Since I try to expose false Christian teachings which usually means experience-based practices that slight the biblical revelation, while at the same time I have positive things to say about a sort of "mysticism" that I think is legitimate, it can get confusing. When I have to get into something like the Jesus Calling book as I as I just did I do start wond3ering if maybe I should just completely abandon any defense of anything that goes by the name "mysticism" and maybe i should. I need to pray more about that. Even A. W. Tozer can be wrong after all even though Ihe bases his "higher life" teachings on the Bible and emphasizes the Bible as the foundation of everything we do as Christians.
Maybe I will eventually have to renounce my own arguments along these lines but since it has come up again I just want to make the case once more. John MacArthur is always denouncinbg the "higher life" as a delusion and that sort of thing and I just heard a vid3eo in which he says that again.
So my defense is that all the "higher life" is is experiences that come to people who spend more than the usual amount of time pursuing the usual normal Christian biblical practices. People who do say morning devotions, Bible reading and prayer for half an hour or so or even an hour, then maybe an eventing prayer time as well, aren't going to have this sort of experience. But those who pant after God to the point that they spend hours in prayer and Bible reading and Bible meditation beecause they have an unusual passion or zeal for the things of God are very likely to have extgraordinary experiences of God. No, not audible speaking, but inhtensified messages of great clarity through the bible, deep experiences of love for God that can carry you away, that can be called as the old mystics called them, "transports<' experiences of great peace, deep peace, experiences of "glory" as Jessie Penn Lewis described hers, and so on. These come often with self-denial, denying self, taking up the cross and following Him. These things are BIBLICAL. And I think that's all Tozer is talking about. When all you hear is debunkery of such things you are likely to get cooled down to the poinbt that you stop spending "too much" time with the Lord. I think that's what tozer was complaining about in his introduction to his book The Pursuit of God.
Fasting is also biblical but we don't hear that preached much outside of charismatic circles where it gets used to promote some bad teaching. This is too bad because it IS biblical, and it DOES promkote deeper experiences of God. It brings more spiritual power, more self denial, more ability to actually do good in the world around us. It can bring an "anointing" that draws people to the gospel, and anointing is another concept that is too often denounced by people who are so woreried about the mystical they quench every tiny way it might be expressed.
It is true that the extra passion and extra zeal that can deepen one's experience of God can also get demons involved and that has to be guarded against. The most trustworthy of the mystics, in my opinion. are always warning about being misled and the need for special care and prayer against deception.
Reading or listening to Christian books is a legitimate part of the normal Christian life, but of course it matters WHAT books you are reading. Jesus Calling is not the right direction. Nor The Shack. Nor The Prayer of Jabok. Nor The Purpose Driven Life. Etc. But there's plenty of Charles Spurgeon out there, and J C Rule and i'd recommend that kind of reading myself. I'm listening to a You tube audible book by SPurgeon, at the moment titled According to Promise. It has som some very inspiring chapters in it that could carry a person away with "mystical transports" I suppose.
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