The Pursuit of God - Week #8

Chapter Eight – Restoring the Creator-creature Relation

“Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; let thy glory be above all the earth.” Psa. 57:5

The subject matter of this chapter is of immense importance to us if we are to move from immaturity to maturity in Christ. This is a reality that the great men and women of God understood clearly.

I think in my personal journey, this truth began to dawn on me when, as a young missionary the Holy Spirit whispered to me one day, “Nita, you are not God.” To the immature ear this appears to be such an obvious truth that it sounds ridiculous that God would say something like that to a sincere and lovesick servant of His (which I was). It was a great revelation to me and set me on the course to the never-ending unfolding of this truth throughout my life. The implications of this simple yet profound reality are impossible to measure, but one thing is for sure, the unfolding of this reality – that there is only One (and it’s not me) – has empowered me to embrace my humanity with joy and to continue learning and growing all my life. In other words, the revelation to my inner heart of this has helped to keep me from stagnating in God; I know I will never “arrive” in terms of learning and growing because I am not omniscient nor omnipotent, etc. I can rest in who I am because I am resting in Who He is! Praise the Lord!

I find that among God’s people (and this is even more pronounced when one is in leadership), there are constant and strong pressures to be God; if a person isn’t secure in his/her humanity and limitations, it’s tempting to yield to those pressures and attempt to be God to people.

In this chapter Tozer speaks of the Transcendent One, the only Creator of all, the I AM. He is the unchanging fixed center against which all else is measured.

“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 flesh whimpers against the rigor of God’s inexorable sentence and begs like Agag for a little mercy, a little indulgence of its carnal ways. It is no use. We can get a right start only by accepting God as He is and learning to love Him for what He is. As we go on to know Him better we shall find it a source of unspeakable joy that God is just what He is. Some of the most rapturous moments we know will be those we spend in reverent admiration of the Godhead…So let us begin with God.”

Tozer goes on to say that the pursuit of God embraces the labor that there is in bringing one’s total personality into conformity to His personality. Then he says a wonderful thing that I can testify is true:

“The moment we make up our minds that we are going on with this determination to exalt God over all we step out of the world’s parade. We shall find ourselves out of adjustment to the ways of the world…Our break with the world will be the direct outcome of our changed relation to God…Millions call themselves by His name…but a simple test will show how little He is really honored among them. Let the average man…be forced into making a choice between God and money, between God and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human love…and God will take second place every time.”

Many years ago I had a dream that was significant and prophetic. I can’t remember all the details but the main story line was that I was with a Christian church congregation; I think I was somehow facilitating a vote that the congregation was going to make and the vote had to do with choosing either the Lord Jesus or some other desirable thing (not something evil in itself). The tragic end of the dream was that the vote was overwhelmingly against Jesus. These were true Christian believers. The dream was a picture of Calvary, and seen in the context of this chapter, it is what we do to Jesus when we refuse to embrace “the labor of bringing our total personality into conformity to His”; when we insist on bringing His personality into conformity to ours; when we want to be God rather than be the creature; when we worship ourselves through introspection rather than looking away from ourselves to worship the One and only Creator.

“Let the seeking man reach a place where life and lips join to say continually, ‘Be thou exalted,’ and a thousand minor problems will be solved at once. His Christian life ceases to be the complicated thing it had been before and becomes the very essence of simplicity. By the exercise of his will he has set his course, and on that course he will stay as if guided by an automatic pilot. If blown off course for a moment by some adverse wind he will surely return again as by a secret bent of the soul. The hidden motions of the Spirit are working in his favor, and ‘the stars in their courses’ fight for him. He has met his life problem at its center, and everything else must follow along…he finds his right place of high honor as one made in the image of his Creator…
Nothing will or can restore order till our hearts make the great decision: God shall be exalted above.”

Tozer contrasts Biblical persons (sons of Eli in contrast to Abraham, David, Jacob, etc), pointing out that what mattered to God was not perfection but “holy intention.” This reality about God and His interaction with humans is absolutely imperative to have revelation on or the believer lives his life cringing before Him and others, seeking after perfectionism (which is of the devil) or giving up entirely:

“See how God winked at weaknesses and overlooked failures as He poured upon His servants grace and blessing untold…The man of God set his heart to exalt God above all; God accepted this intention as fact and acted accordingly.”

Tozer finishes the chapter with a truth that we must grasp internally if we are ever to embrace reminder that we “must always keep in mind that God also hath desire, and His desire is toward the sons of men, and more particularly toward those sons of men who will make the once-for-all decision to exalt Him over all. Such as these are precious to God above all treasures of earth or sea. In them God finds a theater where He can display his exceeding kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. With them God can walk unhindered, toward them he can act like the God He is.”

If you have a moment right now, I would recommend that you pause and reflect on God’s desire toward you personally at this moment and ask the Holy Spirit to help you practice doing this often so that the truth begins to penetrate your deep inner being…)

A final warning is given by Tozer that he fears that he may “convince the mind before God can win the heart. For this God-above-all position is one not easy to take. The mind may approve it while not having the consent of the will to put it into effect…God wants us all, and He will not rest till He gets us all…”

“O God, be Thou exalted over my possessions. Nothing of earth’s treasures shall seem dear unto me if only Thou art glorified in my life. Be Thou exalted over my friendships. I am determined that Thou shalt be above all, though I must stand deserted and alone in the midst of the earth. Be Thou exalted above my comforts. Though it mean the loss of bodily comforts and the carrying of heavy crosses I shall keep my vow made this day before Thee. Be Thou exalted over my reputation. Make me ambitious to please Thee even if as a result I must sink into obscurity and my name be forgotten as a dream. Rise, O Lord, into Thy proper place of honor, above my ambitions, above my likes and dislikes, above my family, my health and even my life itself. Let me decrease that Thou mayest increase, let me sink that Thou mayest rise above. Ride forth upon me as Thou didst ride into Jerusalem mounted upon the humble little beast, a colt, the foal of an ass, and let me hear the children cry to Thee, ‘Hosanna in the highest.’”

May the Spirit of grace and peace rest on you this week. Next week we will cover chapter 9: “Meekness and Rest.”

Just a reminder that after this book we will be reading “Seven Longings of the Human Heart” by Mike Bickle, available at amazon.com or the Forerunner Bookstore at ihop.org.

The Pursuit of God - Week #7

Chapter Seven – The Gaze of the Soul

“Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.”

I love this chapter! What a wonderful word on contemplation Tozer gives here, along with an unashamed endorsement of those great mystic saints of hundreds of years ago whose lives were characterized by lovesickness for Jesus and wasted time spent in “gazing” on His beauty…Tozer admonishes the modern evangelical Christian culture with these words:

“I feel that we could gain much from a little acquaintance with men of his (Nicholas of Cusa) spiritual flavor and the school of Christian thought which they represent. Christian literature, to be accepted and approved by the evangelical leaders of our times, must follow very closely the same train of thought, a kind of ‘party line’ from which it is scarcely safe to depart. A half century of this in America has made us smug and content…Nicolas was a true follower of Christ, a lover of the Lord, radiant and shining in his devotion to the Person of Jesus…”

I open with this quote to set the tone for this chapter which is all about gazing on Jesus and the fundamental role that it plays in the Christian’s full experience of God.

Tozer begins the chapter by saying that any person who approaches the Word of God with a simple heart and unprejudiced mind with nothing to prove nor defend “will not have read long until his mind begins to observe certain truths standing out from the page.” High on that list of things that the Bible gives primary focus to will be the doctrine of faith, and the reader would likely conclude that “faith is all-important in the life of the soul. Without faith it is impossible to please God. Faith will get me anything, take me anywhere in the Kingdom of God, but without faith there can be no approach to God, no forgiveness, no deliverance, no salvation, no communion, no spiritual life at all.”

If this is true, then we should be deeply concerned about whether or not we have faith. The author goes on to say that the Bible approaches the theme of faith practically, not theoretically. It doesn’t attempt (except for Heb. 11:1) to define faith but rather shows faith in action in the people of God.

One such example is the story in Numbers 21 where faith is seen in action when the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people of God after they spoke against God, resulting in death among the people. Moses sought the Lord on their behalf and God commanded that he put a brass serpent on a pole for the people to look at and gave instruction that anyone who looked on it would live.

Jesus interpreted this story in John when He was explaining how His hearers could be saved through believing (John 3:14,15). Tozer says that any simple/plain man reading this would immediately discover that to “look” and to “believe” are synonymous terms. “’Looking’ on the Old Testament serpent is identical with ‘believing’ on the New Testament Christ. That is, the looking and the believing are the same thing…I think he would conclude that faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.”

Other Scriptures that carry this meaning are Psalm 34:5; 123:1,2; Matt. 14:19; John 5:19-21; Heb. 12:2, etc. Indeed, the whole tone of the Bible is summed up in Heb. 12:2 from which we see that faith isn’t a one-time act but a continuous gazing at God.

“Believing, then, is directing the heart’s attention to Jesus. It is lifting the mind to ‘behold the Lamb of God’ and never ceasing that beholding for the rest of our lives. At first this may be difficult, but it becomes easier as we look steadily at His wondrous Person, quietly and without strain. Distractions may hinder, but once the heart is committed to Him, after each brief excursion away from Him the attention will return once again and rest upon Him like a wandering bird coming back to its window.”

Training the soul to gaze requires a volitional act. This is what the saint of God, Brother Andrews, learned and speaks of in his classic, Practicing the Presence of God. To reach a place where gazing with the soul on the Person of God is what we do whenever our minds are not engaged in “earthly affairs”, we must “practice” His presence volitionally and consciously. Eventually, not only do our thoughts automatically go to Him when the mind isn’t preoccupied with earthly duties, but even when the mind is preoccupied with earthly responsibilities, there’s an inner “secret communion always going on.”

“Now, if faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest things possible to do. It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within range of possibility for the weakest and poorest of us.”

How wonderful this is! I can say from personal experience (though I don’t claim to have perfected it) that to live in this reality is the best way to live. And it is wonderful to know that exercising faith is this simple and that it pleases God. Tozer isn't talking about a religious exercise that's magical but a reaching of the soul for the real God. My weak reaching for Him through the practice and habit of beholding Him in my soul counts as faith to Him! And this begins to cause confidence to arise in me so that I live and pray from a place of confidence that He hears and is present with me. As Tozer says at the end of the chapter: “When the habit of inwardly gazing Godward becomes fixed within us we shall be ushered onto a new level of spiritual life more in keeping with the promises of God and the mood of the New Testament. The Triune God will be our dwelling place even while our feet walk the low road of simple duty here among men.”

In conclusion I will say once again that the spirit of the age we live in now makes contemplative prayer more difficult than ever before. To get quiet long enough to “behold” the beauty of God (and that takes time) is warfare, but it is well worth the fight. I believe the prayer movement that God is raising up today is, in part, about fighting for time and space to train the soul to gaze. Many today are blocking out a portion of their life (a month or few months or few years) to focus primarily on worship and prayer in order to then walk out their calling filled with the mind and life of Jesus. Not all can do this, but I would encourage you to find times and places to develop the inward habit of beholding God. “A new set of eyes will develop within us enabling us to be looking at God while our outward eyes are seeing the scenes of this passing world.”

“O Lord, I have heard a good word inviting me to look away to Thee and be satisfied. My heart longs to respond, but sin has clouded my vision till I see Thee but dimly. Be pleased to cleanse me in Thine own precious blood, and make me inwardly pure, so that I may with unveiled eyes gaze upon Thee all the days of my earthly pilgrimage. Then shall I be prepared to behold Thee in full splendor in the day when Thou shalt appear to be glorified in Thy saints and admired in all them that believe. Amen.”

Rich blessings on you this week as you looked to Him – may your countenance be radiant because of your looking at Him! Next week we will cover chapter 8: “Restoring the Creator-creature Relation.”

The Pursuit of God - Week #6

Chapter Six – The Speaking Voice

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

“A word is a medium by which thoughts are expressed, and the application of the term to the Eternal Son leads us to believe that self-expression is inherent in the Godhead, that God is forever seeking to speak Himself out to His creation…God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is by His nature continuously articulate…”

In this chapter, Tozer says wonderful things about the voice of God, distinguishing between mere reading of the Bible (words on a page) and hearing living words from God in His Word.

“I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of Truth. (We believe that) a silent God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished, (He) lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is call the Word. The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech…God’s speaking is in the continuous present…”

God is speaking constantly in many ways, always looking for a response from humans. Proverbs 8 pictures Him (wisdom) pleading for a response that rarely comes.

"The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends upon our hearting,and we have trained our ears not to hear."

The prayer in all 7 of the letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3 – “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” – is a prayer that I pray often for myself and for God’s people, because this truth of not really having ears to hear what God is saying now is increasingly real to me.

As I’ve grown in God and in life experience and listened to saints of God both from the past and the present, I’ve come to understand that the ability to hear is in direct contrast with the dominating spirit of the age in which we live have lived and been trained in; the spirit of this age is one in which such weak-appearing virtues as listening, responding, waiting, being quiet for a length of time have been despised and in their place the strong-appearing virtues of activity, doing, running, building, organizing, etc., have been prized as valuable.

Having devalued the “weak” virtues, the “strong” virtues have lost their good, because, as C.S. Lewis says, you cannot lose the value of one of these sets of virtues and hope to keep the good of the other set. And so we find ourselves in the midst of a frantic, hyper-active culture both in the world and in the modern Church.

>“Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore.”

The above statement of Tozer suggests once again to me that the best way to gain ears to hear what the Spirit is saying is through worship and adoration of the only Uncreated God, Adonai. As I have often said in these postings, the idea of worshipping God appeals to us in theory, but the implications of true worship of the One uncreated Being are huge and are offensive to the flesh. To worship Him is to lose control and free-fall into His love and grace.

Even the practice of stopping everything to adore Him long enough (i.e., not always worshipping on the run) to develop “ears to hear,” is offensive to the western mind that believes we can get anything we want on the run and in a short time. Having “ears to hear” is costly but well worth the price!! And for the modern Christian, the cost for most of us is measured in terms of time, a resource that we have all been given by God. It will cost you time!

I believe we need to start with an honest answer to the question, “Is having ears to hear what the Spirit is saying today important enough to me to pay the price for that?”

“The Voice of God is a friendly Voice. No one need fear to listen to it unless he has already made up his mind to resist it…Whoever will listen will hear the speaking Heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion…”

Tozer says that when a person takes this matter seriously and opens the Word of God, drawing near to Him (which can be as simple as speaking and singing love phrases and statements of desire for Him, reaching out for Him), then very often the progression of hearing from Him is like this:
• First, a sound as of a Presence walking in the garden
• Second, a voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear
• Then the happy moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures
• Finally, life and light come and best of all, the ability to see and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and All.

In conclusion, I’ll add that developing listening ears and hearts happens in worship, then obeying whatever I may have heard God say to me in worship. This will tune my ears into His wave length and the more in tune I am with Him, the more I hear from Him in many different ways. Hearing what the Spirit is saying today through the Word of God is imperative if we are to stay awake and alive to God’s Voice rather than to the screams of the world, the flesh and the devil (and even the well-meaning voices of our friends and family).

“If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to you…It is more than a thing, it is a voice, a word, the very Word (Jesus) of the living God.”

“Lord, teach me to listen. The times are noisy and my ears are weary with the thousand raucous sounds which continuously assault them. Give me the spirit of the boy Samuel when he said to Thee, ‘Speak, for Thy servant heareth.’ Let me hear Thee speaking in my heart. Let me get used to the sound of Thy Voice, that its tones may be familiar when the sounds of earth die away and the only sound will be the music of Thy speaking Voice. Amen.”

May the grace of God rest upon us to adore and listen long enough to develop "ears to hear"; may His power enable us to obey what we hear; may His Spirit come and tenderize us with revelations of His love so that together with God's people we can live in the fullness of His life in these critical days. God bless you!

Next week we'll read chapter 7: The Gaze of the Soul.

The Pursuit of God - Week 5

Chapter Five – "The Universal Presence"

“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your
presence?”

God dwells in all of His creation and is present everywhere in all His works. Tozer says this truth of “divine immanence” is one of the basic Christian truths that is like one of the primary colors needed in painting. We Christians profess such a truth but “for some reason it has not sunk into the average Christian’s heart so as to become a part of his believing self. Christian teachers shy away from its full implications, and if they mention it at all, mute it down till it has little meaning.”

The author clarifies that this doctrine of the divine Presence is nothing like pantheism. God is “transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.” So what does this immanence mean for the Christian experience? “It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here.”

“In the beginning God…the uncaused Cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin.”

Tozer then gives Bible examples of Adam and David as men who tried to hide from the presence of God unsuccessfully. Jonah comes to mind as well in his attempt to flee from the presence of the Lord and could not.

“If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world? The patriarch Jacob…gave answer to (this). He saw a vision of God and cried out in wonder, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’ Jacob had never been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew.”

As we see from Biblical characters, it’s not only pagans that do this, but we believers have our religious and subtle ways of trying to escape His presence. One of these ways is through hiding behind the doctrine itself of the divine Presence. In other words, because we believe in the omnipresence of God, we content ourselves with the theology of that without actively pursuing a real and ongoing experience of His manifest presence.

Tozer says about this,
“The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same. There can be one without the other. God is here when we are wholly unaware of it. He is manifest only when and as we are aware of His Presence. On our part there must be surrender to the Spirit of God, for His work is to show us the Father and the Son. If we cooperate with Him in loving obedience, God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face.”

God is everywhere always present and is also always seeking to discover Himself to us. God “revealed His very Self to Moses so that the skin of Moses’ face shone with the supernatural light…”

“Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us…when we sing, ‘Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord,’ we are…thinking of the nearness of relationship. It is for increasing awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence.”

The author asks the question, “Why do some persons ‘find’ God in a way that others do not? Why does God manifest His Presence to some and let multitudes of others struggle along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience?...the will of God is the same for all. Pick at random a score of great saints whose lives and testimonies are widely known…You will be struck with the fact that the saints were not alike…differences of race, nationality, education, temperament, habit and personal qualities. Yet they all walked, each in his day, upon a high road of spiritual living far above the common way.”

Obviously, these differences in the great saints of God meant nothing to God; so in some vital way they had to be alike. Tozer suggests that the one common quality among them all was “spiritual receptivity.”

Of course, you could argue that everyone has capacity for spiritual receptivity, and the book proceeds to explain that what sets these shining saints apart from the average Christian is that not only did they have a spiritual receptivity and awareness but they took great care to cultivate that “until it became the biggest thing in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing they did something about it. They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response…David: ‘You have said, Seek My face. My heart says to You, Your face, Lord, do I seek.’”

Tozer finishes the chapter by saying that spiritual receptivity is a blending of several things in the soul. It is: an affinity for, a bent toward, a sympathetic response to, a desire to have. However much of it we have can either be increased by spiritual exercise or destroyed by neglect.

Tozer’s prophetic warning is pertinent to us today: “Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture…We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer returned from afar. The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit, etc.”

We have all contributed to this; but God is merciful and loves His Church. I believe the emerging worldwide prayer movement is His awakening today that is preparing His people for the final days of human history before He returns. More and more of His people are weary with religion and want to experience His manifest Presence that Tozer talks about here. On our campus we have been relentlessly crying out for 7 years now for Him to manifest Himself among us and interrupt our programs and human-initiated works; we’re beginning to experience a taste of the sweetness and pain of His manifest presence, and it’s ruining us for anything less and it's causing more and more worship and prayer to arise here.

May the Spirit of God disrupt our lives enough to cause us to want Jesus more than we want anything or anyone else! And may His empowering grace settle over us to develop the wonderful habit of practicing His presence so that we increasingly live in the awareness of His nearness to us.

“O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ’s sake, Amen.”

Next week we’ll look at chapter 6, "The Speaking Voice." May His nearness be your portion this week!