How Can Moral Men Find Saving Truth?

6/9/2002

I hope that God can burn this frightful fact into our souls—the truth that men and women can be respectable and religious and prayerful and careful and eager and ask the right questions and talk about religion—and still be lost.

In our churches today, we feel that we have found a real treasure if we find someone who appears to be eagerly seeking the truth of God. Actually, we rarely find anyone who seems to be as eager as the rich young ruler who came to Jesus.

They don’t seem to be coming to us in the churches. We have to go out to them—joke with them, talk about their sports, try to find some common ground, and then gingerly tell them that if they will receive Jesus, they will have peace of mind, good grades in school, and everything will be alright.

They have not come into the Kingdom of God through repentance and trust and abandonment. The result is exactly what we would expect in those who have been “leaked” into the Kingdom of God, taken between the cracks, crawling in through a side window. There is no inner witness. There is no inner assurance. There is no inward peace.

When we think we have found someone who is a seeker, we settle back and say, “That’s wonderful! He will be alright—he is a seeker.” Here is the caution, brothers: If you could see all the seekers who are in hell today who were seekers while they were on earth, you would know that many have sought AND FOUND OUT what they had to do—and then they REFUSED TO DO IT.

The rich young ruler was a seeker. The churches today would have put his name down on a card and would have counted him among the statistics. But he walked away and turned his back on the offer and appeal of Jesus Christ.

A.W. Tozer “Who Put Jesus on The Cross”