The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing
December 25, 2006 Posted by Roger Overton
The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer is one of those classics that every Christian should return to often. I was planning on posting an excerpt of one the book's great chapters in light of the holiday, but it's all too good to leave any of it behind. My prayer for us this day as we enjoy fellowship and exchange gifts is that we would not forsake fellowship with the One who gave us this day, nor that we would confuse our blessings with the One who granted them. May we cling ever tighter to the Anchor of our souls…
The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing
(A.W.
Tozer)
“Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven. (Matthew 5:3)
Before the Lord God made man upon the earth He first
prepared for him a world of useful and pleasant things for his sustenance and
delight. In the Genesis account of the creation these are simply “things.” They
were made for man’s use, but they were meant always to be external to the man
and subservient to him. In the deep heart of the man was a shrine where none
but God was worthy to come. Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which
God had showered upon him.
But sin has introduced complications and has made those
very gifts of God a potential source of ruin to the soul.
Our woes began when God was forced out of His central
shrine and things were allowed to enter. Within the human heart things have
taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God is
crowned there no longer, but there in the moral dusk, stubborn and aggressive
usurpers fight among themselves for first place on the throne.
This is not a mere metaphor, but an accurate analysis of
our real spiritual trouble. There is within the human heart a tough, fibrous
root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets
things with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns my and mine
look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is
significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a
thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep
disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not
pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a
development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God,
and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.
Our Lord referred to this tyranny of things when He said
to His Disciples, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and
take up his cross, and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose
it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it. (Matthew
16:24-25)
Breaking this truth into fragments for our better
understanding, it would seem that there is within each of us an enemy which we
tolerate at our peril. Jesus called it “life” and “self,”
or as we would say, the self-life. Its chief characteristic is
its possessiveness; the words gain and profit suggest
this. To allow this enemy to live is, in the end, to lose everything. To
repudiate it and give up all for Christ’s sake is to lose nothing at last, but
to preserve everything unto life eternal. And possibly also a hint is given
here as to the only effective way to destroy this foe; it is by the cross. “Let
him take up his cross, and follow Me” (see Matthew 16:24).
The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely
valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who
possess the kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have
rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the “poor in
spirit.” They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward
circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of
as Christ used it actually means. These blessed poor are no longer slaves to
the tyranny of things. They have broken the yoke of the oppressor; and they
have done not by fighting but by surrendering. Though free from all sense of
possessing, they yet possess all things. “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Let me exhort you to take this seriously. It is not to be
understood as a mere Bible teaching to be stored away in the mind along with an
inert mass of other doctrines. It is a marker on the road to greener pastures,
a path chiseled against the steep sides of the mount of God. We dare not try to
bypass it if we would follow this holy pursuit. We must ascend a step at a
time. If we refuse one step, we bring our progress to an end.
As is frequently true, this New Testament principle of
Spiritual life finds its best illustration in the Old Testament. In the story
of Abraham and Isaac We have a dramatic picture of the surrendered life as well
as an excellent commentary on the first Beatitude.
Abraham was old when Isaac was born, old enough to have
been his grandfather, and the child became at once the delight and idol of his
heart. From the moment he first stooped to take the tiny form awkwardly in his
arms, he was an eager love slave of his son. God went out of his way to comment
on the strength of this affection. And it is not hard to understand. The baby
represented everything sacred to his father’s heart: the promises of God, the
covenants, the hopes of the years and the long messianic dream. As he watched
him grow from babyhood to young manhood, the heart of the old man was knit
closer and closer with the life of his son, till at last the relationship
bordered upon the perilous. It was then that God stepped in to save both father
and son from the consequences of an uncleansed love.
“Take now thy son,” God said to Abraham, “thine only son
Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him
there for a burnt offering upon the mountains which I will tell thee of”
(Genesis 22:2). The sacred writer spares us the close-up of the agony that
night on the slopes near
when the aged man had it out with his God, but respectful imagination may view
in awe the bent form wrestling convulsively alone under the stars. Possibly not
again until One greater than Abraham wrestled in the
did such mortal pain visit a human soul. If only the man himself might have
been allowed to die. That would have been a thousand times easier, for he was
old now, and to die would have been no great ordeal for one who had walked so
long with God. Besides, it would have been a last, sweet pleasure to let his
dimming vision rest upon the figure of his stalwart son who would live to carry
on the Abrahamic line and fulfill in himself the promises of God made long
before in Ur of the Chaldees.
How should he slay the lad! Even if he could get the
consent of his wounded and protesting heart, how could he reconcile the act
with the promise, “In Isaac shall thy seed be called”? This was Abraham’s trial
by fire, and he did not fail in the crucible. While the stars still shone like
sharp white points above the tent where the sleeping Isaac lay, and long before
the gray dawn had begun to lighten the east, the old saint had made up his
mind. He would offer his son as God had directed him to do, and then trust
God to raise him from the dead. This, says the writer of Hebrews, was
the solution his aching heart found sometime in the dark night, and he rose
“early in the morning” to carry out the plan. It is beautiful to see that,
while he erred as to God’s method, he had correctly sensed the secret of His
great heart. And the solution accords well with the New Testament Scripture,
“Whosoever will lose…for My sake shall find” (Matthew 16:25).
God let the suffering old man go through with it up to the
point where He knew there would be no retreat, and then forbade him to lay a
hand upon the boy. To the wondering patriarch He know says in effect, “It’s all
right, Abraham. I never intended that you should actually slay the lad. I only
wanted to remove him from the temple of your heart that I might reign
unchallenged there. I wanted to correct the perversion that existed in your
love. Now you may have the boy, sound and well. Take him and go back to your
tent. Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy
son, thine only son, from Me.”
Then heaven opened and a voice was heard saying to him, “By
Myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and
hast not withheld thy son, thine only son; that in blessing I will bless thee,
and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as
the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of
his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed;
because thou hast obeyed my voice” (Genesis 22:16-18).
The old man of God lifted his head to respond to the
Voice, and stood there on the mount strong and pure and grand, a man marked out
by the Lord for special treatment, a friend and favorite of the Most High. Now
he was a man wholly surrendered, a man utterly obedient, a man who possessed
nothing. He had concentrated his all in the person of his dear son and God had
taken it from him. God could have begun out on the margin of Abraham’s life and
worked inward to the center. He chose rather to cut quickly to the heart and
have it over in one sharp act of separation. In dealing thus, He practiced an
economy of means and time. It hurt cruelly, but it was effective.
I have said that Abraham possessed nothing. Yet was not
this poor man rich? Everything he had owned before was his still to enjoy:
sheep, camels, herds and goods of every sort. He had also his wife and his
friends, and best of all he had his son Isaac safe by his side. He had
everything, but he possessed nothing. There is a spiritual
secret. There is the sweet theology of the heart which can be learned only in
the school of renunciation. The books on systematic theology overlook this, but
the wise will understand.
After that bitter
and blessed experience I think that the words my and mine
never again had the same meaning for Abraham. The sense of possession which
they connote was gone from his heart. Things had been cast out forever. They
had now become external to the man. His inner heart was free from them. The
world said, “Abraham is rich,” but the aged patriarch only smiled. He could not
explain it, but he knew that he owned nothing, that his real treasures were
inward and eternal.
There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to
things is one of the most harmful habits in the life. Because it is natural, it
is rarely recognized for the evil that it is. But its outworkings are tragic.
We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the
Lord out of fear for their safety. This is especially true when those treasures
are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came
not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and
nothing is really safe which is not so committed.
Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him.
They should be recognized for what they are, God’s loan to us, and should never
be considered in any sense our own. We have no more right to claim credit for
special abilities than for blue eyes or strong muscles. “For who maketh thee
to differ from another? And what hast thou that thou didst not receive?” (1
Corinthians 4:7).
The Christian who is alive enough to know himself even
slightly will recognize the symptoms of this possession malady, and will grieve
to find them in his own heart. If the longing after God is strong enough within
him, he will do something about the matter. Now, what should he do?
First of all, he should put away all defense and make no
attempt to excuse himself either in his own eyes or before the Lord. Whoever
defends himself will have himself for his defense, and he will have no other.
But let him come defenseless before the Lord and he will have for his defender
no less than God Himself. Let the inquiring Christian trample under foot every
slippery trick of his deceitful heart and insist upon frank and open relations
with the Lord.
Then he should remember that this is holy business. No
careless or casual dealings will suffice. Let him come to God fully determined
to be heard. Let him insist that God accept his all, that He take things out of
his heart and Himself reign there in power. It may be he will need to become
specific, to name things and people by their names one by one. If he will
become drastic enough, he can shorten the time of his travail from years to
minutes and enter the good land before his slower brethren who coddle their
feelings and insist upon caution in their dealings with God.
Let us never forget that a truth such as this cannot be
learned by rote as one would learn the facts of physical science. They must be experienced
before we can really know them. We must, in our hearts, live through Abraham’s
harsh and bitter experiences if we would know the blessedness which follows
them. The ancient curse will not go out painlessly; the tough old miser within
us will not lie down and die in obedience to our command. He must be torn out
of our heart like a plant from the soil; he must be extracted in agony and
blood like a tooth from the jaw. He must be expelled from our soul by violence,
as Christ expelled the moneychangers from the temple. And we shall need to
steel ourselves against his piteous begging, and to recognize it as springing
out of self-pity, one of the most reprehensible sins of the human heart.
If
we would indeed know God in the growing intimacy, we must go this way of
renunciation. And if we are set upon the pursuit of God, He will sooner or
later bring us this test. Abraham’s testing was, at the time, not known to him
as such, yet if he had taken some course other than the one he did, the whole
history of the Old Testament would have been different. God would have found
His man, no doubt, but the loss to Abraham would have been tragic beyond the
telling. So we will be brought one by one to the testing place, and we may
never know when we are there. At that testing place there will be no dozen
possible choices for us-just one and an alternative-but our whole future will
be conditioned by the choice we make.
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