, in the brief time that I have, that I want to offer you a lever to move mountains. I want to offer you a ladder by which, and upon which you can climb to the kingdom of power.

I want to offer you a little secret key that will bring to you riches of inward experience such as you've never had before. That will bring to you deep spiritual satisfaction for your total nature. And usefulness and fruitfulness and growth such as you've never known before.

And in addition, the ravishing knowledge of the only true God. And maybe you've detected in my preaching since I've been here, that I believe in personal communion with God to the point of incandescence.

I believe that we should fellowship with God until like Moses, there's some of the glow of God upon our faces. And this that I'm going to tell you about, or David's already told us, is the secret of it all.

I don't go around with keys. I wrote a series of talks for a magazine, and somebody grabbed it up without asking me and reprinted it, and called it the secrets of the deeper life, or keys to the deeper life.

There aren't any. So I don't claim these are keys, but I do say they point a direction, and if you'll listen and follow, I'm sure that you can have all this that I've said. And that is simply to exalt God over us at our cost, at any cost to us.

Exalt God always. Put God where he belongs. Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens. That is, be thou exalted over me. And be thou exalted at my expense. If I knew where there was a doctor, I'd ask him what to do for a frog in the throat.

I never get a frog. I never get a frog in the throat once in five years, but I had one here. And it's a tadpole, if not a frog, and it's a bothering me. Now, be thou exalted, says God above all. Let thy glory be above, what?

Surrendering Possessions, Family, and Friendships

My possessions. Let thy glory be above my possessions. In a little book I wrote, I have a chapter called The Blessedness of the Man Who Possesses Nothing. People wondered why I wrote it, and wanted to know how come to write it.

Well, I wrote it out of a spiritual experience I had. I dedicated a church one time. Oh, we took a week to dedicate it, you know. We called in a big shot from New York, and he preached, and we had a different big shot grading down, you know, each day until we finally dedicated the building.

But I found that when it was all over, I hadn't dedicated it at all. I was still proud of it because it was new in those times. They've copied it a lot, and it's not new anymore, but it was a new kind, new type.

And I had to go, and I did. And God broke my heart and took me around, and I went around and dedicated it myself, nobody listening. And then I dedicated everything and everybody. And I had six sons. And then after nine years, and we'd given up hope, we had one daughter, and she was a pretty little thing.

And when I first saw the little flimsy clothes begin to hang around, you know, I just went wild. All of you were raising six boys, you know. It was just like trying to bring up a herd of buffalo. And then this refined, feminine little lady came along with all her pretty little frilly things.

And she and I became sweethearts from the first day I saw her little red face through the glass in the hospital. And she became dear to me, so dear to me, I was 42 years old when she was born. That's exactly 20 years ago, if you want to know.

And, you know, she was a child of my old age, and that added. And so I had to come to the place. We dedicated her formally, you know, in church service, offered her to the Lord in public dedication, but she was still mine.

And then the day came when I had to die to my Becky, my little Rebecca. I had to give her up and turn her over to God to take her if he wanted her any time. And she's been there ever since. And when I made that awful, terrible dedication, I didn't know but what.

I'd listen to the evangelist, you know, tell their blood-curdling stories, and I didn't know but what God would take her from me. But he didn't take her from me. He brought her up, now she's in college preparing to be a missionary.

Good health and married and all's well. But, you know, she's safer after I gave her up than she was before. If I'd clung to her, I'd have jeopardized her. But by opening my hands and saying with tears, you can have her, God, the dearest thing I have, she became perfectly safe then.

God always keeps safe everything that you give to him, and you always jeopardize everything you hang on to. Keep that in mind. Be thou exalted above my possessions. Be thou exalted above my friendships.

Fenelon said you refuse to give up your friends in order that you might have the friend. Spell the first friends with lowercase f and the next with uppercase f. That's the editor talking, but f and f and f, friend and friend.

Give up your friends that you might have the friend. But we hang on to our friends and we know the friend only very poorly and inadequately. Be thou exalted, O God, over my comforts and over my pleasures.

Ambition, Religious Profit, and the Glory of God

Be thou exalted. Some people spend so much time taking vacations or holidays, as they say in Canada and Britain. They call it recreation. They say they're taking a vacation, and I say vacation from what?

Mostly it's a vacation from nothing more strenuous than loafing. But it's supposed to be recreating something or other. I wouldn't know what. Maybe doctors know. But mostly it's just a rationalization for our laziness.

We put our pleasures and our comforts first, and then God takes what's left. Then our ambitions. I like to see ambitious Christians, but I want to know whose ambition is interesting them. There's an old German preacher by the name of Meister Eckert.

I rather love him. Some people find him shocking, but I rather like the old fellow. And he preached a sermon one time on Jesus and the money changers, and he developed this thought. He said that Jesus, that the money changers, they changed money out of the monies of the countries from which the people came into the circle of the temple.

And that was perfectly right. It was a good, even a useful thing. And the cattle, they couldn't bring cattle on their hoofs for 200 miles, so they brought the money and bought a calf and offered that.

That was all right. And doves the same, they couldn't bring doves so far, so they bought them. He said all that was good. But he said the trouble with these money changers and buyers and sellers of doves was they were serving God for a profit.

And he said that was what brought the anger of Jesus against them. And he drove them from the place. He said, you've made it a den of thieves. They were doing religious work that should have been done and that there was no good grounds for objecting to, but they were doing it for the profit that had brought them.

And this, said the old German saint, was what brought the wrath of God down upon them. And he said, there are those who would not open a door in the house of God except for profit. And so he said, I count any man who serves God for profit to be a huckster and a money changer.

And I fully agree with him. And the profit I'm talking about here now is not financial profit. Most of us don't have much to worry about that. But there's another kind of profit that we like to get. We serve God on commissions, a very low commission.

And the more spiritual we are, the lower commission we're willing to take for the work we do. We want to serve the Lord with our ambitious schemes, but we want, oh God, we'll serve. We give you 95 of the glory, but Father, could I have 5

And then we get to a revival meeting and get blessed up and we go to God and we edit a bit and say, oh Lord, let it be 3%. And then if we really get prayed up, we say, make it two, Lord, but I want a cut on the glory.

But God says, I am Jehovah, that is my name and my glory will I not give to another. And God will not give his glory to anybody, not now. There will be a day when he will allow us to share all of his glory with him, but that day is not now.

Now we are called to bear crosses, to do without, to lose our goods, to be frowned upon. Now we're called to be a minority group, a despised minority group. This idea that you can make the cross of Christ socially acceptable is a heresy of the 20th century.

You can't do it. These groups, all sorts of groups, evangelical groups that are trying to prove to the world that we're not so dumb after all, that we amount to something, we're somebody in our own right and we believe in Jesus too.

You might as well quit, brother, because as soon as the disgrace of the cross goes out of your life, the power goes out of your life. And just as soon as you're no longer a despised minority group, you're not a powerful people.

The Church as a Despised Minority

The brother that led us in prayer was a Methodist. He no doubt knows the history of his own people. I'm not a Methodist. That is, I don't belong to the Methodist church, but I'm a great lover of Methodism and I have made it my business to study Methodism, particularly the hymnology and the journals of Wesley.

And they began a despised minority group and they were hated. John Wesley had more eggs thrown at him. He could set all the hens in Illinois with the eggs that he had thrown at him. And he was despised everywhere and he lived long enough to reverse that in England because he'd made so many converts that he reversed that.

But at first he belonged to the despised minority group. And always it's the Salvation Army brother sitting down here and he knows the history of his own people and knows that they were considered the riffraff, the scum, and the bums, the tramps of London used to get a drum and stand around it and sing to make fun of the Salvation Army in those days.

The Christian Missionary Alliance to which I belong, 80 years ago when it was formed in New York City, a Canadian New York City, to try to bring the gospel to the wide world, we were looked down upon completely.

Eight people met over a bakery, eight people. And Dr. Simpson told with what little humor, he had no humor, but he had this much. He said when he formed, when he organized, he said he had to put some elect ladies on his board because he didn't have men enough to form a board.

Now the six largest in the world. But you start despised and small, you know, and never imagine that the of Christ ever will become socially acceptable. That which is of Adam will always persecute that which is of Christ.

And he that is born once will always persecute him that is born twice. Now that's scripture. And then our reputation. We like to keep our reputation up and I always have to try to die to my reputation.

“He Must Increase, but I Must Decrease”

And it's odd, you know, that which you don't have is what you all have to die to. And I have to go to God and die to it. There was a man or a group of people came to John the Baptist and they said to John the Baptist, we'd like to know about baptism.

That this fellow they call Jesus, he's baptizing and you're decide you're baptizing. And they wanted to get an argument on modes of baptism or purpose of baptism or something. They can't. I said that I say they came to Jesus.

They came to John the Baptist. And John the Baptist, wise old prophet that he was, he knew their trouble wasn't theological. He knew their trouble wasn't in their head at all. So he settled it with one sentence.

He said, he, Jesus, must increase. I decrease. There it is. And in settling their question, he gave also a motto for his life and gave us the secret, if there are such secrets, to why he was the great man he was.

Jesus must increase and I must decrease. I hear those words. He must be exalted and I must be abased. I hear them coming down the centuries. They're all together out of mood with the modern gospel church all together.

Always now somebody's got to be exalted. We're pushing people up all the time. Somebody's got to be a big wheel. Vance Havner said, don't imagine you're a big wheel just because you have a shiny hubcap.

And we're always finding some fellow with a shiny hubcap and pushing him up and pushing him up. We've got to have our saints to venerate in Protestantism too. So don't look down your holy nose at our friends on the other side.

We venerate them while they're running around among us and push them up. But always remember that God wants his son to be exalted and us to be abased. He must increase and I must decrease. But in this self-conscious and opinionated and proud world in which we're living, it's awfully easy to be dogmatically sure of yourself on every question.

And if you feel called, immediately get a messianic complex and feel that you're going to be a Moses, if not a Moses, at least an Elijah. I have people write me and call me another this and another that and I get enough people writing me mean letters to keep me leveled off.

But I get the other kind and neither one of them know me. The ones that write and say awful things about me, they don't know me. And the ones that write and say, you're a prophet, they don't know me either.

But if they just let me alone, but you won't, you know. If you're heard of across the street, you got to worry about your reputation. Well, he must increase. That's what to do with your reputation, doctor.

And I must decrease. And the more you decrease, the more he'll increase. And the more he increases, the more you'll increase. And that's a paradox, the preachers call it, or a contradiction, but it's true nevertheless.

God can always use a man if he knows his glory is safe in his hands. I talked to old William T. McOsser, an old Baptist preacher who joined the alliance in the early days. And he was a very close friend of A .B. Simpson.

He was this man, father of Charles McOsser, you know, Helen Hay's husband and all that. But he was an old saint of God, a beautiful bearded Scotchman, and looked like a picture of Tennyson, you know. And you walk around now talking to him, writing the life of Simpson, talking to him about Simpson.

And he began to reminisce. And he told me things about A .B. Simpson that I raised, you know, all protected and shielded. I never knew they were true. I thought A .B. Simpson, you know, was a saint. A man who laughed either knew Simpson or knows humanity, I don't know which.

Well, you know, he was a good man, but he wasn't perfect. And I thought he was perfect. I thought he was a spotless, stainless steel saint. And this man had known him, and he began to tell me about mistakes he made and foolish things he did.

You'd hand him a $20 bill and say, this is for a missionary to China, and he'd say, thank you, brother, and stick it in his old pocket. And maybe forget it for two months. Two months later, they'd found $20.

Oh, yes, that's for mission. Well, things like that. I thought, well, if he was so imperfect, how did God bless him? And I asked him. I said, now, Dr. Brother MacArthur, if this man was a man of like passion, why did God bless him as he did?

And he straightened up and croaked that old beard and said, God knew that his glory was safe in the hands of Albert Simpson. And God will bless any man when he knows his glory is safe in his hands. But he withholds his blessing and gives it only in measure when he has reason to believe that that man wants a percentage of the glory.

Dying to Reputation and Desiring Faithfulness

When that man hasn't settled it, that God is above all and above my health and finally life itself. I have a little prayer here. I don't mind telling. I'm old enough now that I can talk to you like this without anybody thinking anything wrong.

I don't know where it is. Either this quote or the other one. But I carry it around, never have been without it for, I guess, 17 or 18 years. In it, I write my prayers. I don't buy prayer books. I write them.

And I have one prayer in there that my heavenly father hears me make, and I want him to know that I mean it. And I want him to know that the people know that I mean it. And here's the prayer. Oh God, let me die right rather than live wrong.

Pay no attention to the grammar. Let me live right rather than die wrong. That is, I've been reading about Asa and Solomon and Hezekiah, who lived 15 years too long, and many others. And they were good men for the first two-thirds or three-fourths of their lives.

Then when old age began to creep in on them, they gave way to their lusts and passions and their general grumpiness of old age. And they were wicked men when they were old. That's why Pastor Philpott made his famous prayer, Oh God, don't let me live to be a wicked old man.

And I pray that I may die in a glow of prayer rather than live to be edgy, touchy, hard to get along with, nasty, mean, and proud of my accomplishments. I won't keep a book review that I ever written about anything.

I won't keep anything ever appears in a newspaper about me. I won't keep any letters. I only have one that was written by a friend years ago, but I throw it all away. I don't want to belong to that pathetic brigade of Bandover preachers carrying manila envelopes full of clippings about how good they used to be.

I don't want to. I'd rather die right and let the world think of me what they will. Well, that was a personal, something personal. I hope you'll forgive it. But of course, if there's anything to forgive, I wouldn't have said it.

But anyhow, now we may find it very hard. You took some of my time. I may take some of yours, Ray. We find it very hard to understand this. Be thou exalted over me. Be thou exalted above. Let thy glory be above my friendships, my family, my sweet children, my grandchildren.

I have 16. Dr. Bell, that's 11, wasn't it? I have 16. Let thy glory, let thy glory. My brethren, it's hard to comprehend this, for we are living in the age of religious Adam. And religious Adam has gotten among us evangelicals.

And you can see him everywhere, scratch him and he gets mad. And you'll know he's Adam because he gets mad as soon as you scratch him. But as long as you don't scratch him or oppose him, he can be as religious as you can imagine.

And we're living in that hour, breezy, self-contained Christianity, having very little affinity with the things of God and with God and Christ. Now, if you look at the roster of the spiritually successful, Abraham, Job, David, Paul, Saint Francis, Chrysostom, Luther, Augustine, Livingston, and all the rest, this was their secret, if they had a secret.

Be thou exalted, O God, over me. Have first place, God. Let me take what's left. Be thou above me, O God. Exalt thyself at my expense. At any cost, be thou exalted, O God. Somebody said, with fine disregard for eschatological soundness, somebody said, my kingdom go is a necessary corollary of thy kingdom come.

“My Kingdom Go”: Yielding the Throne to Christ

And until my kingdom goes, his kingdom can't come. So what I'm saying to you this morning is, now it's very wonderful that you're interested in missions, very wonderful. I've been with missionary society for 41 years, and it's very wonderful.

But you know, even that can have an element of selfishness and personal pride in it and personal love of activity. We'll never be where we ought to be until my kingdom go and his kingdom comes. And he sits, he extends his benign dominion over the little kingdom of man's soul.

And he who reigns in heaven above and will one day take to him the kingdoms and reign over the earth, wants now to reign over the people in the earth, the people called Christians. And he can't reign, a king can't ever be second.

The king has to be first. There can be assistant kings and junior kings and little kings grading down, but there can only be one king in any one kingdom. And so the kingdom of your heart can only have one king, and it's either you or Jesus Christ.