Tag Archives: A.W. Tozer

Savior and Lord

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“Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word…
Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.”
(John 14:23–24)

There has been a bit of a brew-ha-ha percolating on the web among many of the “popular” reformed theologians lately, and while I will spare you the “he said – he said” trivium, I will give you the nutshell version:

Essentially, all the excitement comes down to the very old argument on the relationship between faith and works.  The writer at the eye of the storm has written a study on 1 John 5:3 arguing that the reason the commandments of God are not burdensome is that those in Christ don’t have to do them. When you are in Christ, you are free of the commands.

There have been countless responses to this teaching, pointing out that it cannot stand, especially in light of the rest of 1 John 5:3-4, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.  And his commandments are not burdensome.  For everyone who has been born of God has overcome the world.  And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith.”

I doubt that many of you who are reading this would go so far as to say that faith negates works, that being in Christ cancels all obligations to the call to obedience and righteousness.  We know that we are saved by grace through faith, and not by works (Eph 2:8-9).  But we also know that we are saved by grace through faith so that we may be set free for the good works God has given us to do (Eph. 2:10).

Still, I wonder how many of us, though confessing the truth, live the lie?  We know we are saved by grace through faith and set free for faithful service, but are we slow to obedience?  We are quick to claim Jesus as our Savior, and will even call Him Lord, but how ready are we to bend our knee and bow our head before Him?  Is He Lord, Sovereign over your life, the final authority on how you live and what you believe?

Sadly, many own a divided Christ.

And this is nothing new.

In the 1930’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes.”  Let me unpack that a bit – Faith produces obedience.  When you know and trust the one giving the command, you will obey.  Peter wouldn’t have gotten out of the boat had Jesus not already been standing on the water calling him to His side.  Faith in Christ produces obedience.  At the same time, if there is no obedience, there is no faith.  Disobedience stems from disbelief; if you are having trouble trusting Jesus it is because there is some point in which you are also disobedient to Jesus.

In the 50’s, A.W. Tozer wrote of this in his book, The Root of the Righteous:

It is altogether doubtful whether any man can be saved who comes to Christ for His help but with no intention to obey Him.  Christ’s savior-hood is forever united to His lordship.  Look at the Scriptures: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9).  There the Lord is the object of faith for salvation.  And when the Philippian jailer asked the way to be saved, Paul replied, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31).  He did not tell him to believe on the Savior with the thought that he could later take up the matter of His lordship and settle it at his own convenience.  To Paul there could be not division of offices.  Christ must be Lord or He will not be savior.

Even more recently, R.C. Sproul, in his book, Essential Truth of the Christian Faith, wrote:

Antinomianism… asserts that once a person makes a decision for Christ or prays to receive Jesus as Savior, it is not necessary to embrace Him as Lord.  There are no requirements of law that bind the Christian.  There are a few Christian teachers, if any, who declare that one who embraces Christ as Savior shouldn’t also embrace Him as Lord.  Rather, they encourage the “carnal Christian” to become more spiritual and obedient.  But they shrink from declaring that embracing Christ as Lord is necessary for salvation.  Indeed, they insist that it is not necessary for attaining salvation.

Jesus Christ must be your Lord and Savior.  If you trust in Him for salvation, you will listen to His word.  If you believe in Him, you will obey His commandments.  If you love Him, you will obey Him.  This is not to say that our obedience is perfect.  Were that possible, the cross would have been unnecessary.  Each day we see anew our imperfection, our disobedience, our need for a perfect savior.  The beginning of obedience is the acknowledgment of our reality, the confession of the truth, that we are sinners in need of grace, rebels in need of restoration.  Those who do not obey, those who will not submit to Him, prove that they do not love Him, nor do they truly believe in Him.

If you will have Jesus as your savior, you must also have him as Lord.  He will not be divided, piecemeal, like so many offerings at a buffet.  We cannot take Jesus a la carte – picking and choosing what we think we like and need from Him and leaving the rest behind.  We are not given that choice.  He will be Savior and Lord to you, or He will be nothing to you at all.

Our Fruit Will Be What We Are

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“Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.”
(Matthew 7:20)

Being more than a bit behind this week, I thought I’d turn once again to one of my favorite authors for a “guest writer” today.  Here is an excerpt from A.W. Tozer’s The Root of the Righteous.

Our Fruit Will Be What We Are

Water cannot rise above its own level. Neither can a Christian by any sudden spasmodic effort rise above the level of his own spiritual life.

I have seen under the sun how a man of God will let his tongue go all day in light and frivolous conversation, let his interest roam abroad among the idle pleasures of this world, and then, under the necessity of preaching at night, seek a last minute reprieve just before service and by cramming desperately in prayer to try to put himself in a position where the spirit of the prophet will descend upon him as he enters the pulpit.  By working himself up to an emotional white heat he may afterward have reason to congratulate himself that he had much liberty in preaching the Word.  But he deceives himself and there is no wisdom in him.  What he has been all day and all week is what he is when he opens his Bible to expound unto the people.  Water cannot rise above its level.

Men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles.  The fruit of a tree is determined by the tree, and the fruit of life by the kind of life it is.  What a man is interested in to the point of absorption both decides and reveals what kind of man he is; and the kind of man he is by a secret law of the soul decides the kind of fruit he will bear.  The catch is that we are often unable to discover the true quality of our fruit until it is too late.

If we would be realistic in our Christian lives we must not overlook the tremendous power of affinity.  By affinity I mean the sympathetic attraction which certain things and persons have for us.  The human heart is extremely sensitive and altogether capable of setting up an inward relationship with objects far removed and forbidden.  As the needle of the compass has an affinity for the north magnetic pole, so the heart can keep true to its secret love though separated from it by miles and years.  What that loved object is may be discovered by observing which direction our thoughts turn when they are released from the hard restraints of work or study.  Of what do we think when we are free to think of what we will?  What object gives us inward pleasure as we brood over it?  Over what do we muse in our free moments?  Over what does our imagination return again and again?

When we have answered these questions honestly we will know what kind of persons we are; and when we have discovered what kind of persons we are we may deduce what kind of fruit we will bear.

It is one of the clichés of the evangelist that the true worth of a church member is revealed by his life on Monday rather than on Sunday.  There is a world of sober truth in that statement, and it is devoutly to be hoped that we who thus admonish others may ourselves remember to live the week through in the same atmosphere of sanctity that we desire so earnestly to inhabit on the Lord’s Day.

It is written of Moses that he “went in before the Lord to speak with him… and he came out, and spake unto the children of Israel.”  This is the Biblical norm from which we depart to our own undoing and to the everlasting injury of the souls of men.  No man has any moral right to go before the people who has not first been long before the Lord.  No man has any right to speak to men about God who has not first spoken to God about men.  And the prophet of God should spend more time in the secret place praying than he spends in the public place preaching.

As we dare not overlook the power of the human heart to establish affinities, so we dare not ignore the importance of the spiritual mood.  Mood is mental weather.  It is internal climate and it must be favorable to the growth of spiritual graces or they will not appear in the soul.  The Christian who allows day after day a chilly climate to prevail in his heart need expect no grapes of Eschol to hang over the wall when he goes before his Sunday school class, his choir, or his Sunday morning congregation.

One swallow does not make a spring nor one hot day a summer; nor will a few minutes of frantic praying before service bring out the tender buds or make the flowers to appear on the earth.  The field must be soaked in sunshine over a long period before it will give forth its treasures.  The Christian’s heart must be soaked in prayer before the true spiritual fruits begin to grow.  As the field has learned to live intimately and sympathetically with the rain and the sunshine, so must the Christian learn to live with God.  We cannot in a brief time make up for the long neglect of God and things spiritual.

God’s children live by laws as kind and as severe as those that govern nature.  Grace operates within those laws but never contrary to them.  Our fruit will follow its native tree, and not all our frightened prayers can prevent it.  If we would do holy deeds we must be holy men, every day and all the days that God grants us here below.

SDG