Makes No Sense

I’ve been saturating myself in reading.  Reading God’s word, devotionals and anything C.S. Lewis has written and I can get my hands on and now A. W. Tozer.  I’m searching anything that will lead me to a clearer understanding of my faith.  For so much of my life, I’ve lived to please others at even the high cost of losing myself.  I broke about the year 2000.  It took me 5 years to completely fall apart and walk away from my family.  I then began a journey of about 6 years to go full circle.  Today, 12 years after having moved to Ossian and starting to watch my family fall apart before my eyes I’m sitting at Panara Bread eatery, somewhat confused and still in wonderment of where my life is going. 

This week some of the passages in “The Best of A.W. Tozer” have spoken deeply to my heart.  Below are just a few of the many that have made an impression on me.

·         Millions of professed believers talk as if He were real and act as if He were not.  And always our actual position is to be discovered by the way we act, not by the way we talk.

·         Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by it implications. We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly (open to view: intended for display) seeking it.

·         For each of us the time is surely coming when we shall have nothing but God.  Health and wealth and friends and hiding places will all be swept away and we shall have only God.  To the man of pseudo (fake) faith that is a terrifying thought, but to real faith it is one of the most comforting thoughts the heart can entertain.

·         It would be tragedy indeed to come to the place where we have no other but God and find that we had not really been trusting God during the days of our earthly sojourn.  It would be better to invite God now to remove every false trust, to disengage our hearts from all secret hiding places and to bring us out into the open where we can discover for ourselves whether or not we actually trust Him. That is a harsh cure for our troubles, but it is a sure one. 

·         A discredited doctrine of a divided Christ being accepted in many religious circles goes like this: Christ is both Saviour and Lord.  A sinner may be saved by accepting Him as Saviour without yielding to Him as Lord.  The practical outworking of this doctrine is that the evangelist presents and the seeker accepts a divided Christ. The truth has been twisted to the point that we can believe on His saviourhood while rejecting His lordship.

·         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 inhabited eternity, whose name is Holy, the man who knows the depth of his own sin, will detect a moral incongruity (non conformity) in the teaching that One so holy should dwell in the heart of one so vile.

·         He asks nothing but a pure heart and a single mind.

·         We learn that circumstances do not make men; it is their reaction to circumstances that determines what kind of men they will be.

·         I have long believed that a man who spurns/rejects the Christian faith outright is more respected before God and the heavenly powers than the man who pretends to religion but refuses to come under its total domination.  The first is an overt enemy, the second a false friend. 

·         But we must not get the impression that the Christian life is one continuous conflict, one unbroken irritating struggle against the world, the flesh and the devil.  A thousand times no.  The heart that learns to die with Christ soon knows the blessed experience of rising with Him, and all the world’s persecutions cannot still the high note of holy joy that springs up in the soul that has become the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.

·         Faith is not a substitute for moral conduct but a means toward it.  The tree does not serve in lieu of fruit but as an agent by which fruit is secured.  Fruit, not trees, is the end God has in mind in yonder orchard; so Christ-like conduct is the end of Christian faith.  To oppose faith to works is to make the fruit the enemy to the tree; yet that is exactly what we have managed to do.  And the consequences have been disastrous.

·         It is much easier to pray that a poor friend’s need may be supplied than to supply them.

That all being said, I sat this morning in another church service that has discouraged me to the point I’m thinking I will never find anywhere to settle into and connect with a church.  The church is so technical and cold.  I’ve visited 2 churches and not impressed with either one.  No one talks to you when you walk in.  I walk in look around and just find a seat.  No one approaches me to say hi….nothing.  Then I sit and look around and everyone is so cold.  Where is that love and closeness that Christ speaks about in the New Testament?   I think the New Testament church would be so confused by observing today’s church.  This morning’s “worship service” was more like sitting in a Las Vegas show….lights, orchestra, technical sounds and visuals…..I looked up at one point and asked within my heart ‘God, do you like this? Does this make you smile?’ I’m so confused.  What is church any way?  Why don’t I fit in any longer?  Am I damaged goods or have I built up a protection around my heart that is so thick that nothing proclaiming to be of ‘church’ can even penetrate through?  God get’s through to my thoughts and my heart.  I can read a promise in His Word and I start to rejoice ….but to sit in a service and coached on how to sing or worship just seems fake and manmade.  Will I ever think differently? I want so much to be obedient and I know God’s word says not to “forsake the gathering together” but why do I sense fakeness or loneliness when I’m supposed to be surrounded by something of God?  It makes no sense to me, at all.