A.W. TOZER ON THE JUDGMENT SEAT OF CHRIST AND OUTER DARKNESS
========================================================== Comments by J.D. Faust
Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897-1963) was a man of powerful, spiritual insight. I have often quoted his reproofs and warnings in regard to entertainment. I was unaware, until recently, of Tozer's understanding concerning Christian accountability. He not only understood these truths; he warned that they were being minimized or deleted from much of modern, "fundamental" theology. I had known that Tozer was a leader in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and that Paul Rader was a past president of this denomination. I knew that it was reasonable to conclude that Tozer would share the accountability views of Paul Rader, who had written:
"Everything that has to do with the thousand years must meet the most terrific fires of testing. Only that which can pass through the fire test at the Judgment Seat can be admitted into this thousand years of Millennial splendour." - Paul Rader
Yet, until now, I had not been able to find any warnings such as Rader's in Tozer's writings. I pray the following excerpts of Tozer's sermon will stir you to boldly believe the warnings in the Bible, and to move with fear to race for the prize!
OUR ACCOUNTABILITY TO GOD: JUSTIFIED, SAVED - BUT ON TRIAL by A.W. Tozer
"1 Peter 4:17 For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?
Throughout the Christian church as we know it today, all sense of accountability to God seems to have been lost...Someone has been quoted recently as saying, 'If I believed that I had to give an accounting of my service as seen in the eyes of God, I could never be happy!'...Now, I do not know how men and women can excuse themselves completely as though one of the voices of God sounding throughout the earth is not the voice of judgment. I have searched the Word again for this message, and I have not been able to get away from the fact of judgment as it pertains to the house of God, to Christians rather than sinners.
It is well for us to consider here that church history shows plainly that religious people are prone to select a favorite Bible doctrine or truth and to hold to that one truth at the expense of other basic tenets. We may overemphasize that one truth so as to obscure other important truths which may actually disappear as a result. This is what I mean by a truth disappearing - it falls into disuse and therefore is easily forgotten...
Then, finally, some prophet of God has to come and reassert the forgotten truths and reemphasize and trumpet them forth. That person may be considered a heretic because that segment of Bible truth has been obscured for a generation or two. But in the midst of the grumbling, the prophet of God keeps persisting until the church awakens, readopts that truth, so that a new sense of life comes as it were raised from the dead.
...Men who have been used of God in any generation from Calvary down to this hour have not invented and preached new truths. They have simply had the anointed vision to discover truths that had been obscured by the overemphasis of certain other truths. Now, that is introductory to say this: that justification by faith has become such a doctrine in our time. It has been emphasized to a point where it has obscured certain other closely related truths; so we have lost the cutting power of those truths.
I know it would be difficult for any man to be eloquent enough to overstate the vital importance of justification by faith...that man shall live by his faith and not by works of righteousness which he has done. Therefore, being justified by faith we have peace with God! Justification by faith delivers us from the fruitless struggle to be good. It delivers us from the bondage of the Pharisees and the pride of the ritualist and the snare of the legalist - all of whom attempt in many human ways to make themselves presentable to God. But those are just old Adam decking himself out in his best religious garments for the sake of impressing God Almighty.
...Then along came a thoughtful scholar in the Scriptures. He presented no new truth or doctrine, but insisted on the reexamination of an old Bible truth, long buried and forgotten, proclaiming that it is not by our works of righteousness, but it is by faith through grace, that we can be pleasing to God.
...Then, with the passing of the years, that doctrine of justification by faith has been emphasized until it has been thrown out of focus as badly as was the opposite before Luther's time.
As a result, justification as it is now understood and preached and emphasized and hammered on up and down the country, is causing believers to throw all responsibility over on God, and we conceive ourselves to be happy, satisfied Christians without a responsibility in the world except to give out a tract once in a while...All judgment has been bypassed, for Christians are not thinking of judgment any more.
I discover that the average Christian now seems to have only one worry - he is concerned that he might lose what we call 'fellowship.' In that case, he might not be as happy tomorrow as he was today or as happy day after tomorrow as he was yesterday. He wants to be a happy little moron, with the result that he says, 'I must learn to keep up my fellowship so I will be happy.'
The idea that a believer is accountable to God for the deeds done in the body has completely passed out of the theological thinking of the modern fundamentalist church...There is no longer any consideration of the moral condition of the man, whether or not he is obedient, whether or not he is faithful to God or what kind of Christian he is.
...Now this kind of teaching has obscured other truth, so it is a true doctrine pushed out of focus. It is a doctrine of grace and justification by faith alone pushed by uncorrected logic to a ridiculous and grotesque conclusion.
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