Beware of the Religious Word Game

Part I in a series

by A.W. Tozer

From his book “Reclaiming Christianity: A Call to Authentic Faith”

For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake.

1 Thessalonians 1: 5

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

2 Corinthians 5: 17

And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write; These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars; I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.

Revelation 3: 1

The first text (1 Thessalonians 1: 5) says that the gospel may come in one of two ways. It may come in word only, which is empty, or it may come in power, which is with moral effectiveness. Paul knew that the gospel message had come to the Thessalonians effectively, in moral power, and he gave as his reason that they had much assurance and became followers of Christ, having received the Word in much affliction. Nothing could turn them back. They had a strange and supernatural joy, which Paul labeled the joy of the Holy Ghost; and they went on not only to be followers but examples to the other churches, and from them sounded out the Word of the Lord. They became a missionary church.

If it is true that that is what happens when the Word comes in power – and the text opens the doors to the belief that the Word can come nominally and without power – then exactly the opposite could be true. Without Holy Spirit power, they would become Christians by some decision, but without much assurance, and would not be followers of the Lord, except in name. When affliction came, they would not take it very well, and they would not have much joy; they would have to work it up – it would not stay long. And they would not be very good examples; they would be lukewarm when it came to the missionary zeal. Now that is a fair explanation here, and it lies in this Thessalonian verse.

The second text (2 Corinthians 5: 17) says that the effect of the gospel, in addition to what Paul said in Thessalonians, when received in power, regenerates a man’s nature. “Generate” means to create, and “regenerate” means to create again. This is what the Word does when it is received in power; the old things of the first generation, that is the first creation, pass away, and everything becomes new. A set of new things takes the place of the old that was set aside when the Holy Ghost regenerated the heart to believe in the gospel.

The third text (Revelation 3: 1) says there are those who have heard the gospel and are called Christians, but they are Christians in name only. That is what “nominal” means. They have not been changed fundamentally and are still old; they are still dead.

The reason God has to regenerate us s because sin came, and we died, and He has to do this life-giving job a second time in order that we might live. But there are some who have only changed in name. They have not been changed fundamentally at all. They still belong to the old life, and the Holy Spirit says they have a name to live, but actually they are dead.

This is a brief exegesis of these three great verses. I want you to see what it means to have the gospel come in word, and then what it means to have the gospel come in power. Then let’s talk about the danger that it shall be only in word and not in power, and what we should do about it.

Nominal Christianity

Some believe the gospel but have it in word only. Our Lord Jesus taught this in Israel; He said, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity” (Matthew 23: 27-28).

They looked at each other, tugged at their long beards and determined that as soon as possible, without a mob scene resulting, they would kill Jesus. Finally, they did kill Him, but Goad raised Him from the dead the third day and set Him at His own right hand. They thought they were murdering a man, but God was offering a sacrifice. That is the difference. That is the irony of fighting against the Lord Jesus Christ.

As a consequence of being a nominal Christian, in name only, there is a tendency to use words in a wrong way, to engage in religious word games. In too many places today, the Christian religion has simply been reduced to a word game.

Some say, “I know that very well, because I used to belong to the thus-and-thus denomination. I know that was true then, they were as dead as could be. The pastor did not believe in the virgin birth.” Somebody else says, “I used to go to a church where they did not believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. They were scoundrels, they were liberals.”

But the Holy Spirit is not talking about liberals or people who deny the truth of Scripture. He is talking about people who admit the truth of the Scripture and receive the gospel as a fact and do not deny it, but support it, follow it and would kick a pastor out if he did not preach it. But it has only reached them in words, because their religion is simply a word game.

Playing the Word Game

A game is something you do by creating a problem and then having fun solving it. I know a little about baseball, so I will use that for illustration. Baseball creates a problem and spends millions of dollars solving a problem that di not exist until they created it.

Abner Doubleday (1819 – 1893) is the one credited with inventing the game we now call baseball. He said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. we’ll create a problem and then solve it. We’ll put one man out there with a ball and put another man 60 feet away from him to catch the ball when thrown to him. Now the problem is for this man with the ball to throw it so the other man catches it, but in the meantime, in order to make it tough for this man to get the ball through to the other man, we are going to put a fellow in there with a stick. This man with the stick will stand there and try to keep that ball from getting to that other man’s mitt. Now that problem is what we will work on. One fellow out here will be called the pitcher and will wind up and gyrate and throw the ball to the other man, who will catch it. Then, this fellow with the stick, he’s the devil in between and he will try to keep the catcher from catching it.”

And so the game of baseball was created. Games work that way. They have a problem, but the problem never existed before. There was polio, cancer, war and starvation, but they had to create a problem, and then put the healthiest men in the world to play at it.

this fellow throws the ball, and the fellow with the stick hauls off and swings the stick. And if he connects with the ball, the problem is solved in his favor. His having fun. They hear the sound of the ball on wood and say, “I think it sounds like a homer.” However, there are eight other men determined that he is not going to have that  solution. They are going to have it, ao they are the shortstop – three basemen and three outfielders – they are all ready to catch that ball; and if anybody can get that ball before it hits the ground, the fellow with the stick is out.

We spend millions of dollars solving that problem hundreds of times on a sunny afternoon. That is a game and some people like games.

One thing about a game is that nobody is any better or worse for whatever happens. If the man with the stick wins, he’s not any better off, he just goes home; and if his wife doesn’t like him before, she still doesn’t like him. And if he is in debt, he is still in debt; and if he has a disease, he still has a disease; and no matter what, he is still no better off, and the other fellow is no worse off.

Even in the Olympics, athletes compete with each other but it is all games, and when it is all over, they go home. Nobody is any better off or worse off because they created their problems before the athletes were sent over here to solve them.

When the Canadians and the Americans were fighting Hitler, it mattered who won, for it was the difference between slavery and living on your knees. It was the difference between playing a game and fighting a war.

In religion, the temptation is to take it as a word game. Instead of a baseball or a football, we have other gadgets that we throw around, like words. We write books, but books, proofread books and sweat over books. We edit magazines, We buy magazines. We subscribe. We write songs. We sing songs. We make prayers. We say prayers. We preach sermons. We hear sermons.

All of this requires, of course, a vast amount of activity, and a tremendous amount of money, and a great deal of perspiration, and a lot of inconvenience. Yet a great number of people simply play the game of religious words. It makes no difference. The giveaway is that the religious word game does not change anybody fundamentally; they are not much different from what they were before.

A certain university sponsored a survey. They took 100 men who were devout churchmen and investigated their ethical standards in their business. Then they took a hundred men who never went to church and investigated their ethics to see how they ran their business.

After some time, and after spending a lot of money and doing a lot of investigating, they said, ” By and large there isn’t any difference between the ethical business standards of the religious churchmen and the nonreligious man who never enters the church door.”

We are just human beings, wherever we live and whatever our nationality. If it is true in one place, it is likely to be true in another. So what are these 100 men doing that have been investigated? They are just playing a word game. They go to church and maybe they are ushers, and down the aisle they go, looking dignified with a boutonniere in their lapels. Or they are preachers who stand up, take a text, breathe through their nose heavily, and preach the Word, and people say, “I was blessed,” and go out. The next morning their business ethics have not changed a bit. The pastor simply has fun playing a word game.

We set up a problem and solve it. We throw a ball and somebody else with a stick hits it; and when it’s all over, we say, “Boy, our church is growing, and we’re known in the city. We’re a great church, aren’t we. Let’s see what we can do to make the thing look better.”

I want nothing to do with this religious word game. I want nobody fooling me with unreality. I do not want anybody coming a fawning over me if he does not mean it. I do not want anybody to lie to me in the name of etiquette or ask me for a dime to support something I do not believe in. I do not want anybody to ask me to believe in a religion that I have to take on the basis of somebody’s authority. If Jesus christ cannot change me; if my Christianity is not real; if the problem I face is not a real problem; if it does not mean heaven, hell, death and the grave; then I do not want to be wasting my time with it at all. I would rather take a walk and listen to the birds sing than listen to any man preach who tries to smooth me down or to put up a problem that does not exist and play with it. That is what is going on all the time.

The giveaway of this religious word game is that a person says he is fundamentally different, but the same old principles motivate the life. A man comes, says he is a Christian and wants to join the church. But his natural appetites are just the same, only refined a little bit, that is all. His egotism has not been destroyed, only less gross than it was before. It is possible for an egoist to get a college education and be a refined egotist, skillful at hiding the fact that he is an egoist. He can refine that still more by being converted. And the Word of the Lord will come to him but it will not come to him in power. All it does is refine his egotism.

Then there is the matter of selfishness. He is exactly the same selfish fellow he was before, only he has sanitized his selfishness a little bit now. And he loves games just as he always did, he just rubs his hands to see the money come in, only now he gives a little of it to the lord and takes it off his income tax and feels that he is a saint. But all he has accomplished is what any sinner might do.

The trouble is, the roots of the life have not changed, which is why we are half-dead. That is why we are where we are – the roots of the life have never been changed. We are growing in the same old root as we were before when we were a religious man carrying a hymnbook or a Bible under our arm. That is why Christians are so largely ineffective.

The devil means what he is saying, and he is not fooling  Christians often are, but the devil never. Christians play word games, but the devil is not playing. When the gospel comes in power we are not playing any more; it is real. Do not imagine for a minute that you can get away with this word game inside the church of Christ. God will not accept any tossing things around or playing with words or songs or sermons or books.

What happens to a man when he is really born anew? We use that phrase “born again” in evangelical circles. We have used it until it does not have any meaning left. It is worn as thin as an old 1914 dime, but it is still in the Bible. You still have to be born again. That is, you have to be regenerated, made a new creature. Those are the same words, or a different word meaning the same thing. And when a man has been regenerated, is renewed, made over, recreated, born anew, born from above, born again, what actually happens to him?

To be continued…

Part II: Radical Life Change