And He Dwelt Among Us: Teachings from the Gospel of John by A. W. Tozer

Author:A. W. Tozer [Tozer, A. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sermons (American—20th century), Christian and Missionary Alliance—Sermons, Bible. New Testament book of John—Sermons
ISBN: 9781441267399
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2009-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

Come Just as You Are

Contradicting this lie of Satan, the Christian message boasts, “God cares about you as an individual. No matter what the circumstances around your life at the present, God still cares about you.”

I will make a little confession here. Whenever I get the feeling that I’m important, and I speak and preach to a lot of important people, I do something to humble myself. Often I will go into the inner city of Chicago to some of the old rescue missions and preach to the bums, the addicts and the homeless that gather there. As I look out over my ragtag congregation, I see individuals who have lost the sense of their individuality. They are caught up in the sociological statistics of their day.

There is a tramp in the second row. He is dressed in old ragged clothes that do not fit him too well. The shoes do not have laces in them and the one toe seems to be sticking out. He probably has not had a bath for a long time and reeks of dirt and cooties. There he is, smelling of every place he has been the last 10 years.

If I could catch him at a sober moment, I think he might say, “Why am I here? Nobody cares; I don’t mean anything to anybody. There isn’t anybody, anywhere, who has any emotional concern about me.”

And to be truthful about it, his father’s gone, his mother’s gone, his family will not have anything more to do with him for various reasons. Everybody tries to forget that he is even alive. When the police officers find him lying in the alley, they say, “Move on, buddy.”

There he sits, in a deep sense of sadness and orphanage with nothing to live for and nobody to care if he dies. He means nothing to anybody; nobody is concerned about his welfare; nobody cares what happens to him.

But that is not the end of the story. It does not have to stop here. The Christian evangel says, “For God so loved the world.”

It says, you—dirt and whiskers and smell and filth—wait a minute. Somebody is emotionally concerned about you. Somebody is not happy because you are the way you are. Somebody even knows your name, remembers you and loves you. You mean something to somebody.

Although our tramp may shake his foggy head in disbelief, the Christian message can get to him. “God so loved you that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever would—and you are included—believe in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. I am here from God to tell you that you do matter. Somebody cares about you.”

This is that high compression, that shining facet of the diamond of truth, which God has thrown out to the world almost with happy carelessness and said, “Take it.”

Let us take this another step. What about one of our wounded soldiers? It would be hard to find anybody who experiences the loneliness of heart like our soldiers on the battlefield.

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