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/
Once the heart is freed from its contrary impulses, Christ within becomes a wondrous experiential fact.
The surrendered heart has no more controversy with God, so He can live in us congenial and uninhibited.
Then He thinks His own thoughts in us: thoughts about ourselves, about Himself, about sinners and saints and babes and harlots; thoughts about the Church, about sin and judgment and hell and heaven.
And He thinks about us and Himself and His love for us and our love for Him; and He woos us to Himself as a bridegroom woos his bride.
Yet there is nothing formal or automatic about His operations within us.
We are personalities and we are engaged with personality. We are intelligent and have wills of our own.
We can, so to speak, stand outside of ourselves and discipline ourselves into accord with the will of God. We can commune with our own hearts upon our beds and be still. We can talk to our God in the night watches. We can learn what He wants us to be, and pray and work to prepare Him a habitation.
And what kind of habitation pleases God?
What must our natures be like before He can feel at home within us?
He asks nothing but a pure heart and a single mind.
He asks no rich paneling, no rugs from the Orient, no art treasures from afar.
He desires but sincerity, transparency, humility, and love.
He will see to the rest.
verse
But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord.
— 1 Peter 3:15a
thought
Does God feel at home in you and me? Have we confined Him to the "guestroom" or opened all of our heart-house to Him? Is He treated as a guest or the LORD?
prayer
Be Lord of all my life, O God. Make me what You want me to be so that You will feel at home!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
God does not dwell passively in His people; He wills and works in them (Phil. 2:13); and remember, wherever He is, God always acts like Himself.
He will do in us whatever His holy nature moves Him to do; and unless He is hindered by our resistance He will act in us precisely as He acts in heaven.
Only an unsanctified human will can prevent Him.
Without doubt we hinder God greatly by our willfulness and our unbelief. We fail to cooperate with the holy impulses of the in-living Spirit; we go contrary to His will as it is revealed in the Scriptures, either because we have not taken time to discover what the Bible teaches or because we do not approve it when we do.
This contest between the indwelling Deity and our own fallen propensities occupies a large place in New Testament theology.
But the warfare need not continue indefinitely.
Christ has made full provision for our deliverance from the bondage of the flesh.
A frank and realistic presentation of the whole thing is set forth in Romans 6 and 7, and in the 8th chapter a triumphant solution is discovered: it is, briefly, through a spiritual crucifixion with Christ followed by resurrection and an infusion of the Holy Spirit.
verse
For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.
— Philippians 2:13
thought
God works in us to will to act according to His good purpose. It is for us to acknowledge His will and to do it by His enablement.
prayer
There are areas in my life, Lord, where I have known Your will but failed to do it. Forgive me for wasted opportunities and hindering Your transforming process in me.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The truth of the divine indwelling is developed more fully in the epistles of Paul.
"Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? . . . For the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are" (1 Cor. 3:16-17).
And again (1 Cor. 6:19), "What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?"
Without question, the teaching of the New Testament is that the very God Himself inhabits the nature of His true children.
How this can be I do not know, but neither do I know how my soul inhabits my body.
Paul called this wonder of the indwelling God a rich mystery: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:27).
And if the doctrine involved a contradiction or even an impossibility we must still believe what the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
"Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar" (Rom. 3:4).
The spiritual riches lying buried in this truth are so vast that they are worth any care or effort we may give to their recovery. Yet we are not concerned primarily with the theology or metaphysics embodied here. We want to know the reality of it.
What does the truth mean to us in practical outworking?
What does it have for a serious-minded Christian compelled to live in a dark and godless world?
As Paul would say, "Much every way" (3:2).
verse
Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. Therefore honor God with your body.
— 1 Corinthians 6:19-20
thought
From the context and the grammar it is clear that in 1 Cor. 3:16, Paul is referring to the church, the body of believers, as God's temple. In 6:19, it is individual believers whose body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. God does not live in buildings (cf. Ac
prayer
O God, that You should dwell in a shack, a rat-hole like me! Tear me down and make me Your temple.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.
— Ephesians 3:16-17a
The doctrine of the divine indwelling is one of the most important in the New Testament, and its meaning for the individual Christian is precious beyond all description. To neglect it is to suffer serious loss. The apostle Paul prayed for the Ephesian Christians that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith. Surely it takes faith of a more than average vitality to grasp the full implications of this great truth. Two facts join to make the doctrine difficult to accept: the supreme greatness of God and the utter sinfulness of man. Those who think poorly of God and well of themselves may chatter idly of "the deity within," but the man who trembles before the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy, the man who knows the depth of his own sin, will detect a moral incongruity in the teaching that One so holy should dwell in the heart of one so vile.
But however incongruous it may appear to be, in the Holy Scriptures it is taught so fully that it cannot be overlooked and so plainly that it can hardly be misunderstood. "If a man love me," said our Lord Jesus Christ, "he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him" (John 14:23). That this abiding is within the man is shown by these words: "At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you" (14: 20). Christ said of the Holy Spirit: "He ... shall be in you" (14: 17), and in His great prayer in John 17 our Lord twice used the words "I in them."
thought
God in us. God in us! But He doesn't take over as would be His right as God. It is for us to turn our heart-house over to Him. As we do He changes us.
prayer
Thank You, Lord, You don't remodel me. You make me new!