Faith, constant meditation on the Scriptures, obedience, humility, . . .
3. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Romans 10:17). The Scriptures purify, instruct, strengthen, enlighten and inform. The blessed man will meditate in them day and night.
4. To be entirely safe from the devil's snares the man of God must be completely obedient to the Word of the Lord. The driver on the highway is safe, not when he reads the signs but when he obeys them. So it is with the Scriptures. To be effective they must be obeyed.
5. Again, there is a close relation between humility and the perception of truth. "The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach his way" (Psa. 25:9).
In the Scriptures I find no shred of encouragement for the proud.
Only the tame sheep can be led; only the humble child need expect the guidance of the Father's hand.
When all the evidence is in it may well be found that none but the proud ever strayed from the truth and that self-trust was behind every heresy that ever afflicted the church.
verse
Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.
— Romans 10:17
thought
Knowing God's Word and obediently applying it in daily life is God's provision for us. Humility before Him is the only reasonable posture of heart. He is Godness. We are creatureliness.
prayer
Thank You for Your Word in a language I can understand. Thank You for Your enablement to do Your will as Your Spirit reveals it. Thank You, O God, for all of Your provision for me, little, insignficant, weak me.
malliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
It is . . . critically important that the Christian take full advantage of every provision God has made to save him from delusion.
These are prayer, faith, constant meditation on the Scriptures, obedience, humility, hard, serious thought and the illumination of the Holy Spirit.
1. Prayer is not a sure fire protection against error for the reason that there are many kinds of prayer and some of them are worse than useless.
The prophets of Baal leaped upon the altar in a frenzy of prayer, but their cries went unregarded because they prayed to a god that did not exist.
The God the Pharisees prayed to did exist, but He refused to listen to them because of their self-righteousness and pride. From them we may well learn a profitable lesson in reverse. In spite of the difficulties we encounter when we pray, prayer is a powerful and effective way to get right, stay right and stay free from error. "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him" (James 1:5).
All things else being equal, the praying man is less likely to think wrong than the man who neglects to pray. "Men ought always to pray, and not to faint" (Luke 18:1).
2. The apostle Paul calls faith a shield.
The man of faith can walk at ease, protected by his simple confidence in God. God loves to be trusted, and He puts all heaven at the disposal of the trusting soul.
But when we talk of faith let us know what we mean.
Faith is not optimism, though it may breed optimism; it is not cheerfulness, though the man of faith is likely to be reasonably cheerful; it is not a vague sense of well-being or a tender appreciation for the beauty of human togetherness.
Faith is confidence in God's self-revelation as found in the Holy Scriptures.
verse
In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. . . . And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.
— Ephesians 6:16, 18
thought
We learn to pray by praying and we learn to believe God by believing Him. There are many kinds of prayers in which to engage. There are all kinds of flaming arrows from the evil one against whom we must use the shield of faith. Are we praying and believi
prayer
Lord, You have provided so great an arsenal for spiritual defense and offense. May I have the good sense to use what You have provided!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
There are areas of Christian thought, and because of thought then also of life, where likenesses and differences are so difficult to distinguish that we are often hard put to it to escape complete deception.
Throughout the whole world error and truth travel the same highways, work in the same fields and factories, attend the same churches, fly in the same planes and shop in the same stores. So skilled is error at imitating truth that the two are constantly being mistaken for each other.
It takes a sharp eye these days to know which brother is Cain and which Abel.
We must never take for granted anything that touches our soul's welfare.
Isaac felt Jacob's arms and thought they were the arms of Esau.
Even the disciples failed to spot the traitor among them; the only one of them who knew who he was was Judas himself.
That soft-spoken companion with whom we walk so comfortably and in whose company we take such delight may be an angel of Satan, whereas that rough, plain-spoken man whom we shun may be God's very prophet sent to warn us against danger and eternal loss.
verse
Then Isaac said to Jacob, "Come near so I can touch you, my son, to know whether you really are my son Esau or not."
— Genesis 27:21
thought
Often we encounter error disguised as truth. Crucial is our relationship to the Holy Spirit who seeks to guide into all truth. It is the Spirit who can unmask the deceiver.
prayer
O God, I am easily deceived. Thank You for the Holy Spirit to lead and guide through Satan's deceits and disguises.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Another breakdown in the truth, feeling, act sequence comes when the heart for selfish reasons deliberately hardens itself against the Word of God.
This is the state of all who love darkness rather than light and for that reason either withdraw from the light altogether or when exposed to it stubbornly refuse to obey it.
The covetous man looks on human need and sternly refuses to be moved by it. To yield to the impulse of generosity naturally aroused by the sight of poverty would require him to give up some of his cherished hoard, and this he will not do.
So the fountain of generosity is frozen at its source.
The miser keeps his gold, the poor man suffers on in his poverty and the whole course of nature is upset.
Is it any wonder that God hates covetousness?
But be sure that human feelings can never be completely stifled. If they are forbidden their normal course, like a river they will cut another channel through the life and flow out to curse and ruin and destroy.
The Christian who gazes too long on the carnal pleasures of this world cannot escape a certain feeling of sympathy with them, and that feeling will inevitably lead to behavior that is worldly.
And to expose our hearts to truth and consistently refuse or neglect to obey the impulses it arouses is to stymie the motions of life within us and, if persisted in, to grieve the Holy Spirit into silence.
The Scriptures and our own human constitution agree to teach us to love truth and to obey the sweet impulses of righteousness it raises within us. If we love our own souls we dare do nothing else.
verse
Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.
— Hebrews 4:7c
thought
Truth arouses emotion and incites to action. So does error. If we reject the truth and embrace error the consequence is heart-hardening.
prayer
Forgive me, Father, for those times when I have rejected Your truth and the emotions aroused thus refusing to obey You. Forgive me for grieving Your Spirit and deliver me from heart-hardening. For Jesus' sake.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
A state of emotion always comes between the knowledge and the act.
A feeling of pity would never arise in the human breast unless aroused by a mental picture of others' distress, and without the emotional bump to set off the will there would be no act of mercy.
That is the way we are constituted.
Whether the emotion aroused by a mental picture be pity, love, fear, desire, grief, there can be no act of the will without it.
What I am saying here is nothing new. Every mother, every statesman, every leader of men, every preacher of the Word of God knows that a mental picture must be presented to the listener before he can be moved to act, even though it be for his own advantage. God intended that the truth should move us to moral action.
The mind receives ideas, mental pictures of things as they are. These excite the feelings and these in turn move the will to act in accordance with the truth. That is the way it should be, and would be had not sin entered and wrought injury to our inner life.
Because of sin the simple sequence of truth-feeling-action may break down in any of its three parts.
The mind which is created to receive truth is often turned over to falsehood, and the feeling thus aroused may incite the will to evil action. The contemplation of any wrong or forbidden thing cannot but inflame the feelings to sympathy with evil. A regrettable example of this was David's long gaze at the beautiful Bathsheba in the act of bathing. The king was moved by what he saw and acted accordingly, and the bitter and tragic consequences dogged him to the end of this days.
He saw, he felt, he acted, precisely as his Lord did centuries later when He healed the sick.
The difference in the moral quality of the acts of the two men resulted from the difference in their feelings.
David saw a beautiful woman; Christ saw a suffering multitude.
One gaze led to sin, the other to an act of mercy; but both followed the simple law of their inner structure.
verse
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely; whatever is admirable?if anything is excellent or praiseworthy?think about such things.
— Philippians 4:8
thought
A common misperception is that we can think about sinful acts and enjoy them emotionally yet never actually commit them. However, a weakening of the will results which eventually leads to sinful actions.
prayer
Lord, may I use the freedom You have given me to think on that which is excellent and praiseworthy. Truth, then, will move me to moral, not immoral, action.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
"Excitement, perturbation, feeling." These are states of mind we are all familiar with.
In a world as violent and full of conflict as this these come and go, blaze up and die down in the average man's bosom a hundred times a day.
The normal man and woman will in the course of a few months experience every degree of emotion from near ecstasy to mild dejection without apparently being any the better or the worse for it.
Of course I have in mind here only the normal man and woman.
The psychopathic personality lies outside the field of this study. The emotions are neither to be feared nor despised, for they are a normal part of us as God made us in the first place. Indeed the full human life would be impossible without them.
One recoils from the thought of the man who lacked all feeling.
He would be either a cold, naked intellect such as inhabits the pages of the science-fiction novel, or a mere vegetable, such as is sometimes found in the incurable wards of our mental hospitals.
The right relation of intellect to feeling and feeling to will is disclosed in Matthew 14:14. "And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick."
Intellectual knowledge of the suffering of the people stirred His pity and His pity moved Him to heal them.
This is how it was with the ideal Man whose total organism was perfectly adjusted to itself; and this is the way it is with us in a less perfect measure.
verse
When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
— Matthew 9:36
thought
Jesus looked on the crowds of people. So did the disciples. Jesus saw people harassed and helpless. The disciples saw people. Jesus saw sheep without a shepherd. He saw a harvest to be reaped. The disciples seem to have seen just people. What do we see w
prayer
Lord Jesus, give me a compassionate heart that I may see and feel and respond as You do.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
There is an art of forgetting, and every Christian should become skilled in it.
Forgetting the things which are behind is a positive necessity if we are to become more than mere babes in Christ.
If we cannot trust God to have dealt effectually with our past we may as well throw in the sponge now and have it over with.
Fifty years of grieving over our sins cannot blot out their guilt. But if God has indeed pardoned and cleansed us, then we should count it done and waste no more time in sterile lamentations. And thank God this sudden obliteration of our familiar past does not leave us with a vacuum.
Far from it. Into the empty world vacated by our sins and failures rushes the blessed Spirit of God, bringing with Him everything new.
New life, new hope, new enjoyments, new interests, new purposeful toil, and best of all a new and satisfying object toward which to direct our soul's enraptured gaze. God now fills the recovered garden, and we may without fear walk and commune with Him in the cool of the day.
Right here is where the weakness of much current Christianity lies.
We have not learned where to lay our emphasis. Particularly we have not understood that we are saved to know God, to enter His wonder-filled Presence through the new and living way and remain in that Presence forever.
We are called to an everlasting preoccupation with God.
The Triune God with all of His mystery and majesty is ours and we are His, and eternity will not be long enough to experience all that He is of goodness, holiness and truth.
In heaven they rest not day or night in their ecstatic worship of the Godhead.
We profess to be headed for that place; shall we not begin now to worship on earth as we shall do in heaven?
verse
Jesus replied, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."
— Luke 9:62
thought
There are things Satan does not want us to forget. And we assist him by pondering them even though we know that they are confessed, forgiven and cleansed. On those things let's not look back.
prayer
I lift my eyes from all the past and fix them on You, Lord. Upon You would I gaze in heart worship.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
We are not called to fellowship with nonexistence.
We are called to things that exist in truth, to positive things, and it is as we become occupied with these that health comes to the soul.
Spiritual life cannot feed on negatives.
The man who is constantly reciting the evils of his unconverted days is looking in the wrong direction.
He is like a man trying to run a race while looking back over his shoulder.
What the Christian used to be is altogether the least important thing about him.
What he is yet to be is all that should concern him.
He may occasionally, as Paul sometimes did, remember to his own shame the life he once lived; but that should be only a quick glance; it is never to be a fixed gaze.
Our long permanent look is on God and the glory that shall be revealed.
What we are saved from and what we are saved to bear the same relation to each other as a serious illness and recovered health.
The physician should stand between these two opposites to save from one and restore to the other. Once the great sickness is cured the memory of it should be thrust out onto the margin of the mind to grow fainter and weaker as it retreats farther away; and the fortunate man whose health has been restored should go on to use his new strength to accomplish something useful for mankind.
Yet many persons permit their sick bodies to condition their mental stuff so that after the body has gotten well they still retain the old feeling of chronic invalidism they had before. They are recovered, true enough, but not to anything.
We have but to imagine a group of such persons testifying every Sunday about their late illnesses and singing plaintive songs about them and we have a pretty fair picture of many gatherings among Christians today.
verse
I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
— Philippians 3:14
thought
To remember God's past blessings and deliverances encourages us to walk trustfully in the present. However, to frequently relive our past failures is to lose direction and focus in following God today and tomorrow.
prayer
O Lord, You have so much more for me to experience in following You. I press forward, toward the goal to which You point me.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The evangelical Church today is in the awkward position of being wrong while it is right, and a little preposition makes the difference.
One place where we are wrong while we are right is in the relative stress we lay upon the prepositions to and from when they follow the word saved.
For a long generation we have been holding the letter of truth while at the same time we have been moving away from it in spirit because we have been preoccupied with what we are saved from rather than what we have been saved to.
The right relative importance of the two concepts is set forth by Paul in his first epistle to the Thessalonians: "Ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven" (1 Thess. 1:9-10).
The Christian is saved from his past sins. With these he simply has nothing more to do; they are among the things to be forgotten as the night is forgotten at the dawning of the day.
He is also saved from the wrath to come.
With this also he has nothing to do. It exists, but not for him.
Sin and wrath have a cause-and-effect relationship, and because for the Christian sin is canceled wrath is canceled also.
The from's of the Christian life concern negatives, and to be engrossed in them is to live in a state of negation. Yet that is where many earnest believers live most of the time.
verse
They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead?Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.
— Thessalonians 1:9b-10
thought
There is that from which we turn and that to which we turn. "From" suggests the past. "To" the present and the future. In what direction are we headed?
prayer
Father, I thank You for that from which You have brought me. Expectantly I gaze on that to which you are leading me.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/