A disturbing phenomenon of the day is the new and tricky use of familiar words.
A "people's republic," for instance, is not a republic nor does it belong to the people. The word "freedom" now in most countries refers to something so restricted that a generation or two ago another word altogether would have been chosen to describe it.
Other words that have changed their meanings without admitting it are "war," "peace," "grant" (to describe the small sop the government tosses back out of the money it has previously taken from us), "right," "left," "equality," "security," "liberal" and many more. These have been emptied of their meaning and a different meaning has been poured into them. We may now read them or hear them spoken and, unless we are very sharp, gain from them a wholly false idea.
This phenomenon has invaded the field of religion also. In a predominantly Christian society such as prevails in the West the words of Scripture and of Christian theology have quite naturally acquired a fixed meaning and until recently always meant the same thing whenever they were used by educated and responsible persons. With the coming of the various revolutions ? scientific, industrial, philosophical, social, artistic, political ? fixed meanings have deserted religious words and now float about like disembodied spirits, looking for but apparently never finding the bodies from which they have been exorcised by the revolutionists.
Among religious words which have lost their Christian meaning are "inspiration, "revelation," "spiritual," "fellowship," "brotherhood," "unity,'' ''worship," "prayer," "heaven," "immortality," "hell," "Lord," "new birth," "converted" ? but the list is long and includes almost every major word of the Christian faith.
verse
"If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and he is a foreigner to me."
— 1 Corinthians 14:11
thought
We have all engaged in conversation where the same word is used but with different meaning. Quite confusing! Even more so when terms are being used that designate spiritual reality. Are we careful definers?
prayer
Lord, keep me from confusing and misleading people by incorrect use of terms, especially those that deal with spiritual reality.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
A farmer sows wheat and, granted that the soil is fertile, his harvest will be only what the seed was, allowing for the slight natural retrogression that usually follows each careless planting. Is it not plain that the quality of the seed is what matters most? Would it not be folly for the farmer to grow more and more and poorer and poorer wheat? Let him look to his seed if he would improve his harvest.
Should someone object that the seed is the Word and that since the Word remains always the same it will produce the same effect wherever and by whomsoever it is preached, I would reply that the first is true but not the second. Verily God's Word is ever the same, but what it will do at any time in any place depends largely upon the moral purity, wisdom and spiritual power of those who preach it. There is nothing automatic about the truth. To do its most effective work it must be incarnated in the church.
Look at Acts 18 and 19. Apollos, a man mighty in the Scriptures, for all his faithfulness to the truth as he understood it, could produce only imperfect converts. Suppose Paul had not arrived when he did. It is not hard to imagine an immature, weak and ineffective church propagating itself in Ephesus.
So vitally important is spiritual quality that it is hardly too much to suggest that attempts to grow larger might well be suspended until we have become better.
verse
''For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord.''
— Ephesians 5:8-10
thought
Truth proclaimed but unlived clouds that truth. Truth lived out emblazons that truth. God wants His truth incarnated in you and me.
prayer
Lord, forgive me for so often obscuring Your truth by cloud-befogged living. May Your truth be incarnate in me that I may be light because of You.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
If we would be followers of Christ indeed we must become personally and vitally involved in His death and resurrection. And this requires repentance, prayer, watchfulness, self-denial, detachment from the world, humility, obedience and cross carrying. That is why it is easier to talk about revival than to experience it.
To avoid personal involvement with the cross we have become adept at finding or creating religious projects to soothe our conscience and make things look good. Among these may be named evangelism and foreign missions. These are good, scriptural activities, incumbent upon all Christians, but all presuppose that they who engage in them should be holy, Spirit-filled and totally committed to God. To carry on these activities scripturally the church should be walking in fullness of power, separated, purified and ready at any moment to give up everything, even life itself, for the greater glory of Christ. For a worldly, weak, decadent church to make converts is but to bring forth after her own kind and extend her weakness and decadence a bit further out.
verse
"In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus."
— Romans 6:11
thought
Because of Christ's death and resurrection and our faith identification with Him, we are to count ourselves dead to sin and alive to God. That means refusing to let sin reign in us. Wow!
prayer
Father, Your provision for me in Christ is so full and complete. May more and more I utilize it by faith ? Christ's life lived out in my daily life.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Our most pressing obligation today is to do all in our power to obtain a revival that will result in a reformed, revitalized, purified church. It is of far greater importance that we have better Christians than that we have more of them. Each generation of Christians is the seed of the next, and degenerate seed is sure to produce a degenerate harvest not a little better than but a little worse than the seed from which it sprang. Thus the direction will be down until vigorous, effective means are taken to improve the seed.
And how can we improve the church?
Simply and only by improving ourselves: and there is where the difficulty lies. The church in any locality is what its individual members are, no better and no worse. We as members must begin by seeking moral amendment that will result in a positive spiritual renaissance. And that is why improvement is hard to achieve.
As long as we can keep the whole thing at arm's length and deal with it academically we may preach and write about it at little or no real cost to ourselves and, it must be admitted, with no real advance in godliness.
verse
''For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.''
— Colossians 2:9-10
thought
The Church will experience revival, spiritual renewal only as we experience it. We cannot criticize the Church for spiritual defects unless we ourselves are modeling Christlike living. The Church is not them, it is us.
prayer
You promise fullness in Christ. May I experience it, Lord!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The emphasis today in Christian circles appears to be on quantity, with a corresponding lack of emphasis on quality. Numbers, size and amount seem to be very nearly all that matters even among evangelicals. The size of the crowd, the number of converts, the size of the budget, the amount of the weekly collections: if these look good the church is prospering and the pastor is thought to be a success. The church that can show an impressive quantitative growth is frankly envied and imitated by other ambitious churches.
This is the age of the Laodiceans. The great goddess Numbers is worshiped with fervent devotion and all things religious are brought before her for examination. Her Old Testament is the financial report and her New Testament is the membership roll. To these she appeals as arbiters of all questions, the test of spiritual growth and the proof of success or failure in every Christian endeavor.
A little acquaintance with the Bible should show this up for the heresy it is. To judge anything spiritual by statistics is to judge by another than scriptural judgment. It is to admit the validity of externalism and to deny the value our Lord places upon the soul as over against the body. It is to mistake the old creation for the new and to confuse things eternal with things temporal. Yet it is being done every day by ministers, church boards and denominational leaders. And hardly anyone notices the deep and dangerous error.
verse
''His work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work.''
— First Corinthians 3:13
thought
It is the quality of one's work that will be tested. Nothing is said of quantity. There can be qualitative quantity but quantity without quality is of little worth.
prayer
Lord, I want to strive for quality in service for You. May I do my very best regardless of quantity.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
. . . The Advent established:. . .
Fifth, the human race will not be exterminated. That which was God seized upon that which was man. ''God of the substance of His Father, begotten before all ages; Man of the substance of His mother, born in the world. Perfect God and perfect Man . . . who, although He be God and man, yet He is not two but one Christ.'' God did not visit the race to rescue it; in Christ He took human nature unto Himself, and now He is one of us.
For this reason we may be certain that mankind will not be wiped out by a nuclear explosion or turned into subhuman monsters by the effects of radiation on the human genetic processes. Christ did not take upon Himself the nature of a race soon to be extinct.
Sixth, this world is not the end. Christ spoke with cheerful certainty of the world to come. He reported on things He had seen and heard in heaven and told of the many mansions awaiting us. We are made for two worlds and as surely as we now inhabit the one we shall also inhabit the other.
Seventh, death will some day be abolished and life and immortality hold sway. ''For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil,'' and what more terrible work has the devil accomplished than to bring sin to the world and death by sin? But life is now made manifest by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
verse
''He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.''
— Revelation 21:4
thought
Bernard of Cluny wrote of the world to come: ''I know not, oh, I know not what joys await us there; what radiancy of glory, what bliss beyond compare.'' The end of sin and death. Life in Christ. All because Christ came that first Christmas morning!
prayer
In one world and made for another one. Father, now I can see that other world but dimly but by faith I know that it is coming. Thank You!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
. . . The Advent established:. . .
Third, God indeed spoke by the prophets. The priests and scribes who were versed in the Scriptures could inform the troubled Herod that the Christ was to be born in Bethlehem of Judaea. And thereafter the Old Testament came alive in Christ. It was as if Moses and David and Isaiah and Jeremiah and all the minor prophets hovered around Him, guiding His footsteps into the way of the prophetic Scriptures.
So difficult was the Old Testament gamut the Messiah must run to validate His claims that the possibility of anyone's being able to do it seemed utterly remote; yet Jesus did it, as a comparison of the Old Testament with the New will demonstrate. His coming confirmed the veracity of the Old Testament Scriptures, even as those Scriptures confirmed the soundness of His own claims.
Fourth, man is lost but not abandoned. The coming of Christ to the world tells us both of these things.
Had men not been lost no Savior would have been required. Had they been abandoned no Savior would have come. But He came, and it is now established that God has a concern for men. Though we have sinned away every shred of merit, still He has not forsaken us. ''For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.''
verse
''For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.''
— Luke 19:10
thought
The Son of Man seeks the lost. He does not toss them into hell's garbage or totally ignore them. Christ seeks the lost. But He will not force us to leave our lostness to follow Him. To us belongs that choice.
prayer
Lord, I am a lost sheep whom You sought and found. I want to follow You wherever You lead.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The birth of Christ told the world something. . . . His coming, I repeat, told the world something; it declared something, established something. What was it?
That something was several things, and as Christ broke the loaves into pieces for greater convenience in eating, let me divide the message into parts the easier to understand it. The Advent established:
First, that God is real. The heavens were opened and another world than this came into view. A message came from beyond the familiar world of nature. ''Glory to God in the highest,'' chanted the celestial host, ''and on earth peace, good will.'' Earth the shepherds know too well; now they hear from God and heaven above. Our earthly world and the world above blend into one scene and in their joyous excitement the shepherds can but imperfectly distinguish the one from the other.
It is little wonder that they went in haste to see Him who had come from above. To them God was no longer a hope, a desire that He might be. He was real. Second, human life is essentially spiritual. With the emergence into human flesh of the Eternal Word of the Father the fact of man's divine origin is confirmed. God could not incarnate Himself in a being wholly flesh or even essentially flesh. For God and man to unite they must be to some degree like each other. It had to be so.
The Incarnation may indeed raise some questions, but it answers many more. The ones it raises are speculative; the ones it settles are deeply moral and vastly important to the souls of men. Man's creation in the image and likeness of God is one question it settles by affirming it positively. The Advent proves it to be a literal fact.
verse
"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."
— John 1:14
thought
Christ comes in the image of man ? fully human and fully God. And believing man and woman created in the image of God may become godly in Christ. Amazing!
prayer
O Christ, You God-Man are and You call me to experience the spiritual while yet in the earthly.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The announcement of the birth of Christ came as a sunburst of joy to a world where grief and pain are known to all and joy comes rarely and never tarries long.
The joy the angel brought to the awe-struck shepherds was not to be a disembodied wisp of religious emotion, swelling and ebbing like the sound of an aeolian harp in the rising and falling of the wind. Rather it was and is a state of lasting gladness resulting from tidings that there was born in the city of David a Savior which is Christ the Lord. It was an overflowing sense of well-being that had every right to be there.
The birth of Christ told the world something. That He should come to be born of a woman, to make Himself of no reputation and, being found in fashion as a man, to humble Himself even to death on a cross this is a fact so meaningful, so eloquent as to elude even the power of a David or an Isaiah fully to celebrate. His coming, I repeat, told the world something; it declared something, established something. What was it?
verse
"For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich."
— 2 Corinthians 8:9
thought
Incomprehensible the sacrifice Christ made for us. He laid aside His glory as the Son of God to enter this world as a weak human baby. He voluntarily became poor with the purpose that we might become rich. Are we living in the experience of that richn...
prayer
Lord, You have made me a spiritual billionaire. May I so live.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/