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Lowell Brueckner

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THE PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE PROTEST

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THE PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE PROTEST 
against the miniseries and the new movie, Son of God

A. W. Tozer said that the first step towards the downfall of the Christian Church is “a wrong answer to the
Author of  "The Knowledge of the Holy\"
question, ‘What is God like?’ and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.”

“It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God… is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity.”

The movie is said to be an evangelistic tool. However, it is essential in evangelism that God be presented rightly: “The multiple burdens of time may be lifted from (a man, but) the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another. That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably. And when the man’s laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear. UNLESS THE WEIGHT OF THE BURDEN IS FELT THE GOSPEL CAN MEAN NOTHING TO THE MAN; AND UNTIL HE SEES A VISION OF GOD HIGH AND LIFTED UP, THERE WILL BE NO WOE AND NO BURDEN. LOW VIEWS OF GOD DESTROY THE GOSPEL FOR ALL WHO HOLD THEM.


Tozer prays at the beginning of chapter one: “They that know Thee not may call upon Thee as other than Thou art, and so worship not Thee but a creature of their own fancy; therefore enlighten our minds that we may know Thee as Thou art.”

“The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.
With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life in the Spirit. The words, ‘Be still, and know that I am God,” mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper…”

“The forces of religion are making dramatic gains and the churches are more prosperous… but the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly internal… our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field.”

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us… We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God… Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God…
Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ‘What comes into your mind when you think about God?’ we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most INFLUENTIAL RELIGIOUS LEADERS think of God today, we might be able with some precision to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow.
Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God.”

“That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, OUR CREEDAL STATEMENTS ARE OF LITTLE CONSEQUENCE… Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God... A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well.”

A professing ‘Christian’, who delves into New Age and even spiritism cannot be trusted to portray a true picture of God or His Christ: “The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is – in itself a monstrous sin – and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness. Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.
A god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God. ‘You thought that I was just like you,’ said the Lord to the wicked man in the Psalm.”

“Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and that civilized peoples are therefore free from it. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind…
Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; THEY ARE THEMSELVES IDOLATROUS. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.”

“So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards declines along with it…”


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