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Lowell Brueckner

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The Faithfulness of God

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Among the reasons that A. W. Tozer is one of my favorite authors is because his writings are balanced. He is not hyper-Calvinistic, nor ultra-Arminian. He does not arrive at conclusions, strictly by following logic, but is faithful to the flow of the biblical text. In other words, he does not take a pet doctrine and follow it to other deductions, saying, for example, “All right, if my first premise is right, then it follows logically that the second, third, fourth and fifth, must also be true.” Tozer understood well that the Bible is the product of divine thoughts, well above those that a man can imagine or reach, and for that reason, he accepted the Scripture, as it states. This chapter of his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, is a good example of his theology.        L. Brueckner

A. W. Tozer
The Faithfulness of God

It is a good thing to give thanks unto Thee and to sing praises unto Thy name, O Most High, to show forth Thy loving-kindness in the morning and Thy faithfulness every night. As Thy Son while on earth was loyal to Thee, His Heavenly Father, so now in heaven He is faithful to us, His earthly brethren; and in this knowledge we press on with every confident hope for all the years and centuries yet to come. Amen.

As emphasized earlier, God’s attributes are not isolated traits of His character but facets of His unitary being. They are not things-in-themselves; they are, rather, thoughts by which we think of God aspects of a perfect whole, names given to whatever we know to be true of the Godhead.

To have a correct understanding of the attributes it is necessary that we see them all as one. We can think of them separately but they cannot be separated. “All attributes assigned to God cannot differ in reality, by reason of the perfect simplicity of God, although we in divers ways use of God divers words,” says Nicholas of Cusa. “Whence, although we attribute to God sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, sense, reason and intellect, and so forth, according to the divers significations of each word, yet in Him sight is not other than hearing, or tasting, or smelling, or touching, or feeling, or understanding. And so all theology is said to be stablished in a circle, because any one of His attributes is affirmed of another.”

Ten Shekels and a Shirt

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To be sure, this is a very personal opinion, but the message that I am posting today is the most important one that I have heard in the last 50 years. It moved me deeply and greatly affirmed my position, concerning every Christian’s purpose in this life. It also influenced my presentation of the gospel. Please read this message, praying that God will anoint your ears to receive the immense truth that Paris Reidhead presents.

Ten Shekels and a Shirt was one of the first articles that I posted, when we opened this blog in 2011, and since then, we have offered hundreds more. Possibly, many of our readers of Call to Commitment have not read it. For this reason, I am preparing it anew, to bring it to the attention of every one of you. I am adding Reidhead’s account of how his message came to be preached many years ago.

How this Message Came To Be

Paris Reidhead
In over fifty years of Bible teaching and preaching "Ten Shekels and a Shirt" is the only message that I feel constrained to explain how it came to be preached. During a Bethany Fellowship Summer Conference in the mid-sixties I was preparing to speak at the Tuesday morning Bible hour. Upon returning to my room after breakfast to meditate and pray about the message for that morning hour, I felt strangely impressed that I could not deliver the message that had been prepared for the session.

Instead, I felt that there was some other message that was needed which I was to bring. After prayer, the message that came to mind was one on which I had begun preparation for the ministry at the church in New York City of which I was pastor at that time. My notes were not with me, but were in a file folder in my study. An empty envelope was on the desk in my room, on the back of which I wrote the scripture texts to be used and one or two ideas that came to mind. With the envelope in my Bible marking Judges, Chapter 17, and myself utterly cast upon the Lord, I went to the auditorium where between four and five hundred people waited to hear from the Lord through me.