Recent Posts
Lowell Brueckner

Enter your email address:


Delivered by FeedBurner

A Transforming Vision of God

Labels:



If A. W. Tozer was right, stating that the Church was in Babylonian captivity in the middle of the 20th Century, then where is it now? I was a young boy at that time and I can testify today of a spiritual state that none of us in those days would have believed possible. The Church is in a free-fall, tumbling rapidly towards total apostasy. Tozer spoke of a low concept of God, but I, and others, are now speaking about idolatry, worshiping gods conceived in the minds of individuals. Although they may quote texts from the Bible, they have joined those texts with psychological ideology, mixed in dreams and visions, and have conjured gods and christs, who they can manipulate, foreign to the general tenor of Scripture.

Now, anyone can tear down and destroy… and destruction of that which is built upon deceit and humanism is necessary… but it takes an anointed man like Tozer to re-build. He offers hope and demonstrates biblically how the walls can be restored! And we may do likewise, for while the general trend of the visible church (Do not eliminate Evangelicals, Pentecostals and Charismatics from that number!) today is downward, God is calling forth an honest and sincere people, who are hungry for truth and reality. The rapture may take place before too long and these are preparing for the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. Let’s follow Tozer’s six steps to a knowledge of the Holy God (because they are biblical steps) and experience in our times another, and perhaps final, move of the Spirit of God. 
A. W. Tozer

Allow me to explain briefly that the paragraphs copied below are excerpts from the final chapter of The Knowledge of the Holy:

“When viewed from the perspective of eternity, the most critical need of this hour may well be that the Church should be brought back from her long Babylonian captivity and the name of God be glorified in her again as of old… What can we plain Christians do to bring back the departed glory? Is there some secret we may learn? Is there a formula for personal revival we can apply to the present situation, to our own situation? The answer to these questions is yes.

Yet the answer may easily disappoint some persons, for it is anything but profound… The secret is an open one which the wayfaring man may read. It is simply the old and ever-new counsel: acquaint thyself with God. To regain her lost power the Church must see heaven opened and have a transforming vision of God.


But the God we must see is not the utilitarian God who is having such a run of popularity today, whose chief claim to men’s attention is His ability to bring them success in their various undertakings and who for that reason is being cajoled and flattered by everyone who wants a favor. The God we must learn to know is the Majesty in the heavens, God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, the only wise God our Saviour. He it is that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, who stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in, who bringeth out His starry host by number and calleth them all by name through the greatness of His power, who seeth the works of man as vanity, who putteth no confidence in princes and asks no counsel of kings.

Knowledge of such a Being cannot be gained by study alone. It comes by a wisdom the natural man knows nothing of, neither can know, because it is spiritually discerned. To know God is at once the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world. It is easy because the knowledge is not won by hard mental toil, but is something freely given. As sunlight falls free on the open field, so the knowledge of the holy God is a free gift to men who are open to receive it. But this knowledge is difficult because there are conditions to be met and the obstinate nature of fallen man does not take kindly to them.

Let me present a brief summary of these conditions as taught by the Bible and repeated through the centuries by the holiest, sweetest saints the world has ever known:

First, we must forsake our sins…

Second, there must be an utter committal of the whole life to Christ in faith…

Third, there must be a reckoning of ourselves to have died unto sin and to be alive unto God in Christ Jesus, followed by a throwing open of the entire personality to the inflow of the Holy Spirit…

Fourth, we must boldly repudiate the cheap values of the fallen world…

Fifth, we must practice the art of long and loving meditation upon the majesty of God… We may also need… to protest the frivolous character of much that passes for Christianity among us. By this we may for a time lose friends and gain a passing reputation for being holier-than-thou; but no man who permits the expectation of unpleasant consequences to influence him in a matter like this is fit for the kingdom of God…

Sixth, as the knowledge of God becomes more wonderful, greater service to our fellow men will become for us imperative…”


0 comments:

Post a Comment