by A. W. Tozer
NOW IN THIS 52nd chapter of Isaiah, Isaiah fifty-second chapter:
“Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city: for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean. Shake thyself from the dust; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem: loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion. For thus saith the Lord, Ye have sold yourselves for naught; and ye shall be redeemed without money.” [Isaiah 52:1-3]This is a very familiar passage and I don't want to talk long about it but only to point out that this was written about Israel and it describes a natural and national, literal revival yet to come.
And yet, though it refers to Israel – Zion – it's spiritual content is for all of those who name the name of Israel's God in truth. I say this because sometimes men want to slough over what's written in the Old Testament as not applying to us but Isaiah's words were fully applied to New Testament believers without hesitation, by John the Baptist, Christ Himself, Paul and the other New Testament apostles and writers of epistles.
They quoted Isaiah without hesitation and applied it directly, without excusing themselves or apologizing – they applied it to the New Testament church. If they did it, we can do it. And not only can we do it, but we should.
The Old Testament was for the Jews but the spirit of the Old Testament is the same Spirit that wrote the New and intrinsically the same laws apply, the same principles underly and while the dispensations change, the God of dispensations has not changed.
Now he cries “Awake, awake” and this call “awake, awake” if you take an actor to repeat those words and did them with the mighty emphasis that God must have done them when He cried “awake, awake” to Israel. Now, this is addressed to sleeping people and I wonder what it is to sleep. Let's look at it for just a little bit.
You know that to sleep is to be unconscious or semi-conscious. It is to have a dimming of feeling and thought and awareness is either absent or very faint.
When I ride on a train I sleep all night – in fact I sleep better on a train than I do when I'm not on a train – that is, I stay asleep longer. The lulling of the thing must take me back to my boyhood or childhood because I'm sort of nursed and rocked to sleep with the rhythmic beat of the wheels and the swaying of the train.
And yet I'm never quite sleep and the next day I'm rather groggy even though I slept all night – that's an odd situation – because while I am asleep, I'm only semi-asleep, partly asleep. And there's an awareness that isn't quite there and yet it's there; it's very faint. The light never quite goes off, it just dims till you can't read by it, so to speak.
Then during sleep one may be in the gravest danger and not know it. A man may be in great danger – Dr Hamlyn told us last night about a man out in the Keswick Colony of which I have so often spoken here, in New Jersey – a colony dedicated to the cure of alcoholics, by the only method that Dr Hamlyn says he knows, and that is by conversion and the new birth.
Some years ago, old Mr Raws, the father of the present director out at the colony, felt he should take a walk one rainy night out to the little spur railroad that runs out there. He did and found a man asleep across the rails, drunk. He picked him up, dragged him out of there before the coming freight had ground him to bits, got him converted, and he became one of the songwriters and has lived a long and useful Christian life.
Now that man was asleep and in grave danger and didn't know it! He could have been killed there if somebody hadn't found him by a kind of Divine Providence and so it is with people who may be in immoral sleep. They may be in danger and not know it. And the danger of a man may be approaching and yet we give it no concern at all.
I've been in hospitals and in homes where they would take me in and talk in a low voice and point to a sleeping man – or woman, more often a man in my experiences – and he was in a deep sleep and he never came out of that sleep. Death was creeping on and he was completely unaware of it. Now that's the danger of sleep.
And that's why God says “Awake, awake!” and that's why the New Testament say “Awake, thou that sleepest ... and Christ shall give thee light.”[Ephesians 5:14]
Now, there's two kinds of sleep which I want to mention. There's what we call moral sleep. It is to live and to have habits and to commit acts which are deeply rooted and hateful to God and yet not know it; acts that are dangerous to the soul and yet not be aware of it. To live a life and have habits that are self-destructive and harmful to self and others and yet not be aware of it. To live a life which must certainly and surely lead, directly to that place about which we do not like to speak – hell itself – and yet not be aware of it.
Not alive, not worried, not concerned. We used to talk about – we use to have a word they applied to a situation where God moved in and people that were not concerned suddenly became concerned: they call it an awakening.
And if you will notice the literature of revival you will find that the New England revivals were rarely called revivals, it was called the Great Awakening. People who had been asleep, morally asleep, careless men and women, young people were suddenly awakened morally. And that's what they called it, a Great Awakening! I wonder if that ought not be the word we use in the day in which we live. That people might suddenly become awakened, who were sleeping.
You say, Can we sleep and yet work? Yes, we can be morally asleep and yet be intellectually awake. We can be morally asleep and yet be planning, running businesses, writing, painting, working, traveling, flying airplanes, playing baseball, doing anything that men normally might engage in – and properly might engage in; not that what they're doing is wrong, working – work is not wrong, but their lives are wrong.
So it's possible, entirely possible to be intellectually, physically awake and yet be morally asleep. And I believe that that's one thing that's wrong with us now, today: we sleep on in dangerous sin. Nobody likes to be awakened, nobody likes to be awake.
Do you like to be the one that goes in and drags the youngster out for school? Do you? I never did. We had a flock of them to awaken but I never liked it because they never welcomed me. He that bringeth evil tidings is like a cold rain on a summer day – doesn't it say that in Proverbs or words to that effect? [Proverbs 27:14] And to go in to some young fellow or girl who is deep in sleep and utterly relaxed and comfortable and say, It's time to get up! – they never like it! Nobody wants to be awakened. Yet, they may be in danger.
Lying, cheating, and gossiping, and secret-sinning, the miser and the grouch and the unbeliever all of these may be deeply in sleep and are deep in sleep if this describes them and the day of awakening not very far away – that is the day of judgment not very far away – yet they sleep on until the day of judgment!
I used to hear the evangelist say – in the days when evangelists set out to awake you, not to comfort you – they used to say, you're asleep and you'll be awakened by the trump of the archangel!
I'm afraid that's too true of a lot of people. Busy and happy apparently and at peace and unconcerned with their social enjoyments around them, their growing family, their comfortable homes: all proper and desirable and right and good things to have – but morally asleep and not know how bad off they are!
A few are semi-conscious, that is, a few sinners are semi-conscious; slightly troubled but drowsy. And a few others are deeply troubled but rather numb like someone who is awake, but not quite awake.
People are different, I guess. You will excuse my referring to myself again. I had a little season in the Army, when I was a young fellow, not very long, I wasn't in it as long as General Harrison. Didn't rise as high, but I think that I went as high as I could have gone – Private. But ever since I used to jump out of bed at first call. Three notes and I was out on the third one. I've never had any trouble waking up since and to this hour when I awake, I'm fully awake. I'm either asleep or fully awake with never any twilight zone in between.
But I have been with people that were completely woozy for five minutes or ten minutes afterwards; they couldn't talk and you couldn't get through to them, they couldn't communicate, they were just blissfully drowsy. And half asleep and still awake, sitting on the edge of the bed but still awake or still asleep – you didn't know which they were!
And I have met people that are like that, they are deeply troubled, but they are numb. They're not awakened enough to do anything about it; some people when they're converted are converted the way I wake up after a night's sleep with an absolute sudden awake-ness that has no drowsiness in it.
But most people are not converted quite like that. They wake up a little slower, a little more slowly and it takes a little more time but it ought to be a complete awakening that would rouse the sinner, that would rouse the wrong-doer from his wrong-doings, arouse him to the danger of it!
You can imagine that man lying across the railroad tracks and hearing the long moan of then steam train coming down that track – I said a spur, it wasn't really a spur because it had passenger trains on it in those days; I've seen the track myself. It goes from one town to another but it wasn't too important a branch of the railroad – but if you could imagine his suddenly rousing himself and sitting up and seeing the headlight through the rain aiming in his direction getting out of there fast – well now that's the way we should react to the call of God!
That's the way every young person should react to the call of God. Some of you have been reared in Christian homes where Christianity and the Bible and the Gospel and the New Testament and the Sunday School and the presence of Christian people has become a routine thing and you're not affected by it at all. Prayer doesn't even affect you! I warn you, that's not a proof you're alright, that's a proof you're morally asleep and you need to be awake!
Then there's another kind of sleep and I don't know but what this might have been nearer to what the prophet had in mind and I think it was certainly nearer to what the New Testament had in mind when it said “wake thou that sleepest and rise from the dead” and that is a spiritual sleep.
I would suppose that the moral man who was morally asleep was also spiritually asleep but it's possible for one to be morally awake and then slip back by degrees into a kind of a spiritual somnolence that is coldness and lack of feeling about God and the things of God about Christians and about the dying and the Scriptures and about prayer.
You get used to things and you get sophisticated; spiritual sophistication, lacks freshness and warmth. God is far away and there's little communion and little joy in the Lord, now this is a spiritual sleeping; to have a cold heart with little pity little fire and little love and little worship this is a spiritual sleepiness.
The old man of God1 wrote like this, he said:
Ye sons of Adam, vain and young,
Indulge your eyes, indulge your tongue,
Taste the delights your souls desire
And give a loose to all your fire
Pursue the pleasures you design
And cheer your hearts with songs and wine
Enjoy the day of mirth, but know
There is a day of judgment, too!I believe that we Christians ought to very careful that we are awake and that we stay awake, that we're alert – that we're alerted to what's going on in the world. Most Christians aren't, I'm afraid, alert to what's going on around them. They know it historically, they know it in what we call current events but they don't know what the current events mean.
If you're far enough in the hills somewhere where your only news you get by pack mule, why you may not know what's going on at all in the world, that is, not what events are going on. But it's possible to have a radio in every room and listen to every news broadcast and subscribe to three papers and Time magazine and Newsweek and still not know what's going on! You know what I mean? It's perfectly possible to know what's going on but not know the meaning of what's going on.
I've noticed and I've had occasion to notice – we use it ourselves in a limited degree – but I've noticed how in the day now religious journalism has gone to religious news items. Whole page after page given over to religious news items. What this person did, what that person did, and who was elected to this, who had a meeting over there, and who is the president of this college, and the arguments such-and-such had about baptism: news, everywhere, news.
But it's possible to be crammed with religious news and filled with religious shop-talk and yet not have the spiritual discernment to know what it means! If there's anything I've asked God for, it's that. It makes you just about as popular as a hawk in a hen-roost ... or a skunk at a picnic! You're not popular at all, you'll never be – nobody wants to be awakened!
When everybody is dancing around Diana of the Ephesians, “Great is Diana!” – nobody wants an apostle to come around and say, “That old girl's dead! She's nobody!” They want to kill him right away! They say, why he's taking away our source of income.
Well, somebody will say, “Mr Tozer I'm for you, in a general way, but I think you need correcting here on one thing: if somebody is asleep, how can you arouse anybody? The Bible says they're more than asleep, the Bible says the sinner's dead. How can you arouse dead men?”
And they want to tell us that it takes a convenient miracle of God's grace to awake a man sovereignly without his consent and after he has been sovereignly converted without his consent then he believes and then he's awake and then you can preach to him!
Well, I never believed that down to this hour and I'm believing it less and less. And the very brethren who preach it, don't practice it because they'll preach a sermon like that and then turn around and give an altar call! You know that makes a lot of sense; if a man's dead and you can't wake him and he can't hear and he supposedly so depraved he can't hear the voice of a preacher why give an altar call? Might just as well go home!
But I know some brethren who do those two self-contradictory things. It's an instant for a man that is better than theology: got more sense than his teachers!
Now, I want to answer this; can a sleeping man be awakened? Can a person dead in sin be awakened? Well, the answer is, the technique and the psychology of it ought not to bother you – can you awake your seventeen-year-old son to go to high school? Can you? He's in deep sleep! And brother, at that age they can go deep; they're nearly dead! With sheer downright delight and sleepiness. Not a muscle tense anywhere. Deep sleep: how do you get him awake? Are you going to stand at his bedside and say to your husband, “George, according to my theology, this fellow is asleep and can't hear, therefore there's no use to try to wake him.”
You don't practice what you preach; you live at it. I used to pull one of my boys by the feet! That's the only way I could get him up! Grab him by the feet and start to pull. And he'd wake up and start to laugh and struggle with me and by the time he's was out on the floor we were in a good nature and he was awake. But that was the only way.
There is a way to get a boy awake to send him to school. And if you can wake a sleeping boy, then why should we refuse to say we can wake a sleeping sinner? And if we couldn't rouse a sleeping soul then no one could be saved because everybody's dead in sin until he's come to the Lord and is born anew.
Then no church could ever have an awakening nor a revival and the prophet himself would be a fool for trying to awaken anybody. Now, let's not press an illustration too far.
The old man who said those terrible words,
Pursue the pleasures you design
And cheer your hearts with songs and wine;
Enjoy the day of mirth, but know
There is a day of judgment, too!went on to say this prayer
Almighty God! turn off their eyes
From these alluring vanities;
And let the thunder of Thy Word
Awake their souls to fear the Lord!He knows it's possible. It says “Shake Thyself from the dust and put on the beautiful garments” and in the Bible garments, of course, are righteousness and true holiness – that's the Bible; basic goodness, moral soundness.
Basic goodness. I was taught for a long time that There is none righteousness, no, not one and therefore to say someone is a “good man” is to insult God. But the Bible says, He was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost – the Bible says that. He was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost. [Acts 11:24]
And I want to repeat – and I suppose I've said it every second Sunday for twenty-eight years – that a Christian ought to be, above all other things, basically a good man. And if he's not basically a good man I can't see how he can be a Christian! Now, he's not good by nature. By nature, he is, as the song says, an alien by birth and a sinner by choice and everybody who's been truly converted knows that. But when God converts a man he not only writes his name in the Lamb's book of life and justifies him from his past sins but he makes him basically to become a good man. He ought to be a good man!
I talked to a preacher the other day – or did he write me? One of the two. Anyhow, I was communicating with a man of God. He said, Brother Tozer, I have been reading Finney. And he said, I'm simply bowled over – I am simply astonished to learn that Charles G. Finney expected as much of a converted man as we now expect of a man after he's been filled with the Holy Ghost! He said Finney would not grant a man to even be converted unless he showed a purity of life that we now call sanctification. He said, he started where we end! That was Finney; was that why 75% of his converts stood, is that why? Because he insisted that basically a man ought to put on his beautiful garments if he's going to serve the Lord Jesus. Not use the Lord Jesus simply as a means of getting something.
Any of you ever read Sydney Harris in the Daily News? Now Sydney Harris is a columnist, a writer, a newspaperman, through and through. And I don't think he's converted man — I don't want to say he isn't but he never said he was and some things that he's said seem to indicate to me that he wouldn't be. He's a theatrical critic as well as a general philosopher. Well, last Thursday or Friday he had a little paragraph. He said, the modern religious revival leaves me cold for this reason. Men are trying to use God in place of offering themselves to God to be used by Him!
Then he added these significant words – and if I said it, they'd write me dirty letters and tell me I was a mean old ogre and old age was setting in!
But this newspaper man added these words: No man has a right to ask God for peace of mind unless it's founded on righteousness! The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of the day. Every once in awhile up in some liberal university somewhere, or out in some place where you wouldn't expect any light at all to come somebody will make a pronouncement that's like a flash of lightning in the darkness telling us that if we don't look out we'll be using God to get peace of mind, using God to get business, using God to get rich, using God – and never serving God at all!
If God never answered another prayer for me as long as I live I still want God to believe that I want to serve Him until I die. If He never did another thing for me, yet from this morning on, He withdrew His hand and let me go to pieces, physically, mentally, nervously, financially, and every other way I'd still want Him to know I want to serve Him just because He's God.
But this modern emphasis that God is a convenience and Jesus Christ so kindly died for us in order that we might have peace of mind is a travesty on the gospel! And the sinners know it, and the liberals know it – only we poor, sleepy evangelicals fail to see it!
Basic goodness, I say, and moral soundness, and purity of life, honesty that won't cheat tax collectors or anybody else, truthfulness that won't lie about not even one person more than is present, mercy, and humbleness, and forgiving love. And what a sight that is, to put on the beautiful garments, beautiful garments – and there are some. Thank God, there are some. There are some here and there throughout the world that wear the beautiful garments of righteousness and true holiness and they walk with their God. They're not very popular, maybe. They're not heard of much but they walk with their God quietly.
And as Gray said in Gray's Elegy2 something to the effect that many a mute Milton had walked here among these hedgerows and through the shocks of corn filled with everything Milton knew but unable to express it.
So I believe there are mute inglorious Pauls and Davids walking the earth today, here and there, simple plain godly people that believe in the power of the blood of Jesus not only to save us from hell but to cleanse us now on earth!
They're not heard of maybe, they're “mute inglorious Miltons” but they're among us. And they're the seeds, yet, of survival. Now put on thy strength, it says, and in the Bible, of course, that means the power of Holy Ghost.
And I pray that all of us that are awake now will do our duty and our privilege and our right under grace to be filled with the Holy Ghost so that we might rise and shine and let our light shine forth to the world. Well, God bless us; it's time we wake up and I pray with the prophet – or was it the hymn-writer1:
Almighty God! turn off their eyes
From these alluring vanities;
And let the thunder of Thy Word
Awake their souls to fear the Lord!
1 – Ye Sons of Adam, Vain and Young, by Isaac Watts, 1707
2 – Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard, by Thomas Gray, 1756