God Himself or His Interventions and His Gifts

 It is breaking my heart to read Tozer's Pursuit of God.  How did I fall away so far from this truth?  When I left the Charismatic Movement, was that the turning point?  I had to leave it, they were off in so many ways, and yet it's the only place in the Church where personal spiritual experience is taken for granted and encouraged.   The presence of God is often felt among them, yet there is so much mixture with counterfeit spiritualities and some really bad preaching it was a huge relief to find a church where the Bible was clearly and thoroughly preached.  However, the problem there was the complete  absence of spiritual experience and that familiar discouragement of it as if it was all counterfeit and there were no genuine expressions of it.  

Is that where I started to lose it?   Despite the solid biblical doctrine the church felt somehow carnal.  I didn't want to think of it that way, kept trying to tell myself I was being unfairly critical, but that impression never went away.  I was a doctrinal Calvinist by then but I remained attracted to the Holiness churches of the Wesleyan tradition.  It was the days of a resurgence of Reformed preaching, though, Calvinist preaching, and the other churches were doctrinally anemic.  They were also not promoting any spiritual experiences that might have outweighed their doctrinal deficiencies either.  

I found a good book on revival in the library of the Reformed church I'd begun to attend and found the personal experience kept alive in that context.   I even found someone in the church to pray with for revival every morning over the phone, and the presence of God was often with us.  Our prayer time lasted until she moved out of town.  But the church itself didn't seem to be much interested in pursuing revival.   There is a saying in such churches that "When God wants to send revival He sets His people praying."  It's true enough descriptively, but it amounts in the end to an excuse not to seek revival, a way of saying "Well, we aren't experiencing any great movement of the spirit of prayer so apparently God isn't interested in inspiring revival these days."  Well, thjere were at least two of us who wanted to pray for revival.  The saying just seems to be a way to excuse a lack of interest in spiritual life.  The church had a worldly feel,  a carnal feel.  Some charismatic churches on the other hand maintained a level of spiritual excitement, of eager prayer that spilled over into praying groups after the service.  But their revivals have no sense of the depths of  real encounter with the real God, they produce some supernatural phenomena of sorts but without any feel of holiness or awe or fear of God, and nothing of that love of God to be found in the mystics I've mentioned.   

.  In those years I gravitated to worldly occupations.  I had a job that required mostly packaging and sorting things and I was alone except for the occaional customer or occasional delivery, so I could listen to the radio.  I started listening to politics instead of Christian teachings.  Or I listened to both but the Christian teachings weren't on that spiritual level Tozer is talking about anyway. Besides poitics I spent time thinking through the Creation-Evolution issues.  I stopped the spiritual reading that had kept me enthralled with God for years, or more accurately it became sporadic:  I'd reach a point of disgust with myself that would impel me to reread some of my favorite spiritual writers, including books by Tozer.  It would fire me up for a time and then I'd just fall back into my other more worldly preoccupations.

And here I am again seeking personal spiritual revival, but this time I got so far away from God I got scared and have been determined not to lose my focus again.  So far so good, and the rediscovery of The Pursuit of God has been the best inspiration I could have found, becaise he's put his finger on at least some of the reason for my own inability to stick to the path, and why the churches are in such bad shape spiritually.  And here he's saying it again, in the third chapter of his book:

At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His Presence. That type of Christianity which happens now to be the vogue knows this Presence only in theory. It fails to stress the Christian’s privilege of present realization. According to its teachings we are in the Presence of God positionally, and nothing is said about the need to experience that Presence actually. The fiery urge that drove men like McCheyne is wholly missing. And the present generation of Christians measures itself by this imperfect rule. Ignoble contentment takes the place of burning zeal. We are satisfied to rest in our judicial possessions and for the most part we bother ourselves very little about the absence of personal experience.

I don't know to what extent my own experience is similar to others.  Over the years I never met anyone in any of the churches who had any interest in the mystics or the spiritual writers that so attract me, and the pursuit of God Himself has never come up in conversation that I recall.   (I did have the fascinating experience of "feeling" a spiritual connection, actually a "fragrance," with two people on separate occasions, which suggested to me that they shared my interest in the pursuit of God or "higher" experience (though there's no word that works best to stand for it).  But I didn't know those people and never had a conversation with them.  It was clear they recognized the same thing in me but it happened more or less at a distance so I never found out anything about them beyond what they conveyed in those encounters.  I could say more about that later, but my only point in bringing it up was to say there were at least these two other people I know of who shared something of what I'm talking about here. Since then I've lost my own spiritual "fragrance" and might no longer be recognizable to them).  

So my interest in these things isn't shared by many, and not by anyone I know personally, and there is also a prejudice against it from the pulpits that would keep me from seeking counsel about any of it except from books.  Tozer is such a refreshing voice on the subject as he sees it as the whole point of the Christian life.  He's had a major impact in the Christian world for many of his writings, but not this one that I know of.   Too bad, it's maybe the most important one.

The common distrust of this sort of experience does rather isolate a person.  Even in the charismatic circles the spiritual experiences were of a different sort, the exercise of the "gifts" in particular, which the Strange Fire Conference convinced me weren't God's gifts at all.  Nevertheless there were people in that movement whose deep prayer life did touch God and that was palpable.   

It's not that there is a lack of spiritual or supernatural experiences in the Church at large.  We hear quite frequently of how God has worked in supernatural ways in people's lives, and in which He engages on a personal level with them too.  But in thinking about this I realized that it's different from what I'm talking about.  In those cases God is the instrument of beneficial changes and guidance in their lives,  but the "mystical" or "higher" experience of God is the person's .craving for God Himself with the attempt to be immersed in Him in a way that ultimately abandons everything that benefits them in this life.  I've been so far from it for such a long time, but am again reminded that it's what I once wanted and sought and now I want to find it again, God willing, whatever little time I may have left.

Oh Happy Miserable Painful Plunge Because the Reward is Worth It

Hard to believe I read this book years ago.  I certainly learned nothing from it at the time though I suppose I found it an inspiring idea and I'm sure it must have deepened my feeling for God..  If I'd assumed the Pursuit of God had to be a lifelong protracted spiritual growth, as the Christian life in general is iusually taught in the churches, Tozer disabuses me of that idea in his third chapter.  

 No careless or casual dealings will suffice. Let [the born-again believer] come to God in full determination to be heard. Let him insist that God accept his all, that He take things out of his heart and Himself reign there in power. It may be he will need to become specific, to name things and people by their names one by one. If he will become drastic enough he can shorten the time of his travail from years to minutes and enter the good land long before his slower brethren who coddle their feelings and insist upon caution in their dealings with God. 

Let us never forget that such a truth as this can not be learned by rote as one would learn the facts of physical science. They must be experienced before we can really know them. \We must in our hearts live through Abraham’s harsh and bitter experiences if we would know the blessedness which follows them. The ancient curse will not go out painlessly; the tough old miser within us will not lie down and die obedient to our command. He must be torn out of our heart like a plant from the soil; he must be extracted in agony and blood like a tooth from the jaw. He must be expelled from our soul by violence as Christ expelled the money changers from the temple. 

And we shall need to steel ourselves against his piteous begging, and to recognize it as springing out of self-pity, one of the most reprehensible sins of the human heart. If we would indeed know God in growing intimacy we must go this way of renunciation. And if we are set upon the pursuit of God He will sooner or later bring us to this test. 

Father, I want to know Thee, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

There is no doubt this is terrifying.  I think of what Madame Guyon suffered for her love of God.  But all I have to do is ponder my own attachments and sins and bad habits and the prospect of God's taking them away precipitously and it is terrifying.  And yet this is what i want.  I'm too old to spend any more time being easy on myself, though from what Tozer says this abrupt method may be what everybody should be doing anyway.  I pray also that He will give me the strength to bear it, give me the strength not to refuse whatever He would take from me or put me through.  I review in my mind all the various possibilities that occur to me but He knows me better than I know myself and I may miss what He sees to be the most important barriers to the spiritual life in Him that I want.  Things in my life, people in my life, what people think of me, health, etc.  These are just some of the categories in which the necessary stripping could be done.  Give me the strength to say "Thy will be done Lord."  You are worth it though in the midst of pain it could only too easily be forgotten and I've forgotten it for years already.