The Pursuit of God by Tozer - Reflections (5)

 

“Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict sense of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such a way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.

“The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.” Tozer, page 10.

During my first year of pastoral ministry I came to a frightening realization, I had been so well trained in exegesis and in sermon preparation and delivery that I didn’t need the Holy Spirit, I could do it on my own. Of course, in the most important sense, I couldn’t do it on my own, for without the Holy Spirit the Bible is not alive and the Word preached is not the Word at all but rather an academic or religious naturalistic distillation of humanistic thought and motive. However, the fact remained that I could do it on my own if I desired and few, if any, would notice or care, I’d just be doing my pastoral job. I could educate people in the Bible, but would they see Jesus? Would they come to experience Jesus, the Living Christ?

To return to Tozer’s image of Elijah on Mount Carmel, I was trained to rearrange the altar stones in ways that would capture hearers’ attention and draw them into Sunday messages. I was also trained to lead folks into careful exegesis. I was trained to educate and communicate, to communicate and educate. Now to be sure, I was also taught to submit to Scripture, and I truly value that discipline and mindset – but was I taught to look for Jesus? Was Jesus our interpretive lens? In seminary, did we speak of our need to rely on the Holy Spirit? Did we focus on our calling to wed the hearts of our people to Jesus and only Jesus (2 Cor. 11:1 – 3)?

When Tozer writes that “the Bible is not an end in itself,” I’m reminded of John 5:39 - 40, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.” 

We can know the Bible and not know Jesus. This ought to be a sobering thought, but I’m not sure it is, I’m not certain we realize what a warning this is to us. The scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees “knew” the Scriptures and yet crucified Jesus – we have never done that…have we?

This is a difficult subject to think about, at least for me. I do so love the Bible and if you know me you know that I love the Bible. I love the Bible for in and through the Bible as the Word of God I meet Jesus Christ and the saints – this is why I love the Bible, for the Bible reveals Jesus from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is, I suppose you could call it, my primary sacrament. Through the promises of God we become “partakers of the Divine Nature,” isn’t this sacramental? Yes, I think it is. (2 Peter 1:4). 

Yet, if we are not seeing and experiencing Jesus Christ in and through the Bible we are perhaps better off without the Bible, for we may deceive ourselves into thinking we have something that we don’t. The Pharisees had the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings and yet they were, as a class, blind – not only were they blind, they helped engineer the crucifixion of God.

We can believe statements the Bible makes and yet not see and experience Jesus Christ. Here is an example:

There is something called the Ark Encounter in Kentucky. I have never been to see this full-size Noah’s Ark, and I imagine it is a fine exhibit and that the folks who own and operate it are fine people.  What follows is no reflection on them. 

Of the folks I know who have visited the Ark Encounter I do not recall one of them talking to me about how the experience brought home to them that Jesus is our Ark. One of my friends who visited the Ark Encounter participated in a teaching series at his church that was focused on getting people to believe that Noah’s Ark was indeed a factual event – which I believe. 

Now here is my point. What good does it do to believe in a literal and factual Noah’s Ark if we don’t know and experience Jesus Christ as our Ark? If Jesus isn’t our Ark, if we aren’t seeing Jesus in the Bible’s passages about Noah’s Ark, then we aren’t really reading and experiencing the Bible. As Jesus said in the above verse, the Scriptures testify of Him.

If we see that Jesus is our Ark, then at least two things ought to happen. We ought to see Jesus as our refuge from the world, the flesh, and the devil; we ought to know Him as our shelter as opposed to economic, political, nationalistic, military, and other world systems. We ought to also be about our Father’s business and do all we can, by God’s grace, to bring others into the Ark of Jesus Christ. 

O yes, and we ought to see the judgments around us for what they are, God giving us up to our own ways, we ought to see the tsunami swirling around us for what it is – a flood of judgment and iniquity – and yet since we are in the Ark we are safe in Jesus, and hopefully we want others to know that safety. 

The Ark that matters is Jesus Christ, and if we aren’t seeing and sharing Jesus as our Ark then we are missing the point. Just as, in the Creation account, Jesus is what matters; He is the Beginning, He is the Light of the world, we have been formed in the image of God and in Jesus Christ we are made new creations. 

We are not called to believe in Noah’s Ark, we are called to believe in and know the One to whom Noah’s Ark points. 

As Tozer writes, “the Bible is not an end in itself.” 

When I was a young Christian, I was taught that there is a difference between knowing about someone and actually knowing the person. I have used this commonsense point to share Jesus over the decades. Yet now it strikes me that many of us within the professing church do not talk and act as if we actually know Jesus Christ. We may talk about church, we may talk about this preacher or that teacher, we may on occasion talk about doctrine (some groups more than others), we may…on rare occasions, talk about Jesus – but this is very rare. The rarest thing is to hear a professing Christian speak as if he or she actually knows Jesus Christ. 

How is it that in much of our evangelism we say that Jesus wants a personal relationship with us and then, once someone makes a commitment to Jesus, that the whole idea of a personal relationship is effectively quashed? 

Well, since this anticipates the first chapter of The Pursuit of God we’ll close for now. 

The Bible is not an end in itself, and when we make it our end we substitute it for Jesus Christ and we twist the Scriptures, we turn the Bible back upon ourselves and away from Jesus – this is tragic.

The Pursuit of God by Tozer - Reflections (4)

“I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real. Milton’s terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to his: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.” It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table. This truth of Wesley’s words is established before our eyes: “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions [beliefs], yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion about God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is proof of this.”” (Page 9). 

While the heart of Tozer’s preface is yet to come, I share this quote, as I did the previous one, because of its directness and imagery. 

As James writes, “You believe that God is one, you do well, the demons also believe, and shudder” (James 2:19). 

To return to Tozer’s image of Elijah on Mount Carmel, we can construct a perfect altar and yet not see the fire of God fall upon it. We can set a perfect table and yet serve unpalatable food.

When I was a boy, my two brothers and I, along with our Dad, visited an elderly relative who gave us her homemade cookies – she had lost her baking touch, and the cookies could not really be eaten – they were like Styrofoam.  When her eyes were turned, we put the cookies in our pockets. The cookies were so bad that, when we arrived home and gave one to our dog, he refused it. I suppose if we had never had cookies we might have eaten them and made the best of it, but we knew what cookies were supposed to taste like, we knew what their texture ought to be. 

Do we know what it is like when the fire of God falls on the altar? Do we know what the psalmist means when he says, “Taste and see that the LORD is good”? Is the Word of God “sweeter than honey and the honeycomb” to us?

We can have right beliefs and yet our hearts may not be right toward God and others. We can have right doctrines and yet not have right hearts. Our table settings may be worthy of a magazine cover, and yet the food we serve may be tasteless.  

When Jesus speaks about the Great Commandment, loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, He does not speak of doctrine but of the heart. When He speaks of loving our neighbor as ourselves, He does not speak of doctrine but of the heart (Mark 12:29 – 31).

When Jesus gives us His new and holy commandment, it is that we love one another just as He has loved us, laying our lives down for one another; He speaks of our hearts in action, He does not speak to us of doctrine - as we normally conceive doctrine (John 13:34 – 35; 15:12 – 13). We might say that the doctrine that Jesus teaches is a doctrine of the heart in action. 

When the Apostle John writes of us following Jesus, he writes that we are to love as He loved and to lay down our lives for one another as Jesus laid down His life for us (1 John 3:16). 

When Paul writes of what the heart of the Church should look like, when he writes of what holds the Body of Christ together, he writes of the more excellent way of love, he writes that “the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13). Without love, without the doctrine of the heart, knowledge means nothing, sacrificial works mean nothing, miraculous faith means nothing – love must be our heartbeat, love for God and for others. 

Peter writes that we are to love one another fervently (1 Peter 1:22), and James writes of the Royal Law, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (James 2:8). 

If we get the doctrine of the heart right, there may be other teachings we may not clearly see, but we will have the foundation of our life in Christ and of life with one another. If our hearts are aflame with the love of God, there will be fire on the altar, there will be food to share. 

We might say that right doctrine without right hearts is dead, just as “faith without works is dead" (James 2:17). 

I suppose we could say that we don’t really have right doctrine if our hearts are not also right, for if we leave out the doctrine of the heart everything else is lifeless and we’ve deceived ourselves and others. As Paul writes, “Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies” (1 Cor. 8:1). 

This is one of those subjects we could, and should, ponder for the rest of our lives.

How are our hearts looking today? 

Are we loving God and others?

The Pursuit of God by Tozer - Reflections (3)

“Current evangelicalism has…laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel.” (pp. 8 – 9).

“There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy." (page 9).

While Tozer will develop the above statements, I am quoting them for their directness – with more to come. The first excerpt draws from 1 Kings 17:20 – 40, the confrontation of Elijah with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. 

“So with the stones he built an altar in the name of the LORD…Then he arranged the wood and cut the ox in pieces and laid it on the wood…Then the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.”

Paul tells Timothy that Timothy is to “rightly divide” or “accurately handle” the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15). This is more than an academic exercise, it is more than an expository verse-by-verse (stone-by-stone) exegesis that can be taught to anyone with basic intellectual skills, for Paul makes it clear that his message was “in demonstration of the Spirit and power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:4 – 5).  He further states, “The kingdom of God does not consist in word but in power” (1 Corinthians 4:20). Building an altar, arranging wood, and even killing and laying out an ox, is a sterile exercise without the fire and power of the Living God.

“For our Gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction…” (1 Thessalonians 1:5).  

Is our preaching and teaching essentially an exercise in rearranging stones in different combinations week after week? Do we offer an ox one week, a lamb another, a goat another, a heifer another…all without fire? 

What would we do if fire actually came from God? What would we do if the Holy Spirit replicated His manifestations of Acts? It might be the cause of some embarrassment.

Would we say, “O…hello God…we didn’t expect you”?

Tozer writes of those who “seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year.”

I think this is one of the scandals of the professing church, we have good - hearted men and women who have attended church all of their lives and they know no more today than they did 70 years ago. In fact, it is likely that some had a deeper faith as trusting children than as senior adults whose hearts have been dulled by being fed the fundamentals year after year, fundamentals which have become rote and dry and without Divine relationship. 

This reminds me of people I’ve known in the workplace.  You can have two twenty – year employees in the same company; one has twenty years of experience, the other has one year of experience repeated twenty times. When the latter is confronted with this reality, he will either say, “O my, I didn’t realize this, teach me please, I want to learn.” Or he will be offended and quit. The same is true of folks in the professing church, including pastors. One difference between the workplace and church, is that in the church we are seldom confronted with our lack of depth, with the great chasm between our lives and the wonderful relationship to which God calls us. 

Perhaps, as we explore The Pursuit of God, we’ll gain some understanding of why these things are, and what we can do to change, how we can pray, how we can believe, how we can obey, how we can encourage one another. Of course this must all be by the grace of God, by the enabling of the Holy Spirit. 

I wonder if we really know how much God our Father loves us. For sure I don’t think we have an inkling of what it means to be the sons and daughters of the Living God, the sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ. This is a critical element of the Gospel, and yet we don’t know it, we don’t teach it – so how can we live it? 

God so loved the world, that He not only gave His Only Begotten Son, but that He births us as His sons and daughters in the Only Begotten Son – in Christ we are all begotten, the Son with an eternal uppercase “B”; Jesus’ many sisters and brothers with the Holy Spirit (in thist sense, with another Upper Case “B”).

Tozer writes that there are “believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching [that of the Bible teachers] simply does not satisfy.”

Do you think this is true today? 

I don’t think it is true in the United States. I think those who attend church are typically satiated with programs, music, “how to” teachings, rearranging the stones and the sacrifices, with what amounts to group therapy, and with knowledge devoid of power. 

I seldom hear any professing Christian yearn for more of Jesus, just as I seldom hear professing Christians speak of Jesus, either of learning about Him or of living in friendship with Him. We seem to be satisfied where we are. O for sure we want church growth, we may want more programs, we may want more of this or that – but the only real question is whether we want more of Jesus. 

Do you hear folks talking about the Person of Jesus Christ and their relationship with Him? Do you hear folks desiring more of Jesus? Do you see people sharing Jesus with others? 

On the other hand, it is surely possible that many do desire Jesus, but they are accepting “Christian” substitutes, it may be that we have come to the point where we don’t know any better, surely a challenge for both pastors and congregations. 

Well, again, perhaps as we travel with Tozer our vision will improve, perhaps we will see Jesus as never before. 

Do I desire Jesus today?

Do you?