Tozer Devotional

Resisting Satanic Stratagems

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0700

In the days of Esther the evil Haman listened to the blandishments of Satan and set out to try to destroy the Jews. The outcome revealed how very unwise the effort had been. The Jews went free and Haman swung from the very gallows he had erected for his hated enemy, the Jew Mordecai. When the body of Haman swung back and forth on the gallows he had built for another, the folly of unrighteousness was exposed in a way and to a degree that must have surprised Satan. The world now knows, or can know if it will, that every gallows built to destroy good men will hang the builder at last. Justice may be a long time getting around to it, but evil will hang finally. Satan did not know this, or if he did he never intended that the secret should get out; either way his supposed shrewdness failed him. Then, Satan's long, unrelenting warfare against the church has never been successful, and this has been at least partly due to his own unwisdom. In his fury he has shed the blood of millions of the saints, but always the blood of the martyr has become the seed of the church. "But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew," first spoken of Israel, accurately describes conditions among the Christians down the centuries. Had Satan been the shrewd strategist he is said to be, he would long ago have stopped trying to exterminate Christianity by direct attack; yet he is still trying in many parts of the earth, and in so doing he is creating public sympathy for the very persons he is seeking to destroy. This reveals not wisdom but a large amount of blind malice instead.

Satan's Attempts to Outwit Us

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0700

The devil is wise, and shrewdness is all that we may properly attribute to him, since sound moral judgment is an ingredient of wisdom and this the devil does not possess. Further thought might require that we modify our belief that he is shrewd in any other than the most superficial meaning of the word: for shrewdness carries with it ability to plan ahead successfully, and apparently the devil is unable to do this. The truly shrewd man does not get caught in his own trap, but the devil has been caught in his not once but many times. A shrewd strategist knows when to attack and when to call off the attack and withdraw. This the devil never seems to know. Bible history will show that he frequently went too far and defeated his own purposes over and over again. One example of this was the heat he turned on the Hebrews in Egypt. Pharaoh had a pretty neat thing going (from his standpoint) when he managed to get all the able-bodied men among the Hebrews to work for him free. A great army of laborers was busy making bricks for the vast building activities of Egypt, and these bricks were costing Pharaoh not one cent. They were being made by slave labor. Had Pharaoh been wise, or even shrewd, he would have eased the pressure on the Hebrews a little and so continued to enjoy the benefits of their free labor for years to come. Instead he imposed impossible terms, drove the afflicted Hebrews to their knees and brought God to their rescue. Surely the devil overshot himself that time.

Examples, Good or Bad

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0700

A sacred obligation lies upon each of us to be Christlike. This generation of Christians must have models it can safely admire. That is not the primary reason for seeking to be holy, but it is a powerful one. Many beginners are taking us for their examples. Later they will become detached from us and will learn to fix their eyes directly upon the Lord Himself; in the meantime, for better or for worse we are their idea of what Christ is like. This is a wonderful and frightening fact that we must face and deal with as we may. We are under deep obligation to do all in our power to shatter the "common" image, which is now accepted as standard for men in and out of the church. The nations need uncommon men to guide them and the church needs uncommon Christians. And we had better take this whole thing seriously.

Believer Models

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0700

The mighty error of the world has been to take for granted what someone has called "the rightness of the customary." The values, attitudes and practices of the majority in any given period constitute a code accepted as binding upon all members of society. Any aberration from this code on the part of anyone excites immediate attention and may even bring the charge of being "mentally ill." And unless I miss my guess I believe that the advocates of the customary are preparing to use the threat of being charged with mental illness as a whip to bring everyone into line. Incidentally, they tried that on Jesus and it did not work. It is a law of the human soul that people tend to become like that which they admire most intensely. Deep and long continued admiration can alter the whole texture of the mind and heart and turn the devotee into something quite other than he was before. For this reason it is critically important that we Christians should have right models. It is not enough to say that our model should be Christ. While that is true, it is also true that Christ is known mostly through the lives of His professed followers, and the more prominent and vocal these followers are the more powerful will be their influence upon the rank and file of Christians. If the models are imperfect the whole standard of Christian living must suffer as a result.

That "Stream of Human Custom"

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0700

The true Christian is uncommon for the reason that he is not in the majority; he is as different from the world in which he lives as Abraham was different from the inhabitants of Canaan. He is likely to be a lowly, humble, approachable man with no claims to greatness or superiority, but his moral standards, his attitudes toward fame, money, earthly pleasures, life and death, mark him as a being from another world. It is custom that destroys aspiration and turns every man into a copy of every other. "Woe unto thee, thou stream of human custom," wrote Augustine. "Who shall stay thy course? How long shall it be before thou art dried up? How long wilt thou carry down the sons of Eve into that huge and formidable ocean, which even they who are embarked on the cross can scarce pass over? . . . And yet, thou stream of hell, into thee are cast the sons of men."

Culturally Common or Uncommonly Holy

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0700

A lot of leveling has been going on among us lately, but, as Dr. Samuel Johnson noted in his day, the levelers always want to level down to themselves, never up. And since most of our self-anointed levelers begin pretty well down to scale, the total effect on society has not been to elevate, but to degrade. Everyone acquainted with the English language knows that the word common may also mean vulgar and often does. The vulgar person is one of low tastes who is not only coarse and boorish but enjoys being so, and because his kind is often in the majority he is also said to be common. And it is this common fellow who has, unfortunately, become the model for the masses in human society. The present clamor after a college education by such large numbers of our young people suggests that perhaps people are getting tired of being common and aspire to loftier and nobler lives. But this is an illusion. Whatever advanced education may do for us theoretically, it is a fact that the stream of college graduates being poured each year into the social current is not having the slightest ennobling effect upon society. It is rather the other way around; society quickly brings the graduate around to its way of thinking and living. Vulgarity is a disease of the human spirit and is not cured by education, or travel, or familiarity with grand opera or works of art. Vulgarity may speak good English and live in a split-level house, but it is known for what it is by its attitudes, its morals, and its aspirations, or lack of them.

The God-Approved Man

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0700

The argument of the apostles is that the man Jesus has been made higher than angels, higher than Moses and Aaron, higher than any creature in earth or heaven. And this exalted position He attained as a man. As God He already stood infinitely above all other beings. No argument was needed to prove the transcendence of the Godhead. The apostles were not declaring the preeminence of God, which would have been superfluous, but of a man, which was necessary. Those first Christians believed that Jesus of Nazareth, a man they knew, had been raised to a position of Lordship over the universe. He was still their friend, still one of them, but had left them for a while to appear in the presence of God on their behalf. And the proof of this was the presence of the Holy Spirit among them. One cause of our moral weakness today is an inadequate Christology. We think of Christ as God but fail to conceive of Him as a man glorified. To recapture the power of the Early Church we must believe what they believed. And they believed they had a God-approved man representing them in heaven.

Bowing to Christ's Lordship

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0700

Salvation comes not by "accepting the finished work" or "deciding for Christ." It comes by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, the whole, living, victorious Lord who, as God and man, fought our fight and won it, accepted our debt as His own and paid it, took our sins and died under them and rose again to set us free. This is the true Christ, and nothing less will do. But something less is among us, nevertheless, and we do well to identify it so that we may repudiate it. That something is a poetic fiction, a product of the romantic imagination and maudlin religious fancy. It is a Jesus, gentle, dreamy, shy, sweet and feminine, almost effeminate, and marvelously adaptable to whatever society He may find Himself in. He is cooed over by women disappointed in love, patronized by pro tem celebrities and recommended by psychiatrists as a model of a well-integrated personality. He is used as a means to almost any carnal end, but he is never acknowledged as Lord. These quasi Christians follow a quasi Christ. They want his help but not his interference. They will flatter him but never obey him.

God with Men and Man with God

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0700

Even among those who acknowledge the deity of Christ there is often a failure to recognize His manhood. We are quick to assert that when He walked the earth He was God with men, but we overlook a truth equally as important, that where He sits now on His mediatorial throne He is Man with God. The teaching of the New Testament is that now, at this very moment, there is a Man in heaven appearing in the presence of God for us. He is as certainly a man as was Adam or Moses or Paul. He is a man glorified, but His glorification did not dehumanize Him. Today He is a real man, of the race of mankind, bearing our lineaments and dimensions, a visible and audible man whom any other man would recognize instantly as one of us. But more than this, He is heir of all things, Lord of all worlds, Head of the church and the Firstborn of the new creation. He is the way to God, the life of the believer, the hope of Israel and the high priest of every true worshiper. He holds the keys of death and hell and stands as advocate and surety for everyone who believes on Him in truth. This is not all that can be said about Him, for were all said that might be said I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. But this in brief is the Christ we preach to sinners as their only escape from the wrath to come. With Him rest the noblest hopes and dreams of men. All the longings for immortality that rise and swell in the human breast will be fulfilled in Him or they will never know fulfillment. There is no other way (John 14:6).

Christ the God Man

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:00:00 -0700

We are under constant temptation these days to substitute another Christ for the Christ of the New Testament. The whole drift of modern religion is toward such a substitution. To avoid this we must hold steadfastly to the concept of Christ as set forth so clearly and plainly in the Scriptures of truth. Though an angel from heaven should preach anything less than the Christ of the apostles let him be forthrightly and fearlessly rejected. The mighty, revolutionary message of the Early Church was that a man named Jesus who had been crucified was now raised from the dead and exalted to the right hand of God. "Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ" (Acts 2:36). Less than 300 years after Pentecost the hard-pressed defenders of the faith drew up a manifesto condensing those teachings of the New Testament having to do with the nature of Christ. This manifesto declares that Christ is God of the substance of His Father, begotten before all ages: Man of the substance of His mother, born in the world: perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting: Equal to His Father, as touching His Godhead: less than the Father, as touching His manhood. Who, although He be God and man, yet He is not two, but one Christ. One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by the taking of the manhood into God. One altogether, not by the confusion of substance, but by the unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ (Athanasian Creed, nos. 31–37).

Correctly Handling the Word of Truth

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 07:00:00 -0700

Should anyone doubt that Christians, even Bible Christians, habitually ignore the teachings of Christ, let him rise in a business meeting of his church or denomination and quote a passage from the sayings of our Lord as the final authority on a question before the house. He will soon learn how little the words of Christ influence the thinking of the average delegate. Christians today have developed the perilous habit of accepting the authority of the New Testament on matters that do not concern them and rejecting it on matters that do. And so with too many churches also Jesus is popular but impotent. Surely another reformation is indicated.

When Words and Deeds Conflict

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:00:00 -0700

In the working out of God's eternal purpose the society of the first Adam and the society of the last Adam, though utterly opposed, may for a while coexist, but not for long (Hebrews 12:26–27). The flesh may admire the spirit while refusing to go along with it, or it may misunderstand the spirit and believe that it is itself spiritual while actually sunk in corruption. The latter, I believe, explains the present popularity of Christ in the world. The contradiction between Christ and unregenerate society is sharp and irreconcilable, but the contrast between society and its own mistaken conception of Him is scarcely noticeable. So the world can cherish its image of Christ and ignore His commandments without a qualm of conscience. What should seriously concern us, however, is not that the world praises Christ without obeying Him, but that the church does. The men of this world go their way careless of the teachings of Christ, but in doing so they are consistent with their position. They have made no vows to the Lord nor taken His name upon them. But when a Christian ignores the commandment of Christ, he is guilty of sin doubly compounded. He violates holy vows, is guilty of rebellion against God and commits the grotesque sin of calling Jesus Lord with his words and denying His Lordship with his deeds.

Limiting Christ's Lordship

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 07:00:00 -0700

One of the most incredible phenomena in the world today is the immense and universal popularity of Jesus Christ. Yet the teachings of Christ are wholly contrary to the beliefs of the modern world. The spiritual philosophy underlying the kingdom of God is radically opposed to that of civilized society. In short, the Christ of the New Testament and the world of mankind are so sharply opposed to each other as to amount to downright hostility. To achieve a compromise is impossible. We can only conclude that Jesus is universally popular today because He is universally misunderstood. Everyone admires Jesus, but almost no one takes Him seriously. He is considered a kindly idealist who loved babies and underprivileged persons. He is pictured as a gentle dreamer who was na�ve enough to believe in human goodness and brave enough to die for His belief. The world thinks of Him as meek, selfless and loving, and values Him because He was what we all are at heart, or would be if things were not so tough and we had more time to cultivate our virtues. Or He is a sweet, holy symbol of something too fine, too beautiful, to be real, but something which we would not lose nevertheless from our treasure house of precious things. Because the human mind has two compartments, the practical and the ideal, people are able to live comfortably with their dreamy, romantic conception of Jesus while paying no attention whatsoever to His words. It is this neat division between the fanciful and the real that enables countless thousands of persons to say "Lord, Lord" in all sincerity while living every moment in flat defiance of His authority.

Recognizing True Leaders

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:00:00 -0700

If the church is to prosper spiritually she must have spiritual leadership, not leadership by majority vote. It is highly significant that when the apostle Paul found it necessary to ask for obedience among the young churches he never appealed to them on the grounds that he had been duly elected to office. He asserted his authority as an apostle appointed by the Head of the church. He held his position by right of sheer spiritual ascendancy, the only earthly right that should be honored among the children of the new creation. In the church or denomination where the Holy Spirit is in control there will be no imposed conformity, but there will be happy cooperation with the anointed leaders on the part of all. The rank-and-file soldiers of the King will recognize their true leaders; they will be the ones not with the epaulets on their shoulders but with the oil on their foreheads.

Leaders: God-Chosen or Man-Chosen

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:00:00 -0700

There is great danger in our present-day evangelical circles that we place too great importance on conformity to authorities within the churches and so stifle whatever originality and daring there may be among us. That denomination is in grave peril when the only virtue required of its ministers is conformity and the only unforgivable ecclesiastical sin is insubordination. This situation develops when church authorities are placed in office by machinery instead of being commissioned by the Holy Spirit. To stay in the ascendancy these leaders must demand and get conformity to protect rules on the part of those under them. Such as these would far rather preside over a denomination of mediocre conformists than to be embarrassed by the presence of anointed men of vision who might unwittingly steal the hearts of the people from them. Thus when a head appears slightly above the dead level of flat conformity it is gently lopped off, ostensibly to protect the work of the Lord, but actually to retain control of the ecclesiastical machine. No Spirit-led man is afraid of losing his position in a Spirit-filled church. Where the church is conceived to be no more than an institution, then every man honored by a place on the hierarchical totem pole will seek to preserve his treasured niche, or to secure a higher one. Then he will look for a technique for survival, and over the years imposed conformity has been the one most frequently employed by the largest number.