Tozer, A W: The Chief End Of Man-07 ~ Internality Of True Worship

In the fourth chapter of the book of John, John four, Gospel of John, that is, fourth chapter, then we break into the narrative at the nineteenth verse. The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. Jesus saith unto her, woman, believe me, the hour cometh, and ye shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. Ye worship, ye know not what. We worship what we, we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. The hour cometh, now is, when the true worshipper shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship him. Then the text will be, verse twenty four, God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. My message tonight will, of necessity, be shorter than the others, I think, as I plan it to be, but I want to talk about the internality of true worship. And of course, I have here for my text, God is spirit, not a spirit, but spirit. That is the substance of God is spirit. Therefore, they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Now, in that text, there is found a sample of the revolutionary quality of Christ's teaching. Just sixteen words are here, seventeen if you put the A in, it doesn't belong in. Just sixteen words are here, and yet into these sixteen English words are compressed truth. The most liberating, the most illuminating, and the most elevating. Religious people have always been a bound people. The religious people all over the world are bound. It is a very significant fact that the word religion means to bind back, and religious people have laid off one set of chains and taken another as a role, except where there's true worship, and that's what we're getting at tonight. But I'm talking about religious people generally, people who are worshippers, supposedly all over the world of every religion. And along comes our Lord and puts into sixteen words an emancipation proclamation and signs it in blood, so that the people of the world bearing the heavy yoke of religion might know that instead of religion being a yoke upon our neck, eh, religion is wings on our souls, if we only knew it. And then our Lord Jesus put here words that were illuminating. By that I mean that the light shines upon us so that there is light in our spirits, and this elevates and gets us up out of the mud. The people of God are never called to walk knee deep in the mire of the world, nor are they called to walk knee deep in the traditions of men. So our Lord sets us free here, and to change the figure, opens a fountain of healing water for the healing of the wounds of the world. They tell us in India that this is only one sample, but in India they believe that the Mother Ganga, that is the Ganges River, has power to cleanse people, and so there are certain ones, certain saints, they call them, holy men, who, uh, who make pilgrimages to bathe in Mother Ganga, the dirtiest, one of the dirtiest rivers in the world, incidentally, they say again, and, uh, they will fall down full length and then mark with their finger where their forehead was, and then put step forward and put their foot where the mark is, and then fall full length again, and thus literally fall across scores of miles to the river, to to Mother Ganga, the River Ganges, and bathe themselves there, and go away and be no cleaner than they were before. In fact, not as clean as they were before, maybe. They're certainly wounded and bruised bitterly in their souls. And our Lord here puts into one sentence the words of worship and says, you don't please God by abusing your body, nor by bathing in this or that river, but they that worship the Father worship him in spirit and in truth. So that this is healing water for the sores of religion. And our Lord tells us here that worship is natural to man. I, uh, mentioned that before, and I explained that, uh, I've been taken to task for saying that, but I don't mind it because it's true. That worship is natural to men and natural to man. It was perfectly natural for Adam to walk with God in the garden in the cool of the day, and the ears of Adam were blessed by the velvet, soft, healing voice of God. Then when Adam sinned, he hid from the presence of God among the trees of the garden. He was hiding, he was conscious of God, but he was not free to worship God now because sin had come in between and torn the strings off of the harp. Nothing was left but the outline. The music of his soul was muted now, and there was cacophony and discord where there had been harmony before. So we lost the proper object of his worship, and we're looking about now for people or something to worship. But man worships nevertheless, and he worships by the necessity of his being. He worships, that's by the necessity of his being, and he looks around for something to worship, and he recognizes mystery and wonder. Every time you wonder about something, every time you wonder, the other day I was down on my knees praying in my study, and I got to thinking about the speed of light, and I reached up and got a pencil and a pad, and I began to figure out how fast light travels in the course of a day and a year and so on. And I know that it travels one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a second. And then I know that if you multiply that by sixty, you get how fast it travels in a minute, and if you multiply that by sixty, you find out how far it travels in an hour, and if you multiply that by twenty four, you know how fast it travels in a day, and if you multiply that by three hundred and sixty five, you'll find out how far it travels in a year. By that time, I'd reached the edge of my card on both sides, just just multiplying, and and there's something wonderful about that. They try they count the galaxies out there in billions now, not thousands or millions, but billions, that is thousands of, uh, millions of millions, thousands of millions. They count, they count them in billions, and the galaxy, they say, is a central sun with satellites revolving around it, such as our sun, around which the nine planets revolve. Well, you, your mind is enlarged and lifted, and you're filled with wonder. And this, this very wonder leads you to worship. It beats you down and, and makes you, and opens mystery to you. And we must recognize mystery, and we do recognize mystery. Men used to stand on the seashore and, uh, hear the moanings of the sea and watch the gulls turn and see the white clouds float, and they would cry, oh, what is all this? What is all this? And they call that something out there Neptune, and they said, this is our God. And they got on their knees and made sacrifices to Neptune, where they saw the sun rising in the morning and making its journey across the sky and setting in a sea of blood and old rose at night. And they said, what is this shining thing that rises always to the same place and goes down and never fails? And they called it Phoebus Apollo. You named Phoebe, you got close to this, and there we have Apollo, a great beautiful god. They made him to be a god with silver wings on his feet that went so fast across the sky, and they worshipped because they said, this is wonderful. They didn't know what it was, but it was wonderful, and the Parsis got on their knees before the sun, and they called it Mazda, and the light that shines down here tonight is Mazda light, named after the god of the Zoroastrians, the Parsi fire worshippers. Well, now why am I telling you this? To show you that if we don't know how to worship through Jesus Christ, our Lord, the human heart will break out somehow like a flood that goes over its banks, and it will worship. And if it doesn't get going the right direction, it will go the wrong direction, but it will worship. The human soul will worship. Then they also said, well, look at love. Look at this powerful, tremendous thing for which men and women die and think nothing of it. Look at this which binds a man and woman together, which binds family together, which binds men to the love of their country until they will give themselves freely. What is this? And they called it Venus. We've named one of the planets after that goddess, incidentally. Well, you can go on. There's Ceres, the goddess of life, and there's many other, but there are many others, but beauty and art, you know. Well, I wonder what it is that makes a man want to do something beautiful. Why does he want to to write a, why does he want to write a poem? Why does he want to paint a picture? Why does he want to compose a piece of music? Why does he want to do this? I believe that fallen man has got in him somewhere in the deep of his soul, he has in him that, that cry after mystery, that longing after wonder, that, that upleaping something. Deep calls unto deep at the noise of God's waterspouts, and the deep voice of God calls in the little deep of man answers back. And so deep is answering deep, and every time a Greek got on his knees at the seashore and offered his sacrifice to Neptune, it was the little blind deep within him answering back to the deep of God. And every time an American Indian stood on the shore of the river and put reverently the bones of the fish back into the sea and apologized to God for killing it and eating it. Every time he looked up and said, Ditchy Manitou, praises be, he was giving up to mystery within him. And every time that great death genius Beethoven turned out a page of immortal music, he was feeling something within him, even that man who wasn't, I think, a Christian, at least he never said he was, and you don't want to make Christians out of people who never bothered to say they are. But he said, I know God, he's nearer to me than he is to other artists. I know this God, and then he wrote his imperishable music. What was he doing? He was flinging out wildly, wanting to worship something. He said, wonder, mystery, wonder, he said, ask Gady, he understands it, he understands it. This great man who hovered back and forth between suicide and life until he gave up and went the way of all flesh. He was only a sample. I mention him only because I happen to admire him and his music very much. But this is it. Man has got it in him to do this. He's got to admire, he's got to fear. And so there are many religions. Again, going to India, they tell us that there is a god for everybody in India. And didn't our sister Muriel Clemenger say this morning of four hundred and fifty million in India? Maybe I'm mistaken there, but I think that's it. Well, then you've got that many gods. You've got a god for everybody. We got to worship. Man's got to admire, he's got to fear, he's got to adore. And if he's lost his ability to adore in his spirit and soar in his heart, he will soar in a rocket. He'll get out there somehow. And I believe that the impulse back of the longing to explore other worlds and ride out into the vast spaces is an evidence of something within us. No other creature does it, and no other creature wants to do it, and no other creature thinks of doing it. Only man, said the poet Ovid, only man looks up. All the other beasts look down. And man alone wants to worship. Now, you will notice what this woman in the text said. And you will notice how she revealed what is wrong with the whole religious world. She said, sir, and that was incidentally, I won't press that because I haven't time tonight, but that was to get herself off the hook, you know. He told her, she said, he said, go call your husband. And she fell into the trap and said, I don't have any. She said, he said, you can say that again. You've had five, and the one you have is not your husband. Well, that was getting embarrassing, so she turned the subject. She said, sir, I understand from what you say that you're a prophet, she said. You know more than the average man would know. You must be a prophet. So she said, I've got a question for you, and this question was not simply a, a frivolous one. It was one that separated Jew from Samaritan, even though they were related by blood. The question was, here in Samaria, in our holy mountain, we worship. Across there, a little way in Jerusalem, the holy mountain of the Jew, they worship. And we say this is the place to worship, and you say Jerusalem is the place to worship. Now you're a prophet, tell me. I might have an answer. The people can't agree, and there's always argument between Jew and Samaritan. Where is the right places, place to worship? So this woman fell into her own little trap, and, uh, she revealed the chief ro- chief law of the religious world. Do I worship here, or do I worship here? Do I worship in this church, or do I worship in this church? Do I go here, or do I go there? That way, that's the difficulty and the problem. And the whole problem then was externality of worship. That's the whole problem, externalism, and that's our problem now. That's the biggest problem the church faces now, is the problem of externalism. You know, we ran an article in the little magazine that I edit. Are we building too much? Somebody got tired seeing these, uh, these fabulously luxurious country, religious country clubs we call churches going up out all over the suburbs, and, uh, they, uh, they wrote about it. She said, I'd like to vote against it and think we ought to give more to missions. Well, you know, my ears are still burning and my whiskers are still singing from that thing. They wrote in from everywhere, committees and groups writing and people from everywhere. What's the matter? What happened to you that I dare say a thing like that? Shall we worship here, shall we worship there? I didn't write the article, but of course I'm responsible for it because it went in the magazine, and I take full responsibility for everything but typographical errors, and we explain them. Well, uh, this is it. Shall we worship here, shall we worship there? Now, Jesus our Lord said this beautiful thing. He said, sister, the time is fast approaching. In fact, it's already here when worship won't be tied down to any location. For the Father seeking touch to worship him in spirit. For God is spirit, and therefore you've got to be spiritual worshippers. If God were a local deity confined to a hill, you'd have to go to that hill to worship him. If God were a river deity confined to the river, you'd go down to the bank of the river and worship him. If God were a mountain deity, or if God were a plains deity, you'd have to go where he was. But Jesus gave us the marvelous, liberating news that God is spirit, and therefore God's everywhere, and we don't worship in places anymore. That is, not necessarily in places. You can worship, I'm worshiping God here, have worshipped, I think, in some measure, God here today in this church in Toronto, Canada. Tomorrow night at this time, at about this same hour, everything goes well, I'll be preaching in, uh, Greensboro, North Carolina, down among the Tar Heels, and I will be worshiping God. Now, if I believed that God was confined to this so-called sanctuary, I'd be in a fix. I'd have to stand outside and apologize to God for leaving the sanctuary, and I would have to say, now, God, you know, I've got business down in North Carolina, but if you'll excuse me, I'll be back, uh, late Friday, and, uh, I'll be out for the sanctuary next Sunday, and I'll worship you some more. But the beautiful thing that Jesus taught us is that we are portable sanctuaries, and if we're worshiping in spirit and in truth, we can take our sanctuary around with us. Some of those very old shingles are getting off of the roof all right, and the nave, and I forget all the parts of the sanctuaries, you know, I remember them all, but they all name them, and they got to be there to worship. Jesus said, don't you see that if God is spirit, worship is spiritual, and anything spiritual has no location in space, and it has no location in time. Therefore, you don't get up in the morning and look at your calendar and say, is this the time to worship? And you don't go out and look around and say, is this the place to worship? You worship God now, anywhere, any place, any time, because worship is spiritual. Now, uh, people have, have, have made a comedy of religion, a comedy of errors it has been too, because we have, men have enslaved themselves to externals. They've enslaved themselves to objects. I remember a dear fellow who's been on the board that called me to Chicago thirty one, two, three years ago. He's in heaven now, but he got into the hospital down there some years ago in Chicago, and uh, used to be, used to be Old Auburn Park, but the Catholics bought it and they called it St. George, and uh, they put a big stone statue outside the window, and I could see it from my friend Derry's bed, and I went to see Derry, and I went in, morning, brother Derry, how are you feeling? Well, better, thanks. And we had a little chat, and he smiled and said, uh, see old George out there? And I said, yes, I see him. Well, he said, you know, the nice little sister was in to see me, and I was suffering a little bit and grunting a little, groaning, and she said, when you're in pain, she said, look out the window, you'll get comfort from George. Ah, you'll get comfort from a, from a piece of stone. Very well, Jacob, you know, took a stone and put it for his pillows, and I've always wondered about why Jacob did that. If there's anything in the wide world I wouldn't want for a pillow, it'd be a rock. But Jacob put it up for his pillows, and there was Saint George made out of a rock outside that window. Got George all around there. Now that's worshiping, you see, and it's locating it in an object. Then on the wall, of course, on the wall there would be a crucifix. So objects are holy, and these dear friends, and God bless them, if there's one of you here tonight, don't get mad at me. I- I'm not, I don't mean to hurt anybody. It's- it's not the individual. I pity the individual, but it's a big mistake that is being made. You take a fellow whose hands have held beer mugs and whiskey glasses and cards and dice and written crooked letters and all the rest, all his lifetime. When he dies, he put a crucifix in his hand and fold it on his breast. If he's got a religious object, you have a, a some kind of a wild hope that it'll be all right with him in the world to come. I'm perfectly happy, by the grace of God, to die without a crucifix in my hand because I've got the cross in my heart. Perfectly willing that I should die without seeing a statue of Saint George or any other saint because I have it inside. They that worship him, worship him in spirit and in truth, you see. So there's no objects, there's no religious objects. There may be objects that have certain, uh, tender memories for you. Somebody may have given you something. I have mentioned before that I have a whole manila envelope full of little things that our daughter Becky, uh, gave me over the years. They got, they get, as I trace them down, they get worse and worse and worse and worse down till she's just able to write to me. Well, those are precious things, and I, I objects like that, but they, but don't, don't imagine they're religious because they have no religious significance whatsoever. And then in object, then we have locations that I've mentioned before, and then some make their religion to consist in foods. Some things they don't eat and some things they do eat, and the result is that if they do eat it, they're holy, and if they don't eat it, they're not holy, and vice versa. But, uh, Paul said that what you ate didn't make you better, and it didn't make you any worse. It might make you sick, but it won't make you holy, and it won't hurt you nor help you. If it, if it's decent and good, and you can digest it, help yourself, because religion doesn't lie in your food. God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. And then there are times. Worship is not in times. I, uh, respect, I respect our brethren of the church calendar year that begin with, uh, one thing and end with another, but, uh, I don't follow it at all. Can you imagine that six weeks out of the year I repent, then after that the lid's off? No, it couldn't be. I couldn't imagine myself tied down to times. Any time, behold, now is the accepted time. This is the time. So any time is all right. You can say good morning, God, any time. You can say good night to God at night. You can wake in the night and think of God, and you can even dream of God. I have. And you can have God any time, any place. So there are no seasons or days. Oh, there are times of the year when I suppose we think a little more. I personally like Easter. Easter's my time. If I were to going to have a time of year, it'd be Easter, because that's when the birds are returning from Florida, and uh, the uh, people of God are looking up, and we're hearing Christ the Lord is risen today. Hallelujah, hallelujah. I like Easter, and I think it's a beautiful thing to, to have that, celebrate that. But, uh, I have a tough time preaching Easter sermons because all of my sermons are based upon his resurrection. And if you take away the resurrection of Jesus Christ, my, my sermons collapse all about me. There's nothing that I can say to anybody, only be good and you'll be happy. I wouldn't know what else to say because it's all based upon his cross and his open grave and his session to the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Yet it's nice at Easter time because you can, women get nice colorful clothes and it isn't so cold. But apart from that, I don't see that there's anything particularly holy about that time of year because he came into the world and he made every place holy. If you're a holy man, you can sit in a, in a restaurant where they're drinking around you. If you don't in the States, you don't eat, brother, that's about it. And so it's your question, some people need to go in where they serve liquor. Well, I settled that with my heart long ago. I don't drink it, and I don't choose to go into those places, but I'm not going to starve just because some fellow's guzzling booze in there. I don't have to guzzle it, and it isn't catching, you know, it isn't catching. So I go in and order something good to eat, and eat it and go out. And even in drug stores in this some of the parts of the United States, you where they sell liquor in drug stores. Go in there and stock up. They get only if you want it in the drug out of a drug store. There's no place to eat on trains, and I long ago gave that up. If you're going to eat on a train, you might just as well sit down and let them serve you what you want, and that's how the others drink. So I don't think that there's any anything holy about places. Every place is holy if a holy man is there, and no place is holy if there isn't a holy man there. The Jews made the mistake of thinking the temple was holy, and because the temple was holy, nothing could happen to the temple. And Jesus said, there you are. See this, you see this temple, see these stones, every bit of it will lie in the dust before very long, and it did. Titus shook it down to the ground in the year seventy AD. He said, these, this Israel is like a tree. Your religion's like a tree. And he said, see that axe? It'll produce fruit or it'll go down and be cast into the fire. So the Lord was perfectly free to turn from anything. That's why I warn the Christian Missionary Alliance. I... I think I've preached at every council but one for twenty-some some years. And I have tried to tell our brethren, don't lean on Abe Simpson. Don't get the pious look on your face and talk about our beloved Fonder. He's dead. What do you got? That's all that matters. God took him home after done his work gloriously, fell asleep and lying on my hillside above my neck, and I can't wrap myself in his mantle. He's gone, sweet man of God, born out here in the Maritimes, but he was a holy man because of Holy Ghostly being, and for no other reason. Not because he was Scotch, not because he was Canadian, not because he went to the United States and established the Alliance, but because God lived in him, and he knew that. The young fellow wants to make an impression on the Alliance. He talks solemnly about this great worldwide organization and our beloved founder. I never let any of that get into the Alliance witness. We got something bigger than that. We've got God, we've got the Holy Ghost. We've got a living Lord Jesus, the right hand of the Father. We've got the world for our parish. We've got every man for our brother who knows Jesus Christ the Lord. And while I've been, since I was twenty one years old, a loyal member of this organization, and nobody's ever dared challenge that I am a loyal member of this organization. I know the difference between organization and free worship. It takes in every man. We have some Anglicans come into the church here and sit sometimes, shake my hand and tell me how they enjoy my messages. Thank God for my brethren of the Anglican Church. I went to hear them, they call them Episcopalians down in the States, same people, and I went to hear them in Indianapolis. Um, Rector Brown of Baltimore gave a series of talks on what is Christianity all about. When I was a young fellow, I tell you I got help from that man, such help as I hadn't found scarcely anywhere else at all, and I remember his great messages down to this hour. And so with my all of my Presbyterian and Baptists and associated gospel and all the rest. We are a fellowship of people in whom the Spirit dwells, and if the Spirit dwells in us, we break over all the bounds, all the bounds. Last Wednesday noon, I spoke at Ryerson Institute of Technology. I didn't want to go, and then after I got there, I didn't want to leave, and I want to go back. We had a great time there. Then at night, my wife and I went down, Wednesday night, went down. That's where we were. We weren't at prayer meeting. We went down to, uh, the, the Harbor Light, and I preached to a whole lot of alcoholics. One MD sitting down in front of me, medical doctor, who had drunk himself under the table and went down to Salvation Army and getting bailed out. You'll excuse this change of figure. But, uh, I, I like that sort of thing. Pretty soon I'm going to speak at... Hold your breath now, brother, hold your breath. You know what? I'm going to preach at a United Church in the city of Toronto, and they have asked me to speak on the cross of Jesus. And they said, come and preach the cross. And I said, the only thing I know is the old-fashioned gospel. And they said, come and preach it. I'm going to preach it. I'm going to preach. I got my text, and I got my sermon. And, uh, the text, the text is, God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Jesus Christ the Lord. And I'm going to preach on why I glory in the cross. They've asked for it, and they're going to get it, and I think they will enjoy it. And then very shortly, I'm going to speak in a Baptist church up here in Willowdale. So I get around, and I don't know one from the other. Get a man on these knees, and you have to listen awfully closely to know whether what school of religious thought he belongs to. I'm talking about worship now and saying that worship is a spiritual thing. It's internal, and the externals, while they're necessary. Now, for instance, we couldn't sit here on the corner tonight and w- and s- and preach and sing and pray without walls to protect us and some heat. You have to have buildings, so I'm for buildings. You have to have books, and I'm for books. God has blessed external things, but the trouble is we make them our slaves instead of our servants. This building should be your servant, not your slave. That piano, that organ should be servants of the Most High God. We should not be slaves to them. So with times and truths and everything else, they are our servants. I'm a prince of the house of God, brother to Jesus Christ the Lord, and so is every true Christian. Therefore, we rise above all the little things of religion and look down from our place, blessed at all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ. We look down and not up at things, but down on them. Wonderful how little things look when you're up high enough. You always know you're losing altitude when things begin to get big. When fields get the size of Canadian postage stamp, you're up there. When you begin to get a little bigger, you say to yourself, we're losing altitude, and you look at your watch and say, sure, we're going to land. And the further down you get into the world, bigger things look, and the higher up you get, the smaller. I recommend to you tonight, dear friends, that big problem that's facing you, rise above it. Take off and get up there and rise above it. Tomorrow I'm going to, among other experiences, going to ride a egg beater, one of these, uh, uh, helicopters. I've never been in one, and I'm not sure how I feel when they turn you over on your side or tip you up on in and take you along. I hope they go high enough and come down when they're short. But I like to fly now because I like to see things get small. And I like to rise in God, where the little things of life aren't little, aren't big after all, but as small as they are. God is spirit. Now, I think I've got to close. It's eight twenty nine and that's time to close. And I'll do what they tell you in Bible schools never to do, break off the sermon and finish it next week. But I have much more to say about this. I want to talk further about the internality of worship and what spirituality means. I've told you tonight what it isn't. Tonight I want, next Sunday night, I want to tell you what it is. So you do what I thought you would do tonight. Now we've had a baptismal service. Seven people have followed the Lord in baptism. There's a parsonage, there's two studies here, offices. You can, you can meet and talk with us, you can come to see us, and sometimes people do, and I have talks with them, or Gray has more than I do. And, uh, so I'll not press an invitation tonight, but I'll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to stand and sing, and sing well, lustily, and then reverently in the chorus. Holy, holy, holy. What's the number? Three forty seven. Three forty seven. Day is dying in the west, heaven is touching earth with rest. Worship, bow the night, set your evening lamps alight to all the sky. Let's worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. If your sins are gone, Christ lives inside of you, you can sing that song with awful, wonderful meaning tonight. Let's stand and sing it.