Do not defend yourself by Tozer

What I am talking about is that we, as individuals, are not to defend ourselves, but live in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1–7:29). You know, they have taken the Sermon on the Mount and given it to the millennium; I am willing that the millennium should have the Sermon on the Mount, but I want a bit of it now. I believe it is for us now, not only, as one man says, a beautiful moral application. I believe that it is binding upon the children of God, and one thing it teaches is that we’re not to fight back.

And so I say take this vow: do not defend yourself. I got into a jam one time that was not my fault at all; that is, it came from another direction. I was just crushed by it, and I went to God. I was reading in Exodus, and the Lord spoke to me just as clearly as if He had never said it to anybody else.

Did you ever have that happen? You go to some text, and some dispensationalist tells you it is not yours. Something in your heart leaps up and grabs it. You feel a sucking sound and a pop as your feet come out of the mud, and it got you out. Then you read a book that says it was not for you. I do not care about that.

But anyhow, Exodus 23:20–24 spoke to me and helped me a great deal!

Do not run around apologizing and asking people, “Please forgive me for living, or I will drop dead tomorrow.” Look at Exodus 23 verse 24: “But thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images” (Exodus 23:24) Somebody called me an iconoclast, and I have biblical authority for it—the word means “destroyer of idols.” God says here, “Utterly overthrow them and quite break down their idols.”

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

A. W. Tozer and Lyle W. Dorsett, Tozer Speaks to Students : Chapel Messages Preached at Wheaton College (Camp Hill, PA.: WingSpread, 1998), 86–89.