For our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power,
and in the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction, as you know what kind
of men we were among you for your sake. (1 Thess. 1:5)
If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. (2 Cor. 5:17)
You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. (Rev. 3:1)
To one who is a student merely, these verses might be interesting,
but to a serious man intent upon gaining eternal life they might well
prove more than a little disturbing. For they evidently teach that the
message of the gospel may be received in either of two ways: in word
only, without power, or in word with power. Yet it is the same message
whether it comes in word or in power. And these verses teach also that
when the message is received in power it effects a change so radical as
to be called a new creation. But the message may be received without
power, and apparently some have so received it, for they have a name to
live, and are dead. All this is present in these texts.
By observing the ways of men at play I have been able to understand
better the ways of men at prayer. Most men, indeed, play at religion as
they play at games, religion itself being of all games the one most
universally played. The various sports have their rules and their balls
and their players; the game excites interest, gives pleasure, and
consumes time, and when it is over, the competing teams laugh and leave
the field. It is common to see a player leave one team and join another
and a few days later play against his old mates with as great zest as he
formerly displayed when playing for them. The whole thing is arbitrary.
It consists in solving artificial problems and attacking difficulties
that have been deliberately created for the sake of the game. It has no
moral roots and is not supposed to have. No one is the better for his
self- imposed toil. It is all but a pleasant activity that changes
nothing and settles nothing at last.
If the conditions we describe were confined to the ballpark, we might
pass it over without further thought, but what are we to say when this
same spirit enters the sanctuary and decides the attitude of men toward
God and religion? For the Church has also its fields and its rules and
its equipment for playing the game of pious words. It has its devotees,
both laymen and professionals, who support the game with their money and
encourage it with their presence, but who are no different in life or
character from many who take in religion no interest at all.
As an athlete uses a ball, so do many of us use words: words spoken
and words sung, words written and words uttered in prayer. We throw them
swiftly across the field; we learn to handle them with dexterity and
grace; we build reputations upon our word skill and gain as our reward
the applause of those who have enjoyed the game. But the emptiness of it
is apparent from the fact that after the pleasant religious game no one
is basically any different from what he had been before . The basis of
life remains unchanged; the same old principles govern, the same old
Adam rules.
I have not said that religion without power makes no changes in a
man’s life, only that it makes no fundamental difference. Water may
change from liquid to vapor, from vapor to snow, and back to liquid
again, and still be fundamentally the same. So powerless religion may
put a man through many surface changes and leave him exactly what he was
before. Right there is where the snare lies. The changes are in form
only; they are not in kind. Behind the activities of the nonreligious
man and the man who has received the gospel without power lie the very
same motives. An unblessed ego lies at the bottom of both lives, the
difference being that the religious man has learned better to disguise
his vice. His sins are refined and less offensive than before he took up
religion, but the man himself is not a better man in the sight of God.
He may indeed be a worse one, for always God hates artificiality and
pretense. Selfishness still throbs like an engine at the center of the
man’s life. True he may learn to “redirect” his selfish impulses, but
his woe is that self still lives unrebuked and even unsuspected deep
within his heart. He is a victim of religion without power.
The man who has received the Word without power has trimmed his
hedge, but it is a thorn hedge still and can never bring forth the
fruits of the new life. Men do not gather grapes from thorns nor figs
from thistles. Yet such a man may be a leader in the church, and his
influence and his vote may go far to determine what religion shall be in
his generation.
The truth received in power shifts the basis of life from Adam to
Christ, and a new set of motives goes to work within the soul. A new and
different Spirit enters the personality and makes the believing man new
in every department of his being. His interests shift from things
external to things internal, from things on earth to things in heaven.
He loses faith in the soundness of external values, he sees clearly the
deceptiveness of outward appearances, and his love for and confidence in
the unseen and eternal world become stronger as his experience widens.
With the ideas here expressed most Christians will agree, but the
gulf between theory and practice is so great as to be terrifying. For
the gospel is too often preached and accepted without power, and the
radical shift that the truth demands is never made. There may be, it is
true, a change of some kind; an intellectual and emotional bargain may
be struck with the truth, but whatever happens is not enough, not deep
enough, not radical enough. The “creature” is changed, but he is not
“new.” And right there is the tragedy of it. The gospel is concerned
with a new life, with a birth upward onto a new level of being, and
until it has effected such a rebirth it has not done a saving work
within the soul.
Wherever the Word comes without power its essential content is
missed. For there is in divine truth an imperious note; there is about
the gospel an urgency, a finality that will not be heard or felt except
by the enabling of the Spirit. We must constantly keep in mind that the
gospel is not good news only, but a judgment as well upon everyone that
hears it. The message of the Cross is good news indeed for the penitent,
but to those who “obey not the gospel” it carries an overtone of
warning. The Spirit’s ministry to the impenitent world is to tell of sin
and righteousness and judgment. For sinners who want to cease being
willful sinners and become obedient children of God, the gospel message
is one of unqualified peace, but it is by its very nature also an
arbiter of the future destinies of men.
This secondary aspect is almost wholly overlooked in our day. The
gift element in the gospel is held to be its exclusive content, and the
shift element is accordingly ignored. Theological assent is all that is
required to make Christians. This assent is called faith and is thought
to be the only difference between the saved and the lost. Faith is thus
conceived as a kind of religious magic, bringing to the Lord great
delight and possessing mysterious power to open the Kingdom of heaven.
I want to be fair to everyone and to find all the good I can in every
man’s religious beliefs, but the harmful effects of this faith-as-magic
creed are greater than could be imagined by anyone who has not come
face-to-face with them. Large assemblies today are being told fervently
that the one essential qualification for heaven is to be an evil man,
and the one sure bar to God’s favor is to be a good one. The very word
righteousness is spoken only in cold scorn, and the moral man is looked
upon with pity. “A Christian,” say these teachers, “is not morally
better than a sinner; the only difference is that he has taken Jesus,
and so he has a Savior.” I trust it may not sound flippant to inquire,
“A savior from what?” If not from sin and evil conduct and the old
fallen life, then from what? And if the answer is, “From the
consequences of past sins and from judgment to come,” still we are not
satisfied. Is justification from past offenses all that distinguishes a
Christian from a sinner? Can a man become a believer in Christ and be no
better than he was before? Does the gospel offer no more than a
skillful Advocate to get guilty sinners off free at the Day of Judgment?
I think the truth of the matter is not too deep nor too difficult to
discover. Self-righteousness is an effective bar to God’s favor because
it throws the sinner back upon his own merits and shuts him out from the
imputed righteousness of Christ. And to be a sinner confessed and
consciously lost is necessary to the act of receiving salvation through
our Lord Jesus Christ. This we joyously admit and constantly assert, but
here is the truth that has been overlooked in our day: A sinner cannot
enter the Kingdom of God. The Bible passages that declare this are too
many and too familiar to need repeating here, but the skeptical might
look at Galatians 5:19-21 and Revelation 21:8. How then can any man be
saved? The penitent sinner meets Christ, and after that saving encounter
he is a sinner no more. The power of the gospel changes him, shifts the
basis of his life from self to Christ, faces him about in a new
direction, and makes him a new creation. The moral state of the penitent
when he comes to Christ does not affect the result, for the work of
Christ sweeps away both his good and his evil, and turns him into
another man. The returning sinner is not saved by some judicial
transaction apart from a corresponding moral change. Salvation must
include a judicial change of status, but what is overlooked by most
teachers is that it also includes an actual change in the life of the
individual . And by this we mean more than a surface change; we mean a
transformation as deep as the roots of his human life. If it does not go
that deep, it does not go deep enough.
If we had not first suffered a serious decline in our expectations,
we should not have accepted this tame technical view of faith. The
churches (even the gospel churches) are worldly in spirit, morally
anemic, on the defensive, imitating instead of initiating, and in a
wretched state generally because for two full generations they have been
told that justification is no more than a not guilty verdict pronounced
by the heavenly Father upon a sinner who can present the magic in faith
with the wondrous “open sesame” engraved upon it. If it is not stated
as bluntly as that, at least the message is so presented as to create
such an impression. The whole business is the result of hearing the Word
preached without power and receiving it in the same way.
Now faith is indeed the open sesame to eternal blessedness. Without
faith it is impossible to please God; neither can any man be saved apart
from faith in the risen Savior. But the true quality of faith is almost
universally missed, namely, its moral quality. It is more than mere
confidence in the veracity of a statement made in Holy Writ. It is a
highly moral thing and of a spiritual essence. It invariably effects
radical transformation in the life of the one who exercises it. It
shifts the inward gaze from self to God. It introduces its possessor
into the life of heaven upon earth.
It is not my desire to minimize the justifying effect of faith. No
man who knows the depths of his own wickedness would dare to appear
before the ineffable Presence with nothing to recommend him but his own
character, nor would any Christian, wise after the discipline of
failures and imperfections, want his acceptance with God to depend upon
any degree of holiness to which he might have attained through the
operations of inward grace. All who know their own hearts and the
provisions of the gospel will join in the prayer of the man of God:
When He shall come with trumpet sound,
O may I then in Him be found;
Dressed in His righteousness alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne.
It is a distressing thing that a truth so beautiful should have been
so perverted. But perversion is the price we pay for failure to
emphasize the moral content of truth; it is the curse that follows
rational orthodoxy when it has quenched or rejected the Spirit of Truth.
In asserting that faith in the gospel effects a change of life motive
from self to God, I am but stating the sober facts. Every man with
moral intelligence must be aware of the curse that afflicts him
inwardly; he must be conscious of the thing we call ego, by the Bible
called flesh or self, but by whatever name called, a cruel master and a
deadly foe. Pharaoh never ruled Israel as tyrannically as this hidden
enemy rules the sons and daughters of men. The words of God to Moses
concerning Israel in bondage may well describe us all: “I have indeed
seen the misery of My people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out
because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their
suffering.” And when, as the Nicene Creed so tenderly states, our Lord
Jesus Christ, “for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made
man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered
and was buried, and the third day He arose again according to the
Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the
Father,” what was it all for? That He might pronounce us technically
free and leave us in our bondage? Never. Did not God say to Moses, “I
have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to
bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land
flowing with milk and honey”? For sin’s human captives God never intends
anything less than full deliverance. The Christian message rightly
understood means this: The God, who by the word of the gospel proclaims
men free, by the power of the gospel actually makes them free . To
accept less than this is to know the gospel in word only, without its
power.
They to whom the Word comes in power know this deliverance, this
inward migration of the soul from slavery to freedom, this release from
moral bondage. They know in experience a radical shift in position, a
real crossing over, and they stand consciously on another soil under
another sky and breath another air. Their life motives are changed and
their inward drives made new.
What are these old drives that once forced obedience at the end of a
lash? What but little taskmasters, servants of the great taskmaster Self
, who stand before him and do his will? To name them all would require a
book in itself, but we would point out one as a type of sample of the
rest. It is the desire for social approval. This is not bad in itself
and might be perfectly innocent if we were living in a sinless world,
but since the race of men has fallen off from God and joined itself to
His foes, to be a friend of the world is to be a collaborator with evil
and an enemy of God. Still the desire to please men is back of all
social acts from the highest civilizations to the lowest levels upon
which human life is found. No one can escape it. The outlaw who flouts
the rules of society and the philosopher who rises in thought above its
common ways may seem to have escaped from the snare, but they have in
reality merely narrowed the circle of those they desire to please. The
outlaw has his pals before whom he seeks to shine; the philosopher his
little coterie of superior thinkers whose approval is necessary to his
happiness. For both, the motive root remains uncut. Each draws his peace
from the thought that he enjoys the esteem of his fellows, though each
will interpret the whole business in his own way.
Every man looks to his fellowmen because he has no one else to whom
he can look. David could say, “Whom have I in heaven but You? And earth
has nothing I desire besides You,” but the sons of this world have not
God; they have only each other, and they walk holding to each other and
looking to one another for assurance like frightened children. But their
hope will fail them, for they are like a group of men, none of whom has
learned to fly a plane, who suddenly find themselves aloft without a
pilot, each looking to the other to bring them safely down. Their
desperate but mistaken trust cannot save them from the crash which must
certainly follow.
With this desire to please men so deeply implanted within us, how can
we uproot it and shift our life drive from pleasing men to pleasing
God? Well, no one can do it alone; nor can he do it with the help of
others, nor by education, nor by training, nor by any other method known
under the sun. What is required is a reversal of nature (that it is a
fallen nature does not make it any the less powerful), and this reversal
must be a supernatural act. That act the Spirit performs through the
power of the gospel when it is received in living faith. Then He
displaces the old with the new. Then He invades the life as sunlight
invades a landscape and drives out the old motives as light drives away
darkness from the sky.
The way it works in experience is something like this: The believing
man is overwhelmed suddenly by a powerful feeling that only God matters ;
soon this works itself out into his mental life and conditions all his
judgments and all his values. Now he finds himself free from slavery to
man’s opinions. A mighty desire to please only God lays hold of him.
Soon he learns to love above all else the assurance that he is well
pleasing to the Father in heaven.
It is this complete switch in their pleasure source that has made
believing men invincible. So could saints and martyrs stand alone,
deserted by every earthly friend, and die for Christ under the universal
displeasure of mankind. When, to intimidate him, Athanasius’ judges
warned him that the whole world was against him, he dared to reply,
“Then is Athanasius against the world!” That cry has come down the years
and today may remind us that the gospel has power to deliver men from
the tyranny of social approval and make them free to do the will of God.
I have singled out this one enemy for consideration, but it is only
one, and there are many others. They seem to stand by themselves and
have existence apart from each other, but it is only seeming. Actually
they are but branches of the same poison vine, growing from the same
evil root, and they die together when the root dies. That root is self ,
and the Cross is its only effective destroyer.
The message of the gospel, then, is the message of a new creation in
the midst of an old, the message of the invasion of our human nature by
the eternal life of God and the displacing of the old by the new. The
new life seizes upon the believing man’s nature and sets about its
benign conquest, a conquest that is not complete until the invading life
has taken full possession and a new creation has emerged. And this is
an act of God without human aid, for it is a moral miracle and a
spiritual resurrection.
A Word in Power by A W Tozer
A Word in Power
A Word in Power
