We Must Do Something

This is from the blog A Prayer Life:

"The cross…always has its way. It wins by defeating its opponent and imposing its will upon him. It always dominates. It never compromises, never dickers nor confers, never surrenders a point for the sake of peace. It cares not for peace; it cares only to end its opposition as fast as possible. With perfect knowledge of all this, Christ said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” So the cross not only brings Christ’s life to an end, it ends also the first life, the old life, of every one of His true followers. It destroys the old pattern, the Adam pattern, in the believer’s life, and brings it to an end. Then the God who raised Christ from the dead raises the believer and a new life begins. This, and nothing less, is true Christianity… We must do something about the cross, and one of two things only we can do – flee it or die upon it."

--A.W. Tozer (1897-1963)

Many Evangelical Teachers Insist . . .

This is from the blog Glory to God Alone:

“Many evangelical teachers insist so strongly upon free, unconditional grace as to create the impression that sin is not a serious matter and that God cares very little about it! They make it seem that God is only concerned with our escaping the consequences. The gospel, then, in practical application, means little more than a way to escape the fruits of our past! But the heart that has felt the weight of its own sin and has seen the dread whiteness of the Most High God will never believe that a message of forgiveness without transformation is a message of good news. To remit a man’s past without transforming his present is to violate the moral sincerity of his own heart. To that kind of thing God will be no party! For to offer a sinner the gift of salvation based upon the work of Christ, while at the same time allowing him to retain the idea that the gift carries with it no moral implications, is to do him untold injury where it hurts him most!”

  --A. W. Tozer

A.W. Tozer on Theology

Breaking off the Greek Mindset

Textual Christianity

This is from The Magpie:

A.W. Tozer is the evangelical answer to the medieval mystics. A self-educated Christian & Missionary Alliance pastor, his many books encourage believers to enter more fully into the life of prayer and a deeper experience of God. Here is what he has to say about revival in his classic Keys to the Deeper Life (1959):

A Revival Right Now Would Be Tragic

 

A religion, even popular Christianity, could enjoy a boom altogether divorced from the transforming power of the Holy Spirit and so leave the church of the next generation worse off than it would have been if the boom had never occurred. I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with symptoms.

It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all. 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.

What Went Wrong: Textualism

 

Fundamentalism, as it spread throughout the various denominations and non-denominational groups, fell victim to its own virtues. The Word died in the hands of its friends. Verbal inspiration, for instance (a doctrine which I have always held and do now hold), soon became afflicted with rigor mortis. The voice of the prophet was silenced and the scribe captured the minds of the faithful. In large areas the religious imagination withered. An unofficial hierarchy decided what Christians were to believe. Not the Scriptures, but what the scribe thought the Scriptures meant became the Christian creed. Christian colleges, seminaries, Bible institutes, Bible conferences, popular Bible expositors all joined to promote the cult of textualism.

The doctrines were sound but something vital was missing. The tree of correct doctrine was never allowed to blossom. The voice of the turtle dove was rarely heard in the land; instead, the parrot sat on his artificial perch and dutifully repeated what he had been taught and the whole emotional tone was somber and dull. Faith, a mighty, vitalizing doctrine in the mouths of the apostles, became in the mouth of the scribe another thing altogether and power went from it. As the letter triumphed, the Spirit withdrew and textualism ruled supreme. It was the time of the believer’s Babylonian captivity.

The error of textualism is not doctrinal. It is far more subtle than that and much more difficult to discover, but its effects are just as deadly. Not its theological beliefs are at fault, but its assumptions. It assumes, for instance, that if we have the word for a thing we have the thing itself. If it is in the Bible, it is in us. If we have the doctrine, we have the experience.

The Resulting Revolt: Worldliness

 

Then came the revolt. The human mind can endure textualism just so long before it seeks a way of escape. So, quietly and quite unaware that any revolt was taking place, the masses of Fundamentalism reacted, not from the teaching of the Bible but from the mental tyranny of the scribes. With the recklessness of drowning men they fought their way up for air and struck out blindly for greater freedom of thought and for the emotional satisfaction their natures demanded and their teachers denied them. The result over the last 20 years has been a religious debauch hardly equaled since Israel worshiped the golden calf.

The separating line between the Church and the world has been all but obliterated. Aside from a few of the grosser sins, the sins of the unregenerated world are now approved by a shocking number of professedly “born-again” Christians, and copied eagerly. Young Christians take as their models the rankest kind of worldlings and try to be as much like them as possible. Religious leaders have adopted the techniques of the advertisers;
The radical element in testimony and life that once made Christians hated by the world is missing from present-day evangelicalism. Christians were once revolutionists—moral, not political—but we have lost our revolutionary character. It is no longer either dangerous or costly to be a Christian. Grace has become not free, but cheap. We are busy these days proving to the world that they can have all the benefits of the Gospel without any inconvenience to their customary way of life. It’s “all this, and heaven too.”

Pray for Reformation, Not Revival

 

For this reason it is useless for large companies of believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament pattern there can be no true revival.

We must have a reformation within the Church. To beg for a flood of blessing to come upon a backslidden and disobedient Church is to waste time and effort. A new wave of religious interest will do no more than add numbers to churches that have no intention to own the Lordship of Jesus and come under obedience to His commandments. God is not interested in increased church attendance unless those who attend amend their ways and begin to live holy lives.

Prayer for revival will prevail when it is accompanied by radical amendment of life; not before. All-night prayer meetings that are not preceded by practical repentance may actually be displeasing to God. “To obey is better than sacrifice.” We must return to New Testament Christianity, not in creed only but in complete manner of life as well. Separation, obedience, humility, simplicity, gravity, self-control, modesty, cross-bearing: these all must again be made a living part of the total Christian concept and be carried out in everyday conduct. We must cleanse the temple of the hucksters and the money changers and come fully under the authority of our risen Lord once more. And this applies to this writer and to this publisher as well as to everyone that names the name of Jesus. Then we can pray with confidence and expect true revival to follow.

A Christian Cult 
I Should go to Dairy Queen More Often
Preach the Gospel; If Necessary, Use Words 

A Definition of Worship

This is from Reved's Blog:

Planning and leading worship services for the church week in and week out can sometimes drain the essence out of worship itself.  Worship becomes something I do, an act of professionalism rather than encounter with my heavenly Father.  As Presbyterians are known for doing things “decently and in order,” our worship often takes on a rehearsed tone, and “passionate worship” is not how visitors would typically describe the service.

So it is that I came upon the following by A.W. Tozer in his book, The Purpose of Man: Designed to Worship.  May this serve as a corrective understanding for all of us as we prepare to enter into worship again:

A Definition of Worship

First, worship is to feel in the heart. I use that word “feel” boldly and without apology. I do not believe that we are to be a feeling-less people. I came into the kingdom of God the old-fashioned way. I believe that I know something of the emotional life that goes with being converted; so I believe in feeling. I do not think we should follow feeling, but I believe that if there is no feeling in our heart, then we are dead. If you woke up in the morning and suddenly had no feeling in your right arm, you would call a doctor.  You would dial with your left hand because your right hand was dead. Anything that has no feeling in it, you can be quite sure is dead. Real worship, among other things, is a feeling in the heart.

Worship is to feel in the heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe.  Worship will humble a person as nothing else can. The egotistical, self-important man cannot worship God any more than the arrogant devil can worship God. There must be humility in the heart before there can be worship.

When the Holy Spirit comes and opens heaven until people stand astonished at what they see, and in astonished wonderment confess His uncreated loveliness in the presence of that ancient mystery, then you have worship. If it is not mysterious, there can be no worship; if I can understand God, then I cannot worship God.

I will never get on my knees and say, “Holy, holy, holy” to that which I can figure out. That which I can explain will never overawe me, never fill me with astonishment, wonder or admiration. But in the presence of that most ancient mystery, that unspeakable majesty, which the philosophers have called a mysterium tremendum, which we who are God’s children call “our Father which art in heaven,” I will bow in humble worship. This attitude ought to be present in our church today.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was one of the greatest minds that ever lived. When he was only in his teens, he wrote advanced books on mathematics, astonishing people. He became a great philosopher, mathematician and thinker.

One night, he met God, and his whole world was changed. He wrote down his experience on a piece of paper while it was still fresh on his mind. According to his testimony, from 10:30 pm to about 12:30 am, he was overwhelmed by the presence of God. To express what he was experiencing, he wrote one word, “fire.”

Pascal was neither a fanatic nor an ignorant farmer with hayseeds back of his ears. He was a great intellectual. God broke through all that and for two solid hours, he experienced something he could holy characterize as fire.

Following his experience, he prayed; and to keep as a reminder of that experience, he wrote it out: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and of the learned.” This was not a prayer for somebody who reads his prayers; this was not formal religious ritual. This was the ecstatic utterance of a man who had two wonderful, awesome hours in the presence of God. “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob not of the philosophers and of the learned. God of Jesus Christ… Thy God shall be my God… He is only found by thy ways taught in the Gospel… Righteous Father, the world has not known Thee, but I have known Thee. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy…” And he put an “Amen” after it, folded it up, put it in his shirt pocket and kept it there.

That man could explain many mysteries in the world, but he was awestruck before the wonder of wonders, even Jesus Christ. His worship flowed out of his encounter with that “fire” and not out of his understanding of who and what God is.

Tozer, A. W. The Purpose of Man: Designed to Worship. (Grand Rapids, MI; Baker House Books) pg. 108-110.

Blaise Pascal

Illumination of the Spirit

This is from the blog a broken man:

I have been making my way through several of A.W. Tozer’s books lately. Never in my life have I read a book so profound, written by a mere human man. Tozer is often described as a modern-day prophet, a man used by God to bring about dramatic change in an otherwise flippant and godless generation. Here are several quotes that I studied long and hard. I hope they speak to your heart as they did to mine.

“The inability of human reason as an organ of divine knowledge arises not from its own weakness but from its unfittedness for the task by its own nature. It was not given as an organ by which to know God. The doctrine of the inability of the human mind and the need for divine illumination is so fully developed in the New Testament that it is nothing short of astonishing that we should have gone so far astray about the whole thing. Fundamentalism has stood aloof from the liberal in self-conscious superiority and has on its own part fallen into error, the error of textualism, which is simply orthodoxy without the Holy Spirit.

"Everywhere among conservatives we find persons who are Bible-taught but not Spirit-taught. They conceive truth to be something that they can grasp with the mind. If a man hold to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, he is thought to possess divine truth. But it does not follow. There is no truth apart from the Spirit. The most brilliant intellect may be imbecilic when confronted with the mysteries of God. For a man to understand revealed truth requires an act of God equal to the original act that inspired the text.”


“The belief that the human mind is the supreme authority in the judgement of truth. . . . is the confidence in the ability of the human mind to do that which the Bible declares it was never created to do and consequently is wholly incapable of doing.”

“But for the searching of the Scriptures and true knowledge of them, an honorable life is needed, and a pure soul, and that virtue which is according to Christ; so that the intellect guiding its path by it, may be able to attain what it desires, and to comprehend it, in so far as it is accessible to human nature to learn concerning the word of God. For without a pure mind and a modeling of the life after the saints, a man could not possibly comprehend the words of the saints. . . . He that would comprehend the mind of those who speak of God needs begin by washing and cleansing his soul.”


--A.W. Tozer

Hearing the Voice of God

This is from Truth2Freedom's Blog:

. . . There are two questions before us. The first question is: How many of us are willing to hear the voice of God? Jesus said, Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate (Matthew 23:34, 37-38). Were these people willing to hear the voice of God? Thousands of years before Christ was born in Bethlehem, the Holy Spirit said, Wisdom calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice in the public squares; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out, in the gateways of the city she makes her speech: “How long will you simple ones love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge? If you had responded to my rebuke, I would have poured out my heart to you and made my thoughts known to you. But since you rejected me when I called and no one gave heed when I stretched out my hand, since you ignored all my advice and would not accept my rebuke, I in turn will laugh at your disaster; I will mock when calamity overtakes you” (Proverbs 1:20-26).

Verse
The LORD came and stood there, calling as at the other times, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ Then Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening.’
1 Samuel 3:10

Thought
We all delight in hearing God’s voice in words of forgiveness and comfort. But are we willing to hear His voice in unvarnished truth and naked honesty? ‘Speak, for your servant is listening’ or are we?

Prayer
Lord, there seem to be a thousand voices calling to me in this world. Help me to discern Your voice above them all and obediently listen!

A. W. Tozer
http://www.cmalliance.org/devotions/tozer

The Spirit Illuminates

This is from the blog Three Iron Nails:

Your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

[1 Corinthians 2:5]

When we study the New Testament record, we see plainly that Christ’s conflict was with the theological rationalists of His day.

John’s gospel record is actually a long, inspired, passionately outpoured account trying to save us from evangelical rationalism—the doctrine that says the text is enough.

Divine revelation is the ground upon which we stand. The Bible is the book of God, and I stand for it with all my heart; but before I can be saved, there must be illumination, penitence, renewal, inward deliverance.

In our Christendom, we have tried to ease many people into the kingdom but they have never been renewed within their own beings. The Apostle Paul told the Corinthians that their faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God! There is a difference.

We must insist that conversion to Christ is a miraculous act of God by the Holy Spirit—it must be wrought in the Spirit. There must be an inward illumination!

Lord, I pray for my family, neighbors, and friends who do not yet know You. Illumine their hearts and minds by Your Holy Spirit.

~ Aiden Wilson Tozer ~

Motive is Everything

"It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it.  The motive is everything."

--A.W. Tozer

A.W. Tozer on Entertainment and Amusements

Entertainment and amusements in the church are a counterfeit to the Presence of God.

The World is the Battleground
A Christian Cult
Enmity:  True Christians versus False Christians

Ways that Demons Enter People:  Entertainment

The Cult of Imitation

A.W. Tozer

This is from the blog wordsoffaithandgooddoctrine:

“The first cult dominating Christianity today is to imitate what we see outside of the Church. This is a characteristic of immaturity, like a little toddler who sees someone do something and tries to imitate it without knowing what it really means. The secular media in America sets the standards for us in the Church. Churches now have 'programs' directed by 'emcees'. This is directly from the world of entertainment. This sacred cow of the world has been brought into the sanctuary of the living God. The Church naively imitates what it sees in the world without any regard to consequence.

"There was a time when the Church set the standard for music. Then the world imitated the Church. Men like Beethoven, Mozart and Handel set the whole world singing, and the focus of their music was the Church. We no longer initiate our music; rather, we pipe in the music of the world around us. Now we go tramping out into the world in order to import into the Church the sounds of the world. We offer this 'swine' on the altar of Jehovah. What blasphemy. We have so much more to offer God. Importing the culture around us instead of adoring the nature and character of Christ within us is the sad reality of today’s Christian.

"Our literature is no different. If there is a best seller out in the world, you can be sure it will be imitated in the Church eventually. Instead of writing great literature that honors God, the Church and the things of heaven, we are duplicating the dreary, morally questionable literature of the world. It seems to be a trophy to some writers to see how close to the edge they can get and not fall over. I have a news bulletin. They are not in danger of falling over the cliff; they have already fallen and do not know it yet.

"The reason for this is that Christianity is greatly misunderstood even by those who claim to be Christians. True Christianity is a mystery, a wonder, something alien and transcendent in this world. The Christianity of the New Testament is incomprehensible to the world. There is absolutely no way to build a bridge between the world’s standards and the Church’s standards.

"Some say it is a great honor and a mark of achievement to write a book acceptable both to the world and to the Church. Something is wrong here. I cannot find anything in the Scriptures or even in Church history that in any way suggests compatibility between the world and the Church. The taste of the Church should be infinitely higher and greater than the world’s. What satisfies the Church should in no way satisfy the world. The true Christian has an insatiable appetite for Christ and the things of Christ, while the world has no such appetite.

"Christ stands alone, and He does not imitate; neither does He court the world in a lame attempt to win the world. Many evangelical churches are closer to the world than to New Testament standards in almost every regard.”

Excerpt from The Dangers of a Shallow Faith by  A.W. Tozer

A Christian Cult 
Apostasy - Isaac Penington 
George Fox Warning False Christians

The Saint Must Walk Alone

Elijah in the wilderness being fed by ravens

The Saint Must Walk Alone

The Weariness of the Prophet Elijah
The Prophet
A Prophet's Eyes

The World Is In The Church

This is from the blog wordsoffaithandgooddoctrine:

“I do not think I can say too many times that the world is too much with us. I have often wondered why, after getting victory over the world, anybody would want to court the world and allow it back in his or her life. It must be understood most emphatically that the world around us is in conflict with the Word within us. The two are absolutely incompatible. Jesus made it plain when He said, “In the world, but . . .” By that, He meant that although we were in the world, the world was not in us.

The evidence is all around us that it is difficult to break the tyranny of the world. Once the world gets a hold on us, it refused to let go. And it is not hard to see this in, for example, the impulse for entertainment and fun. We certainly live in a fun generation. Unless we can have fun, and unless that thing is going to entertain us, we will wander off to something that will. I am not surprised that this is out in the world, but I am greatly disappointed that it has come into the Church.”

– A.W. Tozer

“I’m embarrassed to be part of the church of Jesus today, because I believe it’s an embarrassment to a holy God. Most of our joy is clapping our hands and having a good time, and then afterwards we’re talking all the dribble of the world. Oh, to be lost in Him, to be consumed in Him.”

– Leonard Ravenhill

“You have to go into the world which is like a great leper colony; but if you carry Christ with you, you will never catch the world’s diseases. A man may be worth ever so much money, he will never get worldly if he keeps Christ on his heart. A man may have to tug and toil for his livelihood, and be very poor, he will never be discontented and murmuring if he lives close to Christ. O you who have to handle the world, see to it that you handle the Master more than the world! Some of you have to work with drunk and swearing men; others are cast into the midst of frivolities—O take my Master with you—and sin’s plagues can have no influence upon your moral nature!”

– Charles Spurgeon

“A whole new generation of Christians has come up believing that it is possible to ‘accept’ Christ without forsaking the world.”

– A.W. Tozer

James 4:4:  "Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God."

1 John 2:15-16:  "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."

Romans 12:2:  "And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."

Titus 2:11-12:  "For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world."

The Unpopularity of Jesus and His Doctrines

This is from the blog Christian Praise and Worship in Sermons and Songs:

A. W. Tozer Sermon – The Unpopularity of Jesus and His Doctrines

A.W. Tozer playlist: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=66987CD6E419E258

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

An Open Letter to John MacArthur From A.W. Tozer: He Being Dead Yet Speaketh

A.W. Tozer (1897-1963)

This is from CharismaNews:

Editor's Note: This article is an excerpt from God's Pursuit of Man by A.W. Tozer and used by permission of WingSpread Publishers.

That every Christian can be and should be filled with the Holy Spirit would hardly seem to be a matter for debate among Christians. ... I want here boldly to assert that it is my happy belief that every Christian can have a copious outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a measure far beyond that received at conversion, and I might also say, far beyond that enjoyed by the rank and file of orthodox believers today.

It is important that we get this straight, for until doubts are removed, faith is impossible. God will not surprise a doubting heart with an effusion of the Holy Spirit, nor will He fill anyone who has doctrinal questions about the possibility of being filled.

In light of this, it will be seen how empty and meaningless is the average church service today. All the means are in evidence; the one ominous weakness is the absence of the Spirit’s power. ... The power from on high is neither known nor desired by pastor or people. This is nothing less than tragic, and all the more so because it falls within the field of religion, where the eternal destinies of men are involved.

Fundamentalism has stood aloof from the liberal in self-conscious superiority and has on its own part fallen into error, the error of textualism, which is simply orthodoxy without the Holy Ghost. Everywhere among conservatives we find persons who are Bible-taught but not Spirit-taught. They conceive truth to be something which they can grasp with the mind.

If a man holds to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, he is thought to possess divine truth. But it does not follow. There is no truth apart from the Spirit. The most brilliant intellect may be imbecilic when confronted with the mysteries of God. For a man to understand revealed truth requires an act of God equal to the original act which inspired the text. ... "Now we have received, not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things which are freely given us of God.”

For the textualism of our times is based upon the same premise as the old line rationalism, that is, the belief that the human mind is the supreme authority in the judgment of truth. Or otherwise stated, it is confidence in the ability of the human mind to do that which the Bible declares it was never created to do and consequently is wholly incapable of doing.Philosophical rationalism is honest enough to reject the Bible flatly. Theological rationalism rejects it while pretending to accept it and in so doing puts out its own eyes.

Few there are who without restraint will open their whole heart to the blessed Comforter. He has been and is so widely misunderstood that the very mention of His name in some circles is enough to frighten many people into resistance.

It is no use to deny that Christ was crucified by persons who would today be called fundamentalists. This should prove to be disquieting if not downright distressing to us who pride ourselves on our orthodoxy. An unblessed soul filled with the letter of truth may actually be worse off than a pagan kneeling before a fetish. We are saved only when our intellects are indwelt by the loving fire that came at Pentecost. For the Holy Spirit is not a luxury, not something added now and again to produce a deluxe type of Christian once in a generation. No. He is for every child of God a vital necessity, and that He fill and indwell His people is more than a languid hope. It is rather an inescapable imperative.

Now the Bible teaches that there is something in God which is like emotion. ... God has said certain things about Himself, and these furnish all the grounds we require. “The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing” (Zeph. 3:17). This is but one verse among thousands which serve to form our rational picture of what God is like, and tell us plainly that God feels something like our love, like our joy, and what He feels makes Him act very much as we would in a similar situation; He rejoices over His loved ones with joy and singing.

Here is emotion on as high a plain as it can ever be seen, emotion flowing out of the heart of God Himself. Feeling, then, is not the degenerate son of unbelief that is often painted by some of our Bible teachers. Our ability to feel is one of the marks of our divine origin. We need not be ashamed of either tears or laughter. The Christian stoic who has crushed his feelings is only two-thirds of a man; an important third part has been repudiated. Holy feeling had an important place in the life of our Lord. “For the joy that was set before Him” He endured the cross and despised its shame. He pictured Himself crying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.”

The work of the Holy Spirit is, among other things, to rescue the redeemed man’s emotions, to restring his harp and open again the wells of sacred joy which have been stopped up by sin.

Aiden Wilson Tozer (April 21, 1897–May 12, 1963) was an American Christian pastor, preacher, author, magazine editor and spiritual mentor.

Reprinted from God's Pursuit of Man by A.W. Tozer, copyright © 1950, 1978 by Lowell Tozer. Previously titled The Divine Conquest and The Pursuit of Man. Used by permission of WingSpread Publishers, a division of Zur Ltd., 800.884.4571.

God's Pursuit of Man is protected by copyright and may not be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, translated, transmitted or distributed in any way.

50 Year Old Prophecy from Tozer
The Old Cross and the New
John MacArthur Rebuked by a Prophet

Prophetic Vision:  Jesus, John MacArthur & Ozzy Osbourne

The Loneliness of the Christian

"The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from that of the unregenerate world. His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others of his kind, others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences he is forced to walk alone.

"The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way.

"The man [or woman] who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over-serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens.

"He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.

"It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else."

--A.W. Tozer

The Loneliness of the Christian
I am a Stranger in the Earth
A.W. Tozer Quote

“If ye were not strangers here, the dogs of the world would not bark at you.”

--Samuel Rutherford

Physical Sight and Spiritual Sight

Luke 17: 20-21:  “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:  Neither shall they say,  Lo here! or, lo there!  for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

Luke 17: 30:  “Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.”  This Scripture does not say, when the Son of man is seen or observed (revelation knowledge is not the same thing as physical sight).

If someone reads the Bible, a newspaper article or a book with their physical eyes, this is not revelation.  When you come across a certain Scripture or a sentence in a newspaper article or a book and something is quickened in your spirit by the Holy Ghost—this is revelation from God.  The Lord is shining His light (revelation) upon that Scripture or that sentence—it may even be one word—so that we can better understand it.  Some people call this a Rhema Word or the Spoken Word.

“The kingdom of God cometh not with [physical] observation.”  The kingdom of God comes to purified vessels and is perceived by the spirit by the Holy Ghost.  It is a spiritual kingdom; it is not a physical kingdom that you can see with your physical eyes.

The Second Coming is not a physical Jesus coming through some physical clouds for His bride to be seen through the physical eyes.  The Second Coming is the Holy Ghost revealing the Lordship of Jesus Christ to purified vessels (dead to self) who can see with their spiritual eyes.  These people are not into the letter, but the Spirit, because the letter kills and the Spirit gives life.

Let’s say that the natural, unsaved man can see for twenty miles.  Your basic believer in Christ should be able to see for fifty miles (I am speaking figuratively).  The Christian believer is spiritually alive and should have spiritual insights that the unbeliever cannot have because the unbeliever is dead in his trespasses and sins.   Your basic prophetic Christian should be able to see one hundred miles or five hundred miles ahead of him--or you could say that the prophet can see five years or ten years or five hundred years into the future (this is why prophets are hated so much and are thought to be crazy—they see things way before other people see things and their lives and words convict people of sin).

Revelation from God is spiritual, but the Lord uses our physical bodies/senses/eyesight for His will.  The physical body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.  Our physical body/temple is used by the Lord, so that He can reveal His will to us, so that we can obey His will--this is how we develop and strengthen our spiritual sight.

In 2007, I bought my first pair of reading glasses.  As I get older, my physical sight (for reading) is growing weaker, but my spiritual sight is growing stronger.  I must decrease, so that He can increase.

A Prophet's Eyes
The Second Coming
The Kingdom of Heaven
The Prophet by A.S. Pushkin 
Breaking off the Greek mindset

“The man whom Christ illuminates with His message has eyes, and that resolves the old difficulty of blindness; but he must use his new eyes in a blind world, and that creates another problem. The world in its blindness resents his claim to sight and will go to any lengths to discredit the claim. The truth of Christ brings assurance and so removes the former problem of fear and uncertainty, but that assurance will be interpreted as bigotry by the fear-ridden multitudes. And sooner or later this misunderstanding will get the man of God into trouble. And so with many other of the blessed benefits of the gospel. As long as we remain in this twisted world, these benefits will create their own problems. We cannot escape them.
But no instructed Christian will complain. He will rather accept his problems as opportunities for the exercise of spiritual virtues. He will turn them into useful disciplines for the purification of his life and will rejoice that he is permitted to suffer with his Lord. For however severe may be a Christian’s trials, they cannot last very long, and the blessed fruit they bear will last while the ages endure.”

--A. W. Tozer

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662

Back in 2002 this guy picked me up while I was hitchhiking through Humboldt, Iowa.  A few months later he saw me walking through Estherville, Iowa and showed me Ezekiel 21: 27 (which is very significant to me).  He later sent me a letter and told me about Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and a book written about him by Karen Armstrong.  I have read maybe one page of Pascal’s Pensees.

Armstrong writes:  “On the night of November 23, 1654, Blaise himself had an experience which lasted ‘from about half-past ten in the evening till about half an hour after midnight’ (November 24) and which showed him that his faith had been too remote and academic.  After his death, his ‘Memorial’ of this revelation was found stitched into his doublet:

          FIRE

          ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob’

          Not of philosophers and scholars.

          Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.

          God of Jesus Christ.

          God of Jesus Christ.

          My God and your God.

          ‘Thy God shall be my God.’

          The world forgotten and everything except God.

          He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels.

“This was not the God of the philosophers, but the God of revelation.”

Armstrong later writes:  “Faith, he insisted was not a rational assent based on common sense.  It was a gamble.  It was impossible to prove God exists, but equally impossible for reason to disprove His existence . . . This gamble is not entirely irrational, however.  To opt for God is a win-win solution.  In choosing to believe in God, Pascal continued, the risk is finite, but the gain is infinite.  As the Christian progresses in the faith, he or she will become aware of a continuous enlightenment, an awareness of God’s presence that is a sure sign of salvation.  It is no good relying on external authority; each Christian is on his own . . . Faith is not intellectual certainty, but a leap into the dark and an experience that brings a moral enlightenment.”

Ezekiel 21: 27:  "I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him."

Genesis 49: 10:  "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be."

Blaise Pascal
Great Creation Scientists: Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
The Computer, Iowa State University and Jane Smiley
Book Review:  High Plains Drifter 
A Sword is Sharpened



A.W. Tozer on Blaise Pascal's "Fire" from Tozer's book Whatever Happened To Worship?:

Page 91:  "Were these the expressions of a fanatic, an extremist?

"No.  Pascal's mind was one of the greatest.  But the living God had broken through and beyond all that was human and intellectual and philosophical.  The astonished Pascal could only describe in one word the visitation in his spirit:  'Fire!'

"Understand that this was not a statement in sentences for others to read.  It was the ecstatic utterance of a yielded man during two awesome hours in the presence of his God.

"There was no human engineering or manipulation there.  There was only wonder and awe and adoration wrought by the presence of the Holy Spirit of God as Pascal worshiped.

"What we need among us is a genuine visitation of the Spirit.  We need a sudden bestowment of the spirit of worship among God's people."

A.W. Tozer Quote

This is my reply to a comment that was recently made on "A Dream About Egypt":

The spiritual man judges all things. This is not judgmental and arrogant. We are called to judge righteous or spiritual judgment. A Christian that is not spiritual cannot judge spiritual things.

In my Christian walk, many sins have died out in my life. These sins do not beset me anymore--it is an overcoming life that we have in Christ. If people are not overcoming sin in their lives and they say that they have been saved for ten or more years, then I have a real problem with their salvation. It has been a long time since the Lord has convicted me of sin. This is the overcoming power of God in my life. Glory to God in the Highest!

Salvation is just one of many ministries in the Body of Christ. Salvation is not my ministry--unless you take into account that I am trying to save Christians from their milk bottles.

The Lord called me out of the church (church on Sunday) back in 1991. My life has to stand for something. My life would not glorify God if I continued to fellowship with lukewarm Christians when the Lord told me to separate myself from them.

"Come out from among them and be ye separate."

There is a reason why John the Baptist camped out on the other side of the Jordan River. There is a reason why the Lord has had me hitchhike the highways of America these past 15 years. I meet all kinds of believers and unbelievers every day. Either people will feed off of my life in Christ or else they won't. My life of obedience to the Lord IS the sermon.

If the Lord shows me judgment on America, then this is what I speak. "My Father works and I work." I only do what I see my Father do.

“The fact is that, we are not producing saints. We are making converts to an effete type of Christianity, that bears little resemblance to that of the New Testament. The average so-called Bible Christian of our times is but a shallow display of true sainthood. Yet, we put millions of dollars behind ‘movements’ to perpetuate this lower form of religion and attack the man who dares to challenge the wisdom of it.”

--A.W. Tozer

Effete: “having lost character, courage, strength, stamina, or vitality.”

--Webster’s Third New International Dictionary

A Dream About Egypt
Shiloh
God's Chosen Ones Don't Go To Church

_____


“There are wise men in heaven that could not read or write when they were on earth, and there are learned fools in hell that had degrees after their names like the tail of a kite. Man is a moral wanderer in this present world but he becomes a moral fool when he has shut out the voice of God.”

--A.W. Tozer

Pagan Christianity? by Frank Viola and George Barna

Pagan Christianity?
Exploring The Roots of our Church Practices

By Frank Viola and George Barna



Page 201: Four Stages of Theological Education

“Throughout church history there have been four stages of theological education. They are: episcopal, monastic, scholastic, and seminarian (pastoral).”

Scholastic

Page 204: “Contemporary theology cut its teeth on the abstraction of Greek philosophy. University academics adopted an Aristotelian model of thinking that centered on rational knowledge and logic. The dominating drive in scholastic theology was the assimilation and communication of knowledge. (For this reason, the Western mind has always been fond of creedal formulations, doctrinal statements, and other bloodless abstractions.)

“One of the most influential professors in the shaping of contemporary theology was Peter Abelard (1079-1142). Abelard is partly responsible for giving us ‘modern’ theology. His teaching set the table and prepared the menu for scholastic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

“Distinguished by Abelard, the school of Paris emerged as the model for all universities to follow. Abelard applied Aristotelian logic to revealed truth, though even he understood the tension between the two. . . He also gave the word theology the meaning it has today. (Before him, this word was only used to describe pagan beliefs.)

“Taking his cue from Aristotle, Abelard mastered the pagan philosophical art of dialectic—the logical disputation of truth. He applied this art to the Scriptures. Christian theological education never recovered from Abelard’s influence. Athens is still in its bloodstream. Aristotle, Abelard, and Aquinas all believed that reason was the gateway to divine truth. So from its beginnings, Western university education involved the fusion of pagan and Christian elements.”

Seminarian

Page 205: “Seminary theology grew out of the scholastic theology that was taught in the universities. As we have seen, this theology was based on Aristotle’s philosophical system. Seminary theology was dedicated to the training of professional ministers. Its goal was to produce seminary-trained religious specialists. It taught the theology—not of the early bishop, monk, or professor—but of the professionally ‘qualified’ minister. This is the theology that prevails in the contemporary seminary.”

Page 206: “Concerning the seminary, we might say that Peter Abelard laid the egg and Thomas Aquinas hatched it. Aquinas had the greatest influence on contemporary theological training. In 1879, his work was endorsed by a papal bull as an authentic expression of doctrine to be studied by all students of theology. Aquinas’s main thesis was that God is known through human reason. He ‘preferred the intellect to the heart as the organ for arriving at truth.’ Thus the more highly trained people’s reason and intellect, the better they will know God. Aquinas borrowed this idea from Aristotle. And that is the underlying assumption of many—if not most—contemporary seminaries.

“The teaching of the New Testament is that God is Spirit, and as such, He is known by revelation (spiritual insight) to one’s human spirit. Reason and intellect can cause us to know about God. And they help us to communicate what we know. But they fall short in giving us spiritual revelation. The intellect is not the gateway for knowing the Lord deeply. Neither are the emotions. In the words of A.W. Tozer: ‘Divine truth is of the nature of spirit and for that reason can be received only by spiritual revelation. . . . God’s thoughts belong to the world of spirit, man’s to the world of intellect, and while spirit can embrace intellect, the human intellect can never comprehend spirit. . . . Man by reason cannot know God; he can only know about God. . . . Man’s reason is a fine instrument and useful within its field. It was not given as an organ by which to know God.’”

Page 207: “Today, Protestants and Catholics alike draw upon Aquinas’s work, using his outline for their theological studies. Aquinas’s crowning work, Summa Theologica (The Sum of All Theology), is the model used in virtually all theological classes today—whether Protestant or Catholic.”

Page 208: “Without a doubt, Aquinas is the father of contemporary theology. His influence spread to the Protestant seminaries through the Protestant scholastics. The tragedy is that Aquinas relied so completely on Aristotle’s method of logic chopping when he expounded on holy writ. . . . Regardless of how much we wish to deny it, contemporary theology is a blending of Christian thought and pagan philosophy.”

*****

As a seventeen-year-old atheist, my bible was Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Being an atheist and embracing Aristotle just made sense.

Revelation from God is superior to reason; Christ is superior to Aristotle and Aquinas.

“On this rock [of revelation knowledge—not reason] I will build my church and the gates of hell [the strategies of hell] shall not prevail against it.”