SermonIndex Classics - A.W. Tozer

A. W. Tozer: There is a verse in the second chapter of Acts, verse 44. It says, "And all that believed were together and had all things common." That's the little story of the unity of believers immediately after Pentecost. One of the dearest doctrines in the Scriptures and one of the dearest to me personally is the doctrine of the unity of the members of the Church of Christ. We are not only one with each other, but one with Christ.

I sometimes tell people that I think in our family that we have quite a demonstration of at least interdenominationalism. My wife grew up a Presbyterian and I met her in a Methodist church. We entered then immediately after an Alliance church. Our oldest son and his family go to a Quaker church in California. The next son attends with his family a Presbyterian church. The next son teaches Sunday school in a Baptist church, and his people go there. Another son is affiliated with the Presbyterian church. The youngest son is a Presbyterian preacher. My daughter is taking her training and expects to go to the field as a missionary under the Christian Missionary Alliance. I don't know what I am. That's the ecumenical movement in practice.

Now, I really want to preach to you to warm your hearts a bit out of this second chapter of Acts. But since we're hearing a lot about it, I thought that I would talk a little bit about the ecumenical movement which is abroad. It wouldn't be anything like a scholarly discourse, nor will it be a history of the movement. But it will only be an effort to show that there is a movement of which I believe is not of God. And then there is a unity, a universal oneness which is of God.

In the first place, the ecumenical is a word which you hear. If you're subject to the influence of British-speaking people or are yourself English, you'll call it ecumenical. But ecumenical doesn't sound right to me, so I call it ecumenical, and I think that most people on the continent do. I know they do in the states and as you know, I'm an old Yankee. I will call it, therefore, ecumenical and so on, giving it the soft E instead of the hard one.

Some of you are so busy with your housework and your work generally that you pay little attention to it. But there is a movement on and has been on for some time to bring all the church into one organization. This ecumenical idea, of course, all the word ecumenical means is universal all over the earth. That's all it means. But it has been adapted to mean that all over the earth wherever there are Christians, they are in one organization.

It doesn't mean that the whole church, if there's a council, say as there will be next Thursday beginning in Rome, if there is an ecumenical council, it doesn't mean that all the church is there, but it means all the representatives or that the representatives of the whole church are there. This ecumenical council is to be held at Rome starting next Thursday. It will take a long time to complete its work. There will be over 2,800 delegates and they will deal with 70 different items on their agenda.

The most important one, unless I miss my guess, the most important one will be the one they call the unity of all Christians. I have noticed that they are now getting very broad and Protestant in their views. They are saying that they are willing to put more emphasis on Scripture. That to my mind is bait to catch suckers, to put more emphasis on Scripture. Because our friends over on the papal side of the road, if Scripture has it one way and the Catholic tradition has it another, Catholic tradition will win out all the time. But if they can say that they're willing to give more emphasis to the Scripture in the church in order to win the Protestants who love the Scriptures, of course they'll do that.

The Protestants also, of course, the ecumenical councils have been all down the centuries. That is that the councils held by the Roman church in which there were delegates from all over the world and they settled all kinds of questions and sometimes they didn't say the right thing. But then we have a movement among the Protestants and that movement among the Protestants has some aims. One of the aims I don't believe in at all because I think it's already been fulfilled. Our Lord when he prayed his prayer, it said that they all may be one. Jesus wanted his church to be one and he prayed that way.

Now they are coming to me and they're saying you ought to join our organization for the unification of believers so that the prayer of Jesus would be fulfilled that all may be one. I'd like to tell you this. That if it takes Jesus Christ 1,900 years to get his prayer answered for the unity of his church and if the church all down the centuries this hasn't been answered and they have not yet become unified, then my faith in the Lord would suffer a staggering blow. The simple fact is that the prayer of Jesus that they might all be one was answered dramatically in the fiery outpouring at Pentecost when all that were believers were baptized by the Holy Ghost into one body.

But then there are those who, while they wouldn't say that this is their reason, they just want everybody to get together, all like-minded Christians, and that's a fine idea. There have been some mergers. There have been quite a number of mergers in recent times and some of them have been all right. That is they're all believers and they all get together instead of having two heads and two headquarters and two official magazines. Well, they only have one. Now that's always to be desired.

For 25 years I've worked on this thing of trying to get the Christian Missionary Alliance to unite with the Missionary Church Association. It looks now as if they would. But then you could put the missionary church people and the Alliance people in a sack and shake them up and you wouldn't know one from the other because we do believe the same thing. We're simply Christians. So when we would unite or merge, there would be no sacrifice of any vital theology at all.

Then there are others who believe that Christians ought to get together and thus fulfill the prayer of Christ even if they had to sacrifice truth. There started in Amsterdam in 1948 a great world movement called the World Council of Churches. You've never heard me say anything against it. I don't make it a practice to preach sermons against things. As I've said, I'm 99 percent for things and one percent against. But this happens to be one of the things that I am against.

The Anglicans and the Eastern Orthodox and the Protestants and the Old Catholics got together. And then after that now into the World Council there have come denominations or at least whole parts of denominations until it's a vast sprawling octopus all over the world. Now the pressure is on from many directions, especially from Rome. That smiling, rather overweight gentleman in the Vatican is a kindly old fellow. It wouldn't be bad to talk to him. I'd like to talk to him pointing to Jesus. But he said that here I am at the end of the road and at the top of the heap. He said that after he got elected Pope. Now that was a human thing to say. There hadn't been anything human come out of the Vatican for at least during the time that the previous Pope was in. He had big eyeglasses and big eyes and a sober look. But this fellow is a nice old fellow. But he wants us all to get together and he's saying that he thinks the union of all Christians is one thing that he wants to try to promote. He'd love to bring it about and go down in history as the Pope that brought the Protestants back into the fold.

One thing that we ought to remember is that the unity of the Christian church in the spirit is one thing, but the union of all Christian groups is quite another thing altogether. We ought to remember the doctrine of the apostasy found in the Scriptures. There is a doctrine there that says that the time will come, perhaps I could read just a few verses of it. Where it says that the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. Preach the word. Be instant in season, out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. But after their own lusts, they shall heap to themselves teachers having itching ears. And they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables.

Now that's what the man of God said. And there's much else there also where it said that the time would come when men would be lovers of their own selves and they would deny the form, having the form of godliness but denying the power thereof. And he said from such turn away. You see there is a difference between Christendom and the church. What the present ecumenical push is trying to do is to solidify Christendom, to bring us all who are on the Christian side of things at all, that is the western world and all Christians of any sort, to bring them together in one vast body. That's Christendom.

But there is in the Scriptures a great difference between Christendom and the church. And the church teaches that Christendom shall be apostate and shall give up her faith and shall wallow in her own self-righteousness and shall deny the power and shall be totally unprepared for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. When the Son of Man cometh, will he find faith in the earth? That's Christendom. But the church is another thing, the beautiful Church of Christ that we read about in Ephesians the fourth chapter where there's one body and one spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God the Father of all who is above all and through all and in you all.

But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. It says then that we must go on until for the work of the edifying of the body of Christ till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Now the perfecting of this unity which took place and takes place when anybody is baptized by the Spirit into the body of Christ, then the perfecting of that until the whole beautiful church is brought into the presence of Christ. This is the business of the Holy Ghost through the Scriptures, through the pastors and teachers and prayer warriors on the earth.

But in the meantime, there is a great large body called Christendom made up of Christians of every stripe and color and kind and ringed and streaked and speckled and spotted throughout the whole world. And this is not included here and the Holy Spirit never intended it to be here. What then should we do about it briefly? Well, join nothing that questions the truth of the Bible. Now let me tell you that. Join nothing that questions the truth of the Bible.

I preached down in New York the other night as I mentioned and I said that Jesus Christ took nothing from science and nothing from philosophy and nothing from civilization and nothing from man's wisdom. That he stood alone, unique, and supreme above all and I went over them one at a time and I showed how little science really knew in the end. After the meeting, a fine-looking lady, middle-aged and a very distinguished-looking husband, they walked down the aisle and they spoke to me. The lady said, "Mr. Tozer, we're just fresh out of liberalism." She said we have just been delivered from the modernistic church and we've been born again and oh we were so glad to hear you. The distinguished-looking gentleman said, "I am a scientist." And he said after hearing men like you, I know how little we scientists really know after all.

Well, that dear couple, even though he was evidently a brilliant scientist, he looked like one and after admitting he was one, I knew he was one. All right. The question now is were they to stay in a church that taught that the Bible is a book of myths, that there are several Jehovahs, there are several gods in the Old Testament, that Jehovah's a tribal god, that he is not the true only one God but a tribal god, and that Daniel was written after the event and that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch, and that Jonah could not possibly have been swallowed by a whale, and that Joshua couldn't make the sun stand still, and that the story of creation is now outdated and outmoded and proved to be wrong?

I've had them come to me right in this city at least on two occasions and question after coming to this church and hearing me, question whether I believed the Bible at all or not. They said, "Do you believe it?" Obviously, there are those in this city preaching in churches that do not believe the Bible and these young people, for in all instances they were young people, they are being taught that the Bible is a book of myth and that there are some good things in it if you can find them. And so they either don't want you to read the Bible or they want you to scratch through it as a rooster scratches through a pile of straw looking for that lone grain that he might find.

Now I say any movement or any church or any group anywhere that questions the truth of the Bible, you as a believer cannot afford to fool around with them. And then if this group accepts any place for all the superstition that goes along with holy bones and holy water and the mother of God and all mankind as I heard her called today, why I say for the same thing for you to do is to quietly walk out. I'm not a come-outer outside of the church I mentioned where I came out and joined the Alliance. I've never come out of anything since that I can recall, come out of churches but they've always gone back the next week. But I have never left anything and I've never split anything. So I am not a lint-picker nor a witch hunter and I am not compelling every man to say shibboleth in the same tone of voice that I do. If he has an Irish accent and says shibboleth some other way, let him say it. If he loves the Lord, he's my brother. But if he's a smooth talker and tells me that it's ridiculous for me to believe that God ever inspired the Scriptures, why then, of course, I can't have fellowship with him.

Remember that 17th chapter of Revelation. I'm not going to take time to read it. But that 17th chapter Revelation tells about that great mystery Babylon the great, the mother of harlots, the abomination of the earth. But I want you to know that this harlot has children. She not only is a harlot, but she is the mother of other harlots. And these harlots are nothing else than the churches that are apostate and claim the name of the Lord but do not live the truth of the Lord.

Now remember that 17th of Revelation and remember the teaching of the apostles about the apostasy that shall be in the end time. And remember the teaching of Jesus and do not be taken in by any soft talk about more emphasis on the Scriptures. A fellow told me, the president of the collegiate institute where I spoke, told me on the way to the airport that he had had a teacher, a professor, and he said he used to speak and some of his messages were so beautiful that I said I wish I could have him preach in my church. And then he said the very next time he would get up and upset the whole business and kick the foundations out from under the New Testament and out from under Christianity and out from under things of God. And he said I knew better.

Well, therefore, I'd like to tell you this. I don't know, I'm not good enough prophet to know what direction things are going to take. I do know that I hear strange things in evangelical circles these days. I hear people rethinking things. We're rethinking inspiration, we're rethinking the deity of Christ, we're rethinking sin, we're rethinking morals, and we're trying to equate it with what they call mores or the habits and customs of certain cultures. We've gone to anthropology and have learned that what's a sin in one country won't be in another, and therefore we Christians have got to accept whatever's there. We're rethinking things. We're even rethinking whether God really created the heaven and the earth and man after his own image. The evangelicals are now rethinking things that the generation ago evangelicals took for granted and never gave a thought to.

So I don't know what direction we're going to go from here. They asked me at the newspaper in Miami, Florida, whether I thought that there would be more unity in the church in days to come and whether I thought there ought to be. And I said no, I thought there ought to be more division. Because I thought that there ought to be a group of godly people who wouldn't be taken in by apostate churches and preachers and that they ought to stand out and stand up and be counted. They printed it. I don't know whether anybody liked it or not, but I wasn't particularly careful whether they did or not. I still believe it. I believe that we ought to obey the word of God and withdraw from all that which says that we are that it is not of Christ.

Now I'll tell you this. That while I live, there will be one free Protestant. I don't know about the others. I know not what others may do, said the old politician, but as for me give me liberty or give me death. And as for me, I know not what others may do, but while I live there will be one free Protestant. I may be in jail, but I will be free. And a man who believes in God through Jesus Christ the Lord knows where he is and hasn't been taken in by a red herring and he hasn't been brainwashed by soft talk and who loves God and Christ and mankind for Christ's sake, that's a free Protestant even if he's in chains.

So I say to surrender to the movement that would unite us all together and make a great vast sprawling superchurch out of all Christians. Some drink, some dance, some live wickedly, some are mad about money, some never go to church except once a year, one of the holidays, and some doubt the word of God and some deny it and some laugh at it, and some gamble and some play the horses, and some are dirty-minded and some tell dirty jokes and yet they belong to the different churches. And they want me to join that mess. To join it, my dear brother and sister, would be for me to surrender and to surrender would be to perish.

Now I can't have much influence on the evangelical church. But I should like to say to the evangelical church that there's a little limerick which they ought to remember about the young lady from Niger. "There was a young lady from Niger who went for a ride on a tiger. They came back from the ride with the lady inside and a smile on the face of the tiger." And if you and I who love God go for a ride with the Pope, we will come back from the ride with the evangelicals inside and a smile on the face of the tiger.

So my brothers and sisters, you know now. And whether this makes me popular or unpopular in Toronto, I care absolutely not at all. But I say I want you to know this. That while I have preached for Lutherans and I have almost all of them, let me see what denominations haven't I preached for? I can't think of any. And I love them all and as I've said we're a sample of interdenominationalism in our home and any Alliance church has in it just practically everybody. I preached down at Moody Church here the 5th of August and this last week I got an anonymous letter, a nice-approving letter with a tract in it from somebody and said "a Lutheran here who heard you August the 5th at Moody Church." So there was a Lutheran. I preach to them all, interdenominational as well as scattered ones here and there.

So I don't think the Alliance has everything and that you have to be in the Alliance to be saved by any means. I just think we're a missionary society and up to now, we're clean of any liberalism. So I'm staying along with the Alliance. But there is a difference between the ecumenical movement which would unify in one great super organization all people who say they're Christians and the true church which is a living organism and which is born of the Spirit and washed in the blood and joined to the body of Christ by the mysterious operation of the Holy Ghost in what we call regeneration.

And when this happened in the Book of Acts, the second chapter, I'll watch that clock and when it's time to quit I'll break my sermon off and quit, whether I'm finished or not. Gipsy Smith said his sermons were like a fish's backbone. He said you can unjoint them anywhere. And I'll just unjoint this thing when the time is up. And I want you in the meantime to know that I'm for the church, but I'm not for the great world super church, but for the church which he purchased with his blood.

And all that believed were together. Now why were they together, this beautiful crowd of believers? They were together because there were reasons for it. You see, they were pressed together by antagonisms from the outside and they were drawn together by magnetism from the inside. And a body of Christians that are living so clean and right and that dare to take their stand and stand up and be counted on the issues that matter, they're very likely to get pushed together and pressed together by external antagonisms.

But that's not enough. They must be drawn together by internal magnetism. That is, we must be drawn together by the Holy Spirit. I love the people of God. I really do. I'm a very nervous man and sometimes I can't spend a lot of time with people. The pressure of hard work keeps me rather jumpy and so I don't say that I always like to sit down and talk five hours with everybody. But I love the Lord's people. I love the old weary ladies and I love the bright-eyed young fellows just converted. And I just love God's people. If they're in Christ, I love them. And that magnetism would bring me to the Church of Christ. I don't imagine that I haven't down the years said well, I'm going to quit preaching. But as Jeremiah said, while I was musing the fire burned and I went back to preaching again.

Well, this explains the constitution of the sheep figure. Sheep are not solitary creatures. They work together and live together and feed together and lie down together beside the green in the green pastures beside the soft waters. The only time a sheep goes off by himself is when he's lost or sick. A sick sheep doesn't go with the flock. And when I find a Christian who is such an individualist that he never goes to church, if he's a Christian, he's a sick Christian. So if you're a found sheep and a healthy sheep, you will go where the flock is. And any of you who wonder where the shepherd is, I'd like to tell you where he's where the flock is. And if any of you wonder where the flock is, I'd like to tell you it's where the shepherd is. So the shepherd and the flock always stay together.

And I for my part don't have the courage nor the disposition to go off by myself and try to live my Christian life all alone. I need others. I need the other sheep which are of the fold and the other sheep which are not of this fold but which are coming into the fold. A Christian doesn't dwell alone, I say, and a Christian should stay together for the mutual help they can be to each other. And if you think you don't need the church, that's just the proof that you do need the church. Because if you did need the church, you probably would think you did. It is the same as when a man says he isn't sick and it's obvious that he is, he's worse off than the man who knows he's sick. For the man who is sick and doesn't know he is and won't admit he is is not going to go anywhere for help.

There's such a thing as the communion of saints and the cultivation of eternal friendships. You know something that in this church right here, you can cultivate friendships that will be yours in the eternal tabernacles. You can say goodbye to people here at their graveside and meet them again with a warm immortal handshake at the right hand of God and know them and recognize them and know them for who they are and were. So we need each other. The communion of saints. I don't want to make so much of it. I don't want to make too much of anything unless it's possible to not make too much of Christ. But apart from preaching every time I preach about Christ, I don't want to preach every time I preach about the communion of saints. But I believe in the communion of saints nevertheless, the communion of the saints of God on the earth and the communion of the saints of God who have gone from the earth.

Well, you say then you believe in spirit-tapping? Can you communicate with somebody that's gone? I didn't say communicate, I said commune. There's a difference. I don't believe it's possible to communicate with the saints in heaven, but I think it's possible to have communion with them. I used a little illustration one time in a book and have never used it since I think, but I think it's a pretty good one so I'll use it now. I said suppose that a man and a girl were in love. And the man had to leave her and go away and be in another province somewhere, another state. And he said now listen, we'll be a long, long way apart. But I'll tell you what you do. And he looked at his calendar. Now he said at a certain night at a certain hour the moon will be full. And it will be in a certain position at a certain time in the evening of a certain night. Now I can't come to you, but you go out on the lawn and you look at the moon and I'll go out on the lawn and I'll look at the moon. And I'll be looking at what you're looking at and we'll be seeing the same thing and we'll be thinking about each other.

Well now that may be a little romantic and sticky, but isn't there something to that, brothers and sisters? Isn't there something to that? That we look at Jesus and they look at Jesus and though they're over yonder and we're here, we're the church militant and they're the church triumphant, but we meet in the same person. We don't communicate with each other, just as the young man and young woman don't coo across the meadow to each other, too far apart. But they do say she sees it and she said he sees it and so they're together. I believe it entirely possible to have communion, the communion of saints which is a unity of appreciation, a unity of love, a unity of worship, a unity of devotion and more than that a union in the Holy Ghost which makes all the people of God one around the world.

And you know, I don't know whether I'll take my sense of humor to heaven or not. I don't do much for these articles and books that are being written proving that God has a sense of humor. But I think that I may keep mine in the world to come. And I think, brothers and sisters, that I am going to laugh at least with a certain amount of celestial dignity when I see the astonished look on the face of some people who didn't think we were going to get there. No, I didn't belong to your denomination at all, but I got there. And the look of astonishment is going to please me. I think I'm going to laugh because I believe that all the people of God are going to make it through without any effort at all through the blood of the everlasting covenant. And there's the communion.

Therefore, I want to commune with the people of God. I started to say Chicago, of course, I mean Toronto, lost a lovely soul here from our midst the other day. He didn't die, he went back to England. Our friend Gerry Gregson. He was an Episcopalian and he always had his collar around the other way. We had one of them here on, he wasn't Episcopalian but he was sitting here beside me during the Keswick meetings, spiritual life convention. I sat there alongside of him and felt small because I had my suit on. My suit and he had on his with the collar around. So the next night I saw him back there, unbuttoned, and I went up and I said is this the man that sat beside me on the platform last night with a dog collar on? He said I'm sure it's the man. He said a man has to get a clean shirt on occasionally. So he took it good-naturedly. I don't care, let him wear.

I've preached in robes. I never preached with a collar on backwards, I always managed to be sober at the time and put it on right. But if anybody wants to, if this brother just feels he looks better looking out over his collar, I say amen, put it on. It means nothing to me. One fellow said the reason I wear them, I visit the hospital, it's an entrée to the hospital. Well, if that's worth your trouble, reverend, go ahead and wear. I love you and we're one in Christ and we'll have communion of the saints.

There's always safety near the shepherd too. It can be suicide for a sheep to stray from the shepherd. So if you stay close by the shepherd and all the rest of the sheep stay close by the shepherd, you'll not only be near to the shepherd, but you'll be near to each other. Isn't that reasonable? As you crowd in to get near to each other. And then of course there's the manifestation of the shepherd's presence. I repeat again that I grieve that we have so little manifestation of the shepherd's presence. We talk about his being here, but we don't sense that he's here. Do you know what I mean? You don't have the feeling that he's here. Don't talk down feeling, it's part of our human constitution. But when he walks into the presence of his people consciously, they can't help but feel it.

And I think the most wonderful thing that we could have here at Avenue Road would be that we should become so Christ-conscious and so church-loving that we would clean up our lives and purify our hearts and wash our hands and forgive our enemies and love them too. And then we would focus our eyes on him and learn to live and pray and preach and give and worship in the very conscious presence of the Son of God's love. I think this would be the most beautiful thing in all the wide world. And dear friends, I don't mind telling you at all. If I knew there was any place on earth a company of believers that enjoyed this as intensely and wonderfully as they should, I think I would try to find them and if they would have me spend the rest of my days with them.

But as I've said I have been among most all the denominations from Pentecostals to the Lutherans and preached for them and I just don't find it much. Maybe God would have it that this Avenue Road church should be the one to give back to the evangelicals again in this dispensation, this period, what it means, what Christian unity means, what Christian love means, what the real unity of the believer is. Being let go, they went to their own company. And it's a sweet company when the Lord is in the midst of it. Now there's where I break off my sermon. I have another page of notes, but it's gone in right there. And I want to pray. Let's pray.

Dear Lord Jesus, we're unworthy to be members of thy church. But we are not going to be tricked by the devil into letting our unworthiness make us morbidly unbelieving. Even though we're not worthy to be, we're accepted in thee and thou hast made us members of thy body and we accept it. And we leave the matter of our worth with thee. And if angels or archangels question our right to be there, we look to thee as a sheep looks to his shepherd and say answer for me, Lord, answer for me. I admit I'm not worthy but answer for me, dear Lord, and thou wilt answer for us.

For thou didst come from high heaven to low earth, from the immortal and eternal liberty of the Godhead to the confines of the virgin's womb that we might be redeemed. And thou didst die on the cross of shame and suffering and rise that we might be justified and forgiven and reunited again with the Father from which we fell in the fall. Lord all this is true and we leave that with thee. Now wilt thou bless and help us to see how wonderful it is to be a member of however small a group that believes in thee.

We leave the great top-heavy Christendom to find its own way but we shall pray oh God for all the church, all who call themselves Christians. We shall be tolerant and kind and charitable and loving and friendly to them all but we only go with those that love thy name, that trust the precious work of Christ on the cross and that are ready to leave all and follow him. We pray oh God for every Christian in Toronto. We pray for all the ministers of the truth and we thank thee there are many who preach the truth. Bless them all Father and grant that over these weeks that lie before us we may see a constant rising tide that shall evacuate in a flow that shall be like the river that flows out from the throne of God. And all this we ask in Christ's name. Amen. Amen.