Men are impressed with the message of the Church just as far and as long as she is different from themselves.
When she seeks to be like them they no longer respect her.
They believe (and rightly) that she is playing false to herself and to them.
The moral jar that results when an indoctrinated son of Adam meets a son of heaven is one of the most wholesome things that can happen to both of them. And contrary to common opinion, men are more inclined to follow the way of Christ when they are compelled to make a radical alteration in their lives than they are when the way is made easy for them.
The human heart senses its need to be changed, and when religion appears offering life without such change, it is not taken seriously by thinking men.
The superficial, the insincere, may embrace such a low-powered brand of religion, but the seeking heart must reject it as false and unreal.
All conformity to the world is a negation of our Christian character and a surrender of our heavenly position.
verse
Don't let the world around you squeeze into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within . . . (Phillips Translation).
— Romans 12:2
thought
In our efforts to be "seeker friendly" there is the danger of downplaying the radical nature of conversion, the cost to the sinful nature of daily cross-carrying, and separation from this world. For the child of God there is heavenly citizenship. This wo
prayer
O God, may You express Your love through me to the people of this world, yet keep me being squeezed into this world's mould.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The Church's mightiest influence is felt when she is different from the world in which she lives.
Her power lies in her being different, rises with the degree in which she differs and sinks as the difference diminishes.
This is so fully and clearly taught in the Scriptures and so well illustrated in Church history that it is hard to see how we can miss it. But miss it we do, for we hear constantly that the Church must try to be as much like the world as possible, excepting, of course, where the world is too, too sinful; and we are told to get adjusted to the world and be all things to all men. (This use of the passage, incidentally, points up Peter's saying that Our beloved brother Paul wrote some things which the unlearned and the unstable wrest to their own destruction.)
One sure mark of the Church's heavenly character is that she is different from the rest of mankind; similarity is a mark of her fall.
The sons of God and the sons of men are morally and spiritually separated, and between them there is a great gulf fixed.
When religious persons try to bridge that gulf by compromise they violate the very principles of the kingdom of God.
verse
If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.
— John 15:19
thought
How much are we hated by the world not because of personal peculiarities or hypocrisy but because of likeness to Christ? The world hated Christ. What is its attitude to us?
prayer
Lord, in seeking to love the people of the world may I clearly reject the world's values and practices. I am Yours not theirs.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
It was a saying of George Mueller that faith grows with use.
If we would have great faith we must begin to use the little faith we already have. Put it to work by reverent and faithful praying, and it will grow and become stronger day by day.
Dare today to trust God for something small and ordinary and next week or next year you may be able to trust Him for answers bordering on the miraculous.
Everyone has some faith, said Mueller; the difference among us is one of degree only, and the man of small faith may be simply the one who has not dared to exercise the little faith he has.
According to the Bible, we have because we ask, or we have not because we ask not.
It does not take much wisdom to discover our next move.
Is it not to pray, and pray again and again till the answer comes?
God waits to be invited to display His power in behalf of His people.
The world situation is such that nothing less than God can straighten it out.
Let us not fail the world and disappoint God by failing to pray.
verse
Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.
— Colossians 4:2
thought
Said Wesley Deuwel: "Prayer is not limited to the humanly possible. Prayer is a work of faith. The purpose of prevailing prayer is to bring to pass things that are divinely possible and that are in God's will. . . . He has chosen to make us His co-labore
prayer
Father, what unbelievable resources You have given me ? prayer, believing prayer. I can touch the world through prayer. May I grow in faith as I believingly pray.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Men may, and often do, pray without faith (though this is not true prayer), but it is not thinkable that men should have faith and not pray.
The biblical formula is The prayer of faith. Prayer and faith are here bound together by the little preposition of, and what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
Faith is only genuine as it eventuates into prayer.
When Tennyson wrote More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, he probably uttered a truth of vaster significance than even he understood.
While it is not always possible to trace an act of God to its prayer-cause, it is yet safe to say that prayer is back of everything that God does for the sons of men here upon earth. One would gather as much from a simple reading of the Scriptures. What profit is there in prayer?
Much every way. Whatever God can do faith can do, and whatever faith can do prayer can do when it is offered in faith.
An invitation to prayer is, therefore, an invitation to omnipotence, for prayer engages the Omnipotent God and brings Him into our human affairs.
Nothing is impossible to the man who prays in faith, just as nothing is impossible with God.
This generation has yet to prove all that prayer can do for believing men and women.
verse
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
— Matthew 7:7-8
thought
Why would God invite, even command us to pray if He were not going to answer? He is ready to answer. It is for us to pray in faith according to His revealed will, persevere in prayer and leave the means and the timing to Him.
prayer
Grow me, Lord, to be a person of faithful, faith-filled prayer. May I make prayer my major ministry.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The skeptic in the book of Job asked the disdainful question, What is the Almighty, that we should serve him, and what profit should we have, if we pray unto him?
The whole tone of the remark shows that it is meant to be rhetorical.
The doubter, believing the question could have no answer, tossed it off contemptuously and turned away, like Pilate, without waiting for a reply.
But we have an answer.
God Himself has supplied it, and the universal consensus of the ages has added an Amen.
In the eleventh chapter of Hebrews we have a long list of benefits which faith brings to its possessors: justification, deliverance, fruitfulness, endurance, victory over enemies, courage, strength and even resurrection from the dead.
And everything that is attributed to faith might with equal truth be attributed to prayer, for faith and true prayer are like two sides of the same coin.
They are inseparable.
verse
Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.
— Mark 11:24
thought
We are instructed to not only ask in prayer but to believe we have received it. Our "asking" greatly exceeds our "believing." But the two are inseparable parts of the whole.
prayer
Father, forgive me for asking without believing. You, Lord, invite me to ask but to do so while believing.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
With large blocks of evangelicals praying and preaching like Christians while they live and talk like worldlings, how much longer may we expect them to remain evangelical?
Apostasy always begins with the conduct.
First there is a wrong orientation of the life, a facing toward the lost world with yearning and enjoyment; later there comes a gradual surrender of the truth itself and a slipping back into unbelief.
That has happened to individuals and denominations and it can happen to the whole present evangelical communion if it is not checked before it is too late. For this cause, the facing-both-ways attitude of our present Christianity is something to be alarmed about.
And if that attitude were the result of plain backsliding there would be much more reason for optimism. Unchristian acts done by a Christian through weakness and over the protests of his better heart may be bad enough, but they are not likely to be fatal.
But when he does them with the sanction of his teachers and with the belief that they are all a part of the Christian way, how is he to be rescued?
verse
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
— John 6:66
thought
There is turning back which is deliberate and decisive. There is also that which is gradual and almost insensible. It is the latter to which we may be most vulnerable. We are in the world. Are we of it, too?
prayer
I am in this world but, Lord, I don't want to be of it. Help me to discern the difference.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Let a man but become, as the early Methodists would have said, soundly converted, and certain things will begin to happen in his life.
He will experience a wonderful unification of personality and a turning about of the whole life toward God and heavenly things.
Though he will undoubtedly suffer from the inward struggle described in the seventh chapter of Romans, yet his direction will be established beyond any doubt and his face will remain turned toward the City of God.
That word direction should have more emphasis these days, for the most important thing about a life is its direction. David hardly said anything more significant than this: I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. And the Hebrews' writer summed it all up in one sentence, Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. An emotional conversion which stops short of Christ-orientation is inadequate for life and death, and, unless new help comes from some quarter, it may easily be worse than no religious experience at all.
And just this would appear to be the source of our bad orientation.
The original experience of conversion was not sufficiently radical to turn the life wholly to God and things eternal.
Then when religious leaders found that they had on their hands half-converted persons who wanted to be saved but would not turn fully to God, they tried to meet the situation by providing a twilight-zone religion which did not demand too much and which did offer something. Better have them halfway in, they reasoned, than all the way out.
We know now how bad that reasoning was.
verse
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
— Hebrews 12:2
thought
We can't run the Christian race without fixing our eyes on Jesus. That involves taking our eyes off all else.
prayer
Lord Jesus, You are the author and perfecter of my faith. I focus my heart eyes on You. By Your Spirit I want to run this life marathon with perseverance.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
— Hebrews 12:1
Like a doctor with a sick patient whose disease eludes diagnosis, religious leaders have for some years been aware that there is something seriously wrong with evangelicalism and have yet been unable to lay their finger upon the precise trouble. The symptoms they have discovered in abundance, but the cause back of them has been hard to locate. Mostly we have spent our time correcting symptoms, having all the while an uneasy feeling that our remedies did not go deep enough. Knowing that a disease that cannot be identified invariably calls out a flock of untrained experts to analyze and prescribe, we yet risk a pronouncement upon the condition of evangelical Christianity in our day, and we believe we may not be too far from the truth.
The trouble seems to be a disorder of the spiritual nerve system which we might, for the lack of a proper term, call dual orientation. Its dominant characteristic appears to be a cross up among the nerve ganglia of the soul resulting in an inability to control the direction of the life. The patient starts one direction and before he knows it he is going another. His inward eyes do not coordinate; each one sees a different object and seeks to lead the steps toward it. The individual is caught in the middle, trying to be true to both foci of the heart, and never knowing which he would rather follow. Evangelicalism (at least in many circles) is suffering from this strange division of life-purpose. Its theology faces toward the East and the sacred Temple of Jehovah. Its active interests face toward the world and the temple of Dagon. Doctrinally it is Christian, but actually it is pagan mentality, pagan scale of values and pagan religious principles.
thought
We seem to have forgotten that we are to throw off the hindrances (not sins) and the sin that so easily entangles us, if we are to run the race. Why do we try to run the Christian life marathon with a refrigerator strapped to our back?
prayer
O Spirit of God, awaken me once again to those hindrances and that entangling sin that seriously impedes my progress in the race of life.
Do not put out the Spirit's fire; do not treat prophecies with contempt. Test everything. Hold on to the good.
— 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21
The tests for spiritual genuineness are two: First, the leader must be a good man and full of the Holy Ghost. Christianity is nothing if not moral. . . . But the test of moral goodness is not enough. Every man must submit his work to the scriptural test. It is not enough that he be able to quote from the Bible at great length or that he claim for himself great and startling experiences with God. Go back to the law and to the testimony. If he speak not according to the Word it is because there is no light in him. We who are invited to follow him have every right, as well as a solemn obligation, to test his work according to the Word of God.
We must demand that every claimant for our confidence present a clean bill of health from the Holy Scriptures; that he do more than weave in a text occasionally, or hold up the Bible dramatically before the eyes of his hearers. His doctrines must be those of the Scriptures. The Bible must dominate his preaching. He must preach according to the Word of God. The price of following a false guide on the desert may be death. The price of heeding wrong advice in business may be bankruptcy. The price of trusting to a quack doctor may be permanent loss of health. The price of putting confidence in a pseudo-prophet may be moral and spiritual tragedy. Let us take heed that no man deceive us.
thought
Applying the biblical test will mean accepting what is scripturally accurate and is from the Spirit and rejecting what is not. Needed is a growing knowledge of the Word and increasing sensitivity to the Spirit.
prayer
Equip me to be a tester, Lord, to accurately yet graciously test what is taught in Your name.