The severe drought in California is God's wrath on sin: the sins of abortion, homosexuality, earth worship and other sins. California also has its fair share of evangellyfish Christians. I Kings 17: 1: "And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word." Jeremiah 14: 1-7: "The word of the LORD that came to Jeremiah concerning the dearth. Judah mourneth and the gates thereof languish; they are black unto the ground; and the cry of Jerusalem is gone up. And their nobles have sent their little ones to the waters: they came to the pits, and found no water; they returned with their vessels empty; they were ashamed and confounded, and covered their heads. Because the ground is chapt, for there was no rain in the earth, the plowman were ashamed, they covered their heads. Yea, the hind also calved in the field, and forsook it, because there was no grass. And the wild asses did stand in the high places, they snuffed up the wind like dragons; their eyes did fail, because there was no grass. O, LORD, though our iniquites testify against us, do thou it for thy name's sake: for our backslidings are many; we have sinned against thee." For those who promote the sin of homosexuality by teaching it to children in public schools: Luke 17: 2: "It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones." Hollywood also loves to promote the sin of homosexuality through TV programs and films. This is Sodom! This is Sodom! Flee California! Homosexuality is a Sin Jackson, Wyoming Brian's Dream About the United States and Africa
Because A.W. Tozer lived in the presence of God he saw clearly and he spoke as a prophet to the church. He sought for God’s honor with the zeal of Elijah and mourned with Jeremiah at the apostasy of God’s people. But he was not a prophet of despair. His writings are messages of concern. They expose the weaknesses of the church and denounce compromise. They warn and exhort. But they are messages of hope as well, for God is always there, ever faithful to restore and to fulfill His Word to those who hear and obey. Shortly before his death, Tozer wrote: “Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has heard a voice from the Throne.” I am convinced that Aiden Wilson Tozer himself was such a man. In his 1948 classic The Pursuit of God, Tozer challenged the stiff and wooden quality of many Christian lives. He noted: “Complacency is the deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people.” Indeed, Tozer believed that thirst for God was the sign of coming revival. Tozer’s passion for a deeper knowledge of God led him to study the great devotional writers of the past. “These people know God, and I want to know what they know about God and how they came to know it,” he observed. Prayer and worship were the hallmarks of his life. One biographer states that his preaching as well as his writings were simply an extension of his prayer life. Another noted that Tozer spent more time on his knees than at his desk. He called for a return to astonishment and wonder at the majesty of God. Then he added: “The God of the modern evangelical rarely astonishes anybody. He manages to stay pretty much within the constitution;very well-behaved, very denominational and very much one of us.” In modern evangelicalism, contended Tozer, we work, we have our agendas–in fact, we have almost everything except the spirit of true worship. He defined worship as a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe, astonished wonder and overpowering love in the presence of the unspeakable Majesty. He reminded the pastors, “We’re here to be worshippers first and workers only second; Out of enraptured, admiring, adoring souls God does His work. The work done by a worshipper will have eternity in it.” Tozer believed that worship rises and falls with our concept of God and that if there was one terrible disease in the modern church, it was that we do not see God as great as He is: “We’re too familiar with God. …that is why I do not believe in these half-converted cowboys who call God `the Man Upstairs’.” In the Preface to The Knowledge of the Holy, his last book, Tozer stated how important our view of God is: “The church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping men. .. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error.” Tozer addressed the state of the evangelical church even more bluntly in Keys to the Deeper Life. In a chapter entitled “No Revival Without Reformation”, he stated: “A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.” The imperative need of the day, he affirmed, was not simply revival but a radical reformation that went to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies: “Prayer for revival will prevail when it is accompanied by radical amendment of life; not before.” With revival, said Tozer, would come a renewed spirit of worship which was not the result of engineering or manipulation. It would come out of a high and holy view of God as portrayed in Scripture, not the God who has been “abridged, reduced, modified, edited, changed and amended until He is no longer the God whom Isaiah saw, high and lifted up”. Tozer called the doctrine of the Holy Spirit “buried dynamite”. Yet he always insisted that the Spirit and the Word operate in harmony. He exhorted the overzealous to a warm heart and a cool head: “The history of revivals in the Church reveals how harmful the hot head can be….These are days of great religious turmoil. Let love burn on with increasing fervour, but bring every act to the quiet test of wisdom. Keep the fire in the furnace where it belongs. An overheated chimney will create more excitement than a well-controlled furnace, but it is likely to burn the house down. Let the rule be: a hot furnace but a cool chimney.” --Walter Unger
Genesis 5: 21-24: "And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah: And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters: And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years: And Enoch walked with God: and he was not, for God took him." Hebrews 11: 5: "By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God." Jude 14 & 15: "And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him." How did Enoch walk with God? How can someone be spiritually intimate with the Lord before the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? Very little is written about Enoch. According to the Bible, Enoch lived 365 years; the last 300 years of his life Enoch walked with God. The number 365 is significant. There are 365 days in a complete year. Enoch living 365 years is a foreshadowing of the complete man of God (man of faith or man of obedience). Recently I have heard of a pastor who preached that Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, not because they sinned against God, but because they did not repent of their sin. Scripture never tells us that Adam repented of his sin or that Adam walked with God after he and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. So why was Enoch different? Enoch was born with Adamic Sin. How did Enoch walk with God? Enoch, no doubt, offered the required blood sacrifices unto the Lord for his sins and the sins of his family. This was before the Law, the Prophets and the New Testament. Not only did Enoch, by faith, offer an excellent sacrifice unto the Lord, but I believe, that Enoch truly repented of his sin and believed on the finished work of the cross before the fact. Faith in God transcends time and space. The Lamb of God was slain before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13: 8): somehow Enoch knew this truth from oral tradition or from revealed knowledge. He put his faith in the coming Messiah, died to self-will and was able to walk with God. Enoch, by faith, was translated and did not experience death. Before he was translated, his testimony was that he had pleased God. It is only by faith (obedience) that we are able to please God.
Enoch 1:9: “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones To execute judgement upon all, And to destroy all the ungodly: And to convict all flesh Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
