But if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.
The Pursuit Of God is one of my favourite books despite the need for having a dictionary by my side when I read it and despite there being a number of points I still struggle and grapple to understand. Yet Tozer's depth is not read without a strong sense of his humility and passion and each chapter speaks to the mind and yet refreshes and challenges the heart.
There is today no lack of bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives.
For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God.
Following Hard After God
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart
Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted.
The evil habit of seeking God-and effectively prevents us from finding God in full revelation. In the and lies our great woe. If we omit the and we shall soon find God, and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing.
The man who has God for his treasure has all things in one. Many ordinary treasure may be denied him, or if he is allowed to have them, the enjoyment of them will be so tempered that they will never be necessary to his happiness. Or if he must see them go, one after one, he will scarcely feel a sense of loss, for having the source of all things he has in one all satisfaction, all pleasure, all delight.
The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing
The pronouns my and mine look innocent enough in print, but there constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease.
Then he should remember that this is holy business. No careless or casual dealings will suffice. Let him come to God fully determined to be heard. Let him insist that God accept his all, that He take things out of his heart and Himself reign there in power.
Removing The Veil
God wills that we should push on into presence and live our whole life there. This is to be known to us in conscious experience. It is more than a doctrine to be held; it is a life to be enjoyed every moment of every day.
There is something more serious than coldness of heart, something that may be behind that coldness and be the cause of its existence. What is it? What but the presence of a veil in our hearts? - a veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us.
There must be a work of (painful) destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgement.
Apprehending God
Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural doctrine that God can be known in personal experience. A loving personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation.
The Christian is too sincere to play with ideas for their own sake. He takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come. From the insincere man he turns away.
God has objective existence independent of and apart form any notions which we may have concerning Him. The worshipping heart does not create its object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration...
Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world but we doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word...
The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam's tragic race.
At the root of the Christian Life lies belief in the invisible. The object of the Christian's faith is unseen reality.
The Universal Presence
The truth is that while God dwells in His world He is separated from it by a gulf for ever impassable. However closely He may be identified with the work of His hands, there are and must eternally be other than He, and He is and must be antecedent to and independent of them. He is transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.
'In the beginning God...' (Gen 1:1). Not matter, for matter is not self-causing. It requires an antecedent cause, and God is that cause. Not law, for law is but a name for the course which all creation follows. That course had to be planned, and the planner is God. Not mind, for mind also is a created thing and must have a Creator behind it. In the beginning God, the uncaused cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin.
The Speaking Voice
The why of natural law is the living voice of God immanent in His creation. And this word of God which brought all worlds into being cannot be understood to mean the Bible, for it is not a written or printed word at all, but the expression of the will of God spoken into the structure of all things. This word of God is the breath of God filling the world with living potentiality. The voice of God is the most powerful force in nature, indeed the only force in nature, for all energy is here only because the power-filled word is being spoken.
A word of God once spoken continues to be spoken, as a child once born continues to be alive, or a world once created continues to exist. And those are but imperfect illustrations, for children die and worlds burn out, but the word of our God endureth forever.
If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to you. Do not come with the notion that it is a thing which you may push around at your convenience. It is more than a thing, it is a voice, a word, the very Word of the living God.
The Gaze Of The Soul
Even there (Hebrews 11:1) faith is defined functionally, not philosophically; that is, it is a statement of what faith is in operation, no what it is in essence. It assumes the presence of faith and shows what it results in, rather than what it is. We will be wise to go just that far and attempt to go no further.
Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.
Faith is the least self-regarding of the virtues. It is by its very nature scarcely conscious of its own existence. Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rest and pays no attention to itself at all.
Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow... Thus social religion is perfected when private religion is purified.
Restoring The Creator-Creature Relation
Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and bring Him nearer to our own image.
The man of God set his heart to exalt God above all; God accepted his intention as fact and acted accordingly. Not perfection, but holy intention made the difference.
Meekness And Rest
As one walks on in meekness he will be happy to let God defend him. The old struggle to defend himself is over. He has found the peace which meekness brings.
Artificiality is one curse that will drop away at the moment we kneel at Jesus' feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.
The rest he offers is the rest if meekness, the blessed relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to pretend. It will take some courage at first, but the needed grace will come as we learn that we are sharing this new and easy yoke with the strong Son of God Himself.
The Sacrament Of Living
The New Testament accepts as a matter of course that in His incarnation our Lord took upon Him a real human body, and no effort is made to steer around the downright implications of such a fact. He lived in that body here among men and never once performed a non-sacred act. His presence in human flesh sweeps away for ever the evil notion that there is about the human body something innately offensive to the Deity.
Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.
Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act. All he does is good and acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For such a man, living itself will be sacramental and the whole world a sanctuary.
No comments:
Post a Comment