The Next Chapter After the Last: For the Child of God, the Best is Yet to Come

by A W Tozer

Overview

Next Chapter After the Last is a compilation of editorials by A.W. Tozer that helps Christians keep their orthodoxy in check. Addressing topics like death and resurrection, Tozer attacks unorthodox views of the gospel and lifts up true, New-Testament Christianity.

Christians often see death just like the world does: as the final chapter. Tozer seeks to fervently correct this grave error, which is so inconsistent with the testimony of Scripture. In these 39 editorials, Tozer passionately urges believers to express great things for the afterlife, giving our hearts joy and our lives power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781600663369
Publisher:	Moody Publishers
Publication date:	08/02/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	905 KB

About the Author

A. W. TOZER began his lifelong pursuit of God at the age of seventeen after hearing a street preacher. He never attended high school or seminary—his spiritual understanding came from the power of the Word and the power of the Spirit. While serving as a pastor and magazine editor, he wrote prolifically about basic spiritual disciplines and their relationship to contemporary life. His powerful use of words continues to grip the intellect and stir the soul of today's reader.
A. W. TOZER began his lifelong pursuit of God at the age of seventeen after hearing a street preacher in Akron, Ohio. A self-taught theologian, Tozer was a pastor, writer and editor whose powerful use of words continues to grip the intellect and stir the soul of today's reader. Among his best-loved books are the classics The Pursuit of God and The Attributes of God.

Read an Excerpt

The Next Chapter after the Last

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By A. W. Tozer, Harry Verploegh

Moody Publishers

Copyright © 1987 Zur Ltd.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60066-336-9

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CHAPTER 1

The Next Chapter After the Last

The four gospels tell the story of the life and ministry of Jesus, and in so doing, they follow accurately the ordinary course of biography, giving the facts of His birth, growth, work, death and burial. That is the way with biography: the very word itself suggests it, for it comes from bios, life, and graphein, to write, and means the written history of a person's life. So says Noah Webster.

Now, when we look at the Gospels we note an odd—and wonderful—thing. An extra chapter is added. Why?

Biography, by its own definition, must confine itself to the record of the life of an individual. That part of the book which deals with the family tree is not biography, but history, and that part which follows the record of the subject's death is not biography either. It may be appraisal, or eulogy, or criticism, but not biography, for the reason that the "bios" is gone: the subject is dead. The part that tells of his death is properly the last chapter.

The only place in world literature where this order is broken is in the four Gospels. They record the story of the man Jesus from birth to death, and end like every other book of biography has ended since the art of writing was invented. Matthew says, "And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new tomb." Mark says, "And he [Joseph] bought fine linen, and took him [Jesus] down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock." Luke writes, "And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid." John says, "... There was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, ... There laid they Jesus." They all agree: Jesus was dead. The life about which they had been writing was gone. The biography was ended.

Then, for the only time in this history of human thought, a biographer adds to his book a new section which is authentic biography and begins to write a chapter to follow the last chapter. This time the story did not end with a funeral. The Subject, whose story should have ended at death, was once again back among men to challenge new writers to try to find enough paper and enough ink to write the rest of the story of the life that can never end. Whatever is written of Him now is written of a living man. He was dead, but He is alive forevermore.

That such a thing could be was intimated by the miracles of restoration which our Lord performed during His earthly ministry. The widow's son was brought back to life for a brief time; at our Lord's gentle call Jairus's little daughter rose from her bed of death; and Lazarus, at Christ's command, came forth bound hand and foot. These were but vague disclosures of what was to come, and were at best only temporary suspensions of the inexorable law which demands that death shall always follow life—death complete and final. For these all died again, and the rule of biography was upheld. Each ended in a sepulchre at last. And that sepulchre was the period at the end of the last chapter.

What a perpetual wonder it is, then, that the biography of Jesus had to be resumed. Luke added not merely another chapter, but a whole book. The Book of Acts was a logical necessity. "He showed himself alive after his passion," writes Luke. The rest of the New Testament gives us some idea of what He is doing now, and prophecy reveals a little of what He will be doing through the ages to come.

That next chapter after the last is the source of all the Christian's hope, for it assures us that our Lord has put death in its place and has delivered us from the ancient curse. Death did not end the activities of our Lord; it did not even interrupt them, for while His body lay in Joseph's new tomb, He was preaching to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:18-20). And after three days, His spirit was reunited with His body and the new chapter began, the chapter which can have no ending.

Had Christ not risen from the dead, His life, beautiful as it was, would have been a human tragedy. Since He did in fact rise, His life has been shown to be an unrelieved triumph. The blood, the pain, the rejection, the agony of dying, the cold, stiff body and the colder tomb—these belong to the former days. The days that are now are days of hope and life and everlasting freedom.

What is true of Christ is true also of all who believe in Him. How many saints since New Testament times have lived and hoped and labored and worshiped, only to grow old and bent and to drop at last, weak and helpless, into the open grave. If that was for them the end, then we Christians would be of all men most miserable. But it was not the end. For all of God's true children there will be another chapter, a chapter that will begin with the resurrection and go on as long as eternity endures.

The powers of death have done their worst,
But Christ their legions hath dispersed:
Let shouts of holy joy outburst—

Alleluia!

The three sad days have quickly sped;
He rises glorious from the dead;
All glory to our risen Head!

Alleluia!

He brake the age-bound chains of hell;
The bars from heaven's high portals fell;
Let hymns of praise His triumph tell,—

Alleluia!
—MEDIEVAL LATIN

CHAPTER 2

Quality Versus Quantity

Time may show that one of the greatest weaknesses in our modern civilization has been the acceptance of quantity rather than quality as the goal after which to strive.

This is particularly evident in the United States. Costly buildings are constantly being erected with no expectation that they shall last more than one short generation. It is a common sight in our great cities to see workmen tearing down buildings which a few short years ago were considered the finest examples of the builder's art. So poor are our present materials and so fast do our modern tastes change, that there is even a kind of sad humor about the appearance of buildings erected more than 50 years ago.

Not only in our architecture but almost everywhere else is this psychology of impermanence found. A beauty salon ad recently defined a term which has long needed clarification. It read: "Permanent Waves. Guaranteed to last three months." So, permanence is the quality of lasting three months! These may be extreme cases, but they illustrate the transiency of men's hopes and the brevity of their dreams apart from God.

The church also is suffering from a left-handed acceptance of this philosophy of impermanence. Christianity is resting under the blight of degraded values. And it all stems from a too-eager desire to impress, to gain fleeting attention, to appear well in comparison with some world-beater who happens for the time to have the ear or the eye of the public.

This is so foreign to the Scriptures that we wonder how Bible-loving Christians can be deceived by it. The Word of God ignores size and quantity and lays all its stress upon quality. Christ, more than any other man, was followed by the crowds, yet after giving them such help as they were able to receive, He quietly turned from them and deposited His enduring truths in the breasts of His chosen 12. He refused a quick shortcut to the throne and chose instead the long painful way of the cross. He rejected the offers of the multitude and rested His success upon those eternal qualities which He was able to plant in the hearts of a modest number of redeemed men. The ages have thanked God that He did.

Pastors and churches in our hectic times are harassed by the temptation to seek size at any cost and to secure by inflation what they cannot gain by legitimate growth. The mixed multitude cries for quantity and will not forgive a minister who insists upon solid values and permanence. Many a man of God is being subjected to cruel pressure by the ill-taught members of his flock who scorn his slow methods and demand quick results and a popular following regardless of quality. These children play in the marketplaces and cannot overlook the affront we do them by our refusal to dance when they whistle or to weep when they out of caprice pipe a sad tune. They are greedy for thrills, and since they dare no longer seek them in the theater, they demand to have them brought into the church.

We who follow Christ are men and women of eternity. We must put no confidence in the passing scenes of the disappearing world. We must resist every attempt of Satan to palm off upon us the values that belong to mortality. Nothing less than forever is long enough for us. We view with amused sadness the frenetic scramble of the world to gain a brief moment in the sun. "The book of the month," for instance, has a strange sound to one who has dwelt with God and taken his values from the Ancient of Days. "The man of the year" cannot impress those men and women who are making their plans for that long eternity when days and years have passed away and time is no more.

The church must claim again her ancient dowry of everlastingness. She must begin again to deal with ages and millenniums rather then with days and years. She must not count numbers but test foundations. She must work for permanence rather then for appearance. Her children must seek those enduring things that have been touched with immortality. The shallow brook of popular religion chatters on its nervous way and thinks the ocean too quiet and dull because it lies deep in its mighty bed and is unaffected by the latest shower.

Faith in one of its aspects moves mountains; in another it gives patience to see the promises afar off and to wait quietly for their fulfillment. Insistence upon an immediate answer to every request of the soul is an evidence of religious infantilism. It takes God longer to grow an oak than to grow an ear of popcorn.

It will cost something to walk slow in the parade of the ages while excited men of time rush about confusing motion with progress. But it will pay in the long run—and the true Christian is not much interested in anything short of that.

CHAPTER 3

We Must Stay by the Majors

In life there will be found certain great fundamentals, like pillars bearing up the weight of some mighty building. These fortunately are kept at a minimum in the total scheme of things. They are not hard to discover: love, loyalty, integrity, faith; these with a very few others constitute the pillars upon which rests all the highly complex superstructure.

The wise man will simplify his life by going to the center of it. He will look well to the foundations and, having done that, he will not worry about the rest.

Life as we know it in our painfully intricate civilization can be deadly unless we learn to distinguish the things that matter from those that do not. It is never the major things that destroy us, but invariably the multitude of trifling things which are mistakenly thought to be of major importance. These are so many that, unless we get out from under them, they will crush us body and soul. This is becoming more and more evident as many of our physical ills are being traced back to other than physical causes. Doctors are becoming increasingly aware of the deadly effects of the burden of the imponderables; they are learning that if they would do the patient any permanent good they must minister to the mind as well as to the body.

In the Christian life also we find this pattern repeated: a few important things and a world of burdensome but unimportant ones. The Spirit-taught Christian must look past the multiplicity of incidental things and find the few that really matter. And let it be repeated for our encouragement, they are few in number and surprisingly easy to identify. The Scriptures make perfectly clear what they are: the fact of God, the Person and work of Christ, faith and obedience, hope and love. These along with a few more constitute the essence of the truth which we must know and love. Christ summed up the moral law as love to God and man. Salvation He made to rest upon faith in God and in the One whom He had sent. Paul simplified the wonders of the spiritual life in the words, "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

The temptation to forget the few spiritual essentials and to go wandering off after unimportant things is very strong, especially to Christians of a certain curious type of mind. Such persons find the great majors of the faith of our fathers altogether too tame for them. Their souls loathe that light bread; their appetites crave the gamy tang of fresh-killed meat. They take great pride in their reputation as being mighty hunters before the Lord, and any time we look out we may see them returning from the chase with some new mystery hanging limply over their shoulder.

Usually the game they bring down is something on which there is a biblical closed season. Some vague hint in the Scriptures, some obscure verse about which the translators disagree, some marginal note for which there is not much scholarly authority: these are their favorite meat. They are especially skillful at propounding notions which have never been a part of the Christian heritage of truth. Their enthusiasm mounts with the uncertainty of their position and their dogmatism grows firmer in proportion to the mystery which surrounds their subject.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous English sage, once said that one of the surest evidences of intellectual immaturity is the desire to startle people. Yet there are Christians who have been fed upon the odd, the strange and the curious so long and so exclusively that they have become wholly unfitted spiritually to receive or to appreciate sound doctrine. They live to be startled by something new or thrilled by something wonderful. They will believe anything so long as it is just a little away from the time-honored beliefs of sober Christian men. A serious discourse calling for repentance, humbleness of mind and holiness of life is impatiently dismissed as old-fashioned, dull and lacking in "audience appeal." Yet these things are just the ones that rank highest on the list of things we need to hear, and by them we shall all be judged in that great day of Christ.

A church fed on excitement is no New Testament church at all. The desire for surface stimulation is a sure mark of the fallen nature, the very thing Christ died to deliver us from. A curious crowd of baptized worldlings waiting each Sunday for the quasi-religious needle to give them a lift bears no relation whatsoever to a true assembly of Christian believers. And that its members protest their undying faith in the Bible does not change things any. "Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven" (Matthew 7:21).

Every believer as well as every minister of Christ must decide whether he will put his emphasis upon the majors or the minors. He must decide whether he will stay by the sober truths which constitute the beating heart of the Scriptures or turn his attention to those marginal doctrines which always bring division and which, at their best, could not help us much on our way to the Celestial City.

No man has any moral right to propound any teaching about which there is not full agreement among Bible Christians until he has made himself familiar with church history and with the development of Christian doctrine through the centuries. The historic approach is best. After we have discovered what holy men believed, what great reformers and saints taught, what the purest souls and mightiest workers held to be important for holy living and dying—then we are in a fair position to appraise our own teaching.

Humility is the only state of mind in which to approach the Scriptures. The Spirit will teach the humble soul those things that make for his salvation and for a holy walk and fruitful service here below. And little else matters.

CHAPTER 4

Complaining: A Disease of the Soul

Among those sins most exquisitely fitted to injure the soul and destroy the testimony, few can equal the sin of complaining. Yet the habit is so widespread that we hardly notice it among us.

The complaining heart never lacks for occasion. It can always find reason enough to be unhappy. The object of its censure may be almost anything: the weather, the church, the difficulties of the way, other Christians or even God Himself.

A complaining Christian puts himself in a position morally untenable. The simple logic of his professed discipleship is against him with an unanswerable argument. Its reasoning runs like this: First, he is a Christian because he chose to be. There are no conscripts in the army of God. He is, therefore, in the awkward position of complaining against the very conditions he brought himself into by his own free choice. Secondly, he can quit any time he desires. No Christian wears a chain on his leg. Yet he still continues on, grumbling as he goes, and for such conduct he has no defense.

The complainer is further embarrassed by the moral company in which he finds himself. His is a spiritual affinity with some pretty shady characters: Cain, Korah, the sulky elder brother, the petulant Jews of the Book of Malachi who answered every fatherly admonition of God with an ill-humored "Wherefore have we? Wherein have we?" These are but a few faces that stand out in the picture of the disgruntled followers of the religious way. And the complaining Christian, if he but looks closely, will see his own face peering out at him from the background.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Next Chapter after the Last by A. W. Tozer, Harry Verploegh. Copyright © 1987 Zur Ltd.. Excerpted by permission of Moody Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright,
Foreword,
1 The Next Chapter after the Last,
2 Quality versus Quantity,
3 We Must Stay by the Majors,
4 Complaining: A Disease of the Soul,
5 The Duty of Opposing,
6 Power Requires Separation,
7 The Right Direction Is Forward!,
8 On the Public Reading of the Scriptures,
9 The Spiritual Love of Jesus,
10 Our Christian Obligation to Care,
11 The Growing Movement toward World Union,
12 "I'm a Stranger Here Myself",
13 We Must Think Like Christians,
14 On Going to God First,
15 The Christian's Obligation to Be Joyful,
16 "It Seemed Good in Thy Sight",
17 Co-workers, Not Competitors,
18 The Essence of Beauty,
19 Free, but Not Independent,
20 Convention or Crusade?,
21 It Will Not Go Away,
22 Who Is in Debt to Whom?,
23 True Service,
24 Faith or Superstition,
25 The Logic of the Incarnation,
26 Battles Are Won Before They Are Fought,
27 We Need the Spirit's Gifts,
28 Let's Deal with Life at Its Root,
29 Faith Is a Continuous Act,
30 Deeds Are Seeds,
31 Shadows versus Reality,
32 To the Spirit-filled Man Everything Is Spiritual,
33 Let's Be Careful How We Use the Scriptures,
34 We Are What We Are Anyway,
35 God Can't Help Loving,
36 Jesus Is Victor!,
37 The "Ground of the Soul",
38 Driving with Our Brakes On,
39 Three Ways to Get What We Want,
Other Titles by A.W. Tozer,