Lord of our life

I ask you, Do you want Him to be Lord of your life? That you want His benefits, I know. I take that for granted. But do you want to be possessed by Him? Do you want to hand the keys of your soul over to the Holy Spirit and say, “Lord, from now on I don’t even have a key to my own house. I come and go as Thou tellest me”?

Are you willing to give the office of your business establishment, your soul, over to the Lord and say to Jesus, “You sit in this chair and handle these telephones and boss the staff and be Lord of this outfit”? That is what I mean. Are you sure you want this? Are you sure that you desire it?

Are you sure that you want your personality to be taken over by One who will expect obedience to the written and living Word? Are you sure that you want your personality to be taken over by One who will not tolerate the self sins?

For instance, self-love. You can no more have the Holy Ghost and have self-love than you can have purity and impurity at the same moment in the same place. He will not permit you to indulge self-confidence. Self-love, self-confidence, self-righteousness, self-admiration, self-aggrandizement, and self-pity are under the interdiction of God Almighty, and He cannot send His mighty Spirit to possess the heart where these things are.

Again, I ask you if you desire to have your personality taken over by One who stands in sharp opposition to the world’s easy ways? No tolerance of evil, no smiling at crooked jokes, no laughing off things that God hates.

The Spirit of God, if He takes over, will bring you into opposition to the world just as Jesus was brought into opposition to it. The world crucified Jesus because they couldn’t stand Him! There was something in Him that rebuked them and they hated Him for it and finally crucified Him.

The world hates the Holy Ghost as bad as they ever hated Jesus, the One from whom He proceeds. Are you sure, brother? You want His help, yes; you want a lot of His benefits, yes; but are you willing to go with Him in His opposition to the easygoing ways of the world? If you are not, you needn’t apply for anything more than you have, because you don’t want Him; you only think you do!

Aiden Wilson Tozer, The Best of A.W. Tozer Book One (Camp Hill, PA: WingSpread, 2007), 210–211.