A W Tozer's Pursuit of God is the best inspiration I've found so far in my searches for the way back to God. I'm so happy to read his introduction alone where he not only encourages us who've struggled toward the singular goal of seeking God Himself alone, finding and losing it as I have over and over, but he admonishes the Church for its obtuseness about the whole point of the Christian life. The Bible is essential, the Bible is foundational to everything in the Christian life, not a word of it is to be contradicted or compromised if we are to avoid spiritual shipwreck, but Tozer nails the problem of the shallow Christian life in which we are discouraged from seeking God beyond the event of salvation :.
The doctrine of justifcation by faith -- a Biblical truth, and a blessed relief from sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort—has in our time fallen into evil company and been interpreted by many in such manner as actually to bar men from the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be “received” without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is “saved,” but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with little.
Specifically they assure us, with a tinge of scorn, that our wanting "more" is based on a fallacy, that there is no "more" to be had once we've experienced salvation in the new birth. So we hear the gospel preached Sunday after Sunday with an attitude of righteous accomplishment. This was apparently the case in Tozer's time and it is still the case over seventy years after Tozer wrote the above.
The churches are overrun with apostasies of a dizzying mutiplicity of kinds, and while I've thought of that as the main reason we can't expect God to send us revival, I think now that maybe there's some reason for it in this problem Tozer has put his finger on. That is, this unsatisfied hunger could certainly explain the popularity of the charismatic movement. Many of us gravitated there because of the dry intellectuality in other churches. Some of us also had had spiritual or supernatural exper4iences that nobody could properly assess in the dry churches. Then it turns out that they aren't properly understood in the charismatic churches either and in fact there are great spiritual risks to those who pursue their personal experiences without guildance from anyone who knows what it's really all about.
So we seem to be left with churches that feed us on necessary correct doctrine that is starving us to death spiritually, and churches that scorn doctrine in favor of experience and mislead us into every kind of error as we stumble around searching for how to fill that "God shaped hole" in all of us. Yes I think it possible that most of the apostasies and heresies might have their root in this particular failing Tozer has identified, but I won't argue it beyond just suggesting the possibility.
I want to repeat part of what he said:
Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego.
This has hit me as a kind of revelation. It isn't just doctrinal apostasies plaguing the Church, but also an epidemic of moral weaknesses and scandals, as if the normal guards against sin have broken down. Something has happened to the moral life of the Church and Tozer is laying at the door of the overemphasis on a disembodied doctrinal salvation. We can certainly point to trends in the culture as influential in this regard, but don't we still have to account for what seems to be a peculiar susceptibility to that cultural influence? And besides that, this is a two-way street: just as often we should understand the degeneration of the culture to derive from the failure of the Church to do its job of being salt and light. And again, we can certainly point to doctrinal apostasies as a root of a lot of the moral weakness in the Church, but what Tozer is saying here suggests, at least as it is hitting me now, a reason for the proliferation of the apostacies themselves. Tracing cause and effect is probably not really possible but it seems useful to suggest that all these things are likely interconnected.
We find in the old Catholic mystics a profound emphasis on mortification of sin. We certainly have fine treatises on that subject in Protestantism, and there is no lack of preaching on the causes and remedies of sin, but it seems the message hasn't been getting across in any effectual way for whatever reason. perhaps the reason IS to be found in a shallow overestimation of the doctrine of justification by faith. Perhaps it subtly deprives us of some necessary motivation for truly working on mortifying our sins. You can be quickly exhausted by reading, say, Madame Guyon's accounts of her endless "faults" and God's dealings with them as well as her own practices of moritification. But maybe there's a hint in all that tedium that it is the love of a loving God that inspires a person to such rigorous self-denials, that the mere knowledge of having been justified and "saved" can't motivate in us.
But I am tired of analyzing things. There is one thing needful and I'm at least at the threshhold of seeking it again, and nothing else. As Tozer's introduction nears its end he writes:.
I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.” Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long. In Jesus’ Name, Amen..
