Revival on many levels

Q:  What is the chief end of man?

A:  The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. 

--------------------From the Westminster Shorter Catechism 

 Doesn't that tell us what we should be doing with our time here?   Or is it too often read to mean that in the end, the very end, we will be engaged entirely in glorifying God and enjoying Him forever, but not until then?   

Fraid so.  Fraid that is often how it is read.  It doesn't seem to inspire believers to pursue the enjoyment of God in this life at any rate, though as I read it now that's what it should accomplish.

 Then I found The Christian Book of Mystical Verse, edited by Tozer, a kindle version for 99 cents.  His statement about how he chose the poetry he included in the book encourages me to high expectations.  He says primarily it reflects

...my own bent, though I have been guided somewhat by a few simple rules. First, all sentimental verse was excluded, along with everything homey and maudlin. The only healthy emotions are those aroused by great ideas, and even these must be restrained and purified by the Spirit of God or they will spend themselves in weak and sterile rhymes. Of such there is enough in the religious world; I think none will be found in this book.

An unexpected eagerness to hear God praised in verse surprises me.   God's lovers down the centuries possessing Him, possessed by Him, pass on their passion, capturing streams of living water from the mountains of the Bible, forming pools that draw the panting deer. 

As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after Thee.   -- Psalm 42

There's a song about it too, many versions of which are at You Tube.

If my breath quickens at the thought of reading this poetry about God it reassures me that He hasn't abandoned me after all.

How did the term "mysticism" come under such opprobrium in the Protestant churches?  Is it only because of those who did deviate from scripture?  So many more were true to scripture and Tozer makes clear that was a major criterion for his choices.  A Christian mystic, a genuine Christian mystic, is one who put more passion into the Christian life than others did.  That's basically it.   That deeper passion is expressed in lengthy times of prayer and devotional reading, including reading the Bible, and that lengthy time spent leads sometimes to supernatural experiences of God.  This isn't people starting out looking for experiences at all, however, this is people drawn by Biblical truth to more intense worship and seeking of God than others are, for whatever reason.   If spiritual and supernatural experiences occur they are God's reward for such intense devotion.  

It seems a shame that this pursuit isn't encouraged from the pulpit so that more people would be drawn in this same way to the deeper life.  It's there to be had.  It's in the scripture, it's just a matter of heart engagement.  

Certainly we are exhorted to spend time in prayer, but often it's in the context of getting people who hardly pray at all to pray at least a little more.   And I've needed that exhortation myself, sorry to say.   Certainly we are exhorted to love and adore God, and most Christians would say they do, but it seems to be very limited by the demands of daily life.  

But also by low expectations.  More time can always be made for whatever truly engages our hearts.  What would it take to draw more people to lengthier and deeper times with God?  You can't just criticize the lack of it, you can't just recommend more of it, somehow you have to inspire the motivation that is lacking.  What sort of preaching?   What sort of accommodations among God's people?  Somehow it has to be made clear that it is possible, that scripture calls us to it, that God Himself calls us to it, that God promises to draw near to those who seek Him diligently.  

He who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.  

Churches often set up retreats, usually for a long weekend in some place of natural beauty, and more prayer is usually encouraged in that context, but still it's mostly just a more intensive time of hearing preaching, interspersed with recreations of various sorts.  It's always seemed to me that a time of fasting should be encouraged and times of solitude, directed solitude perhaps, based on devotional scripture readings or the like.  Then group prayer and worship too, but not broken for "lunch" where the focus beomes the usual social chitchat, or a ball game or whatnot.   The point of a retreat is to deepen the Christian life, but except for spending more time overall in more or less spiritual pursuits, it is too fragmented to do much in the way of deepening spiritual life.  Surely people feel refreshed after such a retreat, but is the refrelshment much more spiritual than a good vacation would produce?

Where the Reformation took hold Luther disbanded the monasteries and convents, and no doubt for the best of reasons as nothing of much spiritual importance was going on there either.  Nevertheless, there were those that had provided spiritual inspiration and guidance down the centuries, and some form of provision for that purpose should be part of Protetant life as well.  

There have certainly been times in Protestant life that had a similarly encouraging effect on the spirtiual life.  Family devotions were often such an influence.  People would go home after Sunday service to spend the afternoon discussing the sermon and praying.  There may be some of that going on now, I hope so.   

     Genuine times of God-wrought revival, when God Himself comes down and takes possession of His people, are known for being so attractive that people don't want to leave church after the service, and often the service has already had to give way to outpourings of both penitential and devotional feeling in the congregation.  And others from around the community are drawn to join in so that there is a need for larger and larger spaces to accommodate them all.  They want to be in church, they don't want to leave, the Presence of God enraptures them.  

I'm finding it is possible to rebuild my lost spiritual life at least to some extent.  Spending more time in prayer and asking God specifically to increase my love for Him and my ability to mortify my sins.  So He hasn't deserted me.  Tears come frequently, both of sadness and of joy.  After my thoughts have wandered off to who-knows-where, some mundane concern, some political situation, when I bring my mind back to the thought of God my whole being is melted, the tensions in my body dissolve, I'm in a lovely peaceful state, even perhaps a bit of a "swoon." .  Just the thought.  As many of the mystic poets write, that's all it takes, just the thought of God to transport us into His presence or receive His peace.  This comes of course as a result of increased prayer and time seeking the Lord and it isn't going to happen otherwise.  "Jesus the very thought of Thee With sweetness fills my breast."  For me it's peace, for him sweetness.  Just the thought, just turning the mind to the idea of God, nothing more than that.  Some write of "gazing" on God.  I don't know if that is different from turning one's thought to Him or not.  Perhaps someday I'll know.

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.  

The One Thing Needful and the Church's Hindrances to Pursuing It

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.. 

God Help Us

As happens periodically without much staying power I'm again "trying to get back to God," and this time so far I'm sticking it out and hope it continues.  Reading around in various "mystics" and devotional writers for inspiration.  It helps a lot.  Certain psalms help, the Song of Songs helps (no, it's not about human love relationships no matter how many misguided people think so),  Spurgeon on the Song of Songs, Madame Guyon's various writings, Gerhard Tersteegen's sermons and poetry, John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul --  just the first few lines of the poem are inspiring --   and now going back to take a look at A W Tozer.  First sentence of the Preface to his Pursuit of God:

In this hour of all-but-universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself.

I hope it was true then and even more so that it might be true now.  The book was written in 1948, and the world got darker over the next decades.  The hour is even darker  now.  Without abandoning our obligation to do what we can to push it back, we need to avoid getting swalloed up by it, and the pursuit of God is far more important.   It would be wonderful if revival could still come to this miserable world, but whether it does or not, personal revival is always the most important thing.

There is only one Republican Possibility

I'm not sure what I think of the Unity idea put forward by Bret Weinstein to add a moderate Democrat and a moderate Republican to the ticket with Trump and Biden.   Well, really I do know what I think about a few things.  I think it is clever and creative, and I think it's based on a wrong idea about the election.  There may have been some reason in the past to refer to our two=party system as a "duopoly," but that's not what's going on now.   

Just guessing, I doubt it would take votes from Trump, because I doubt there are many who would vote for him simply because he's the only Republican choice while they'd really prefer a "moderate" --whatever that means: Trump isn't a radical so I don't really get the use of the term.  It might I suppose bring out some voters for the "moderate" Republican who otherwise wouldn't vote at all.   But on the slight possibility that it could take votes from Trump I have to oppose it.  And I suppose it might take votes from Biden on the other hand, but I wouldn't want to gamble on that desirable situation either.   It's hard to know of course but in general I think Trump supporters are a solidly committed bunch who understand this is no ordinary election between two worldviews, this is a tidal wave against the dike that protects the nation, at the moment kept from total destruction only by a guy with his finger in one of its holes.

There is simply no Republican other than Trump who has the personal strength to pursue the goals that need to be pursued.  The Left is so doggedly lying and opposing him at every turn everything he does is a struggle anyway, and there's no denying he has his faults which also compromise his aims, BUT there is simply no other Republican who could have done a tenth of what he's done in the teeth of that opposition.   Not to mention that there is no other Republican who would have been as clear about what needs to be done to keep America America.  

The Leftist opposition isn't going to go away.  Any Republican President is going to be slandered and sabotaged every day just as Trump has been, but Trump seems to have a steel backbone and can take it far beyond what  could have been expected of anyone.  Nobody else could survive it for half a minute.  This is a revolution they are trying to pull off and they aren't going to let up.  I don't know if it's possible to save the country at all, but I know Trump is the only possible man for the moment, like it or not.   (And I suspect those who continue to dislike him to the point of being completely unable to consider voting for him, are still laboring under one lie or another about him.  An antidote could be spending some time listening to the conservatives like Rush and Mark Levin.)

This isn't going to pass, it's only going to get worse.

 Come soon, Lord Jesus.   Not just for the sake of the Church, though happy we would be to be taken out of this worsening world we're in, but so things can't just go on and on getting worse  all the time without any clear end in sight.    The Tribulation will certainly be much worse but it's time-limited and many will be saved during it, and God will be their refuge. .

Chris Pinto's latest two radio shows as usual get at what's going on behind the scenes.   The Marxist and also Satanist/occultic underpinnings of BLM is the subject of the show on September 5th..  (Remember Hitler was into occultism and some say he was clearly possessed by Satan when he gave his speeches, which were not in his own voice.  No surprise to find this spirit-being hater of mankind behind any destructive movements on this planet.  Marx was also a practicing Satanist and Pinto quotes him on the subject).   

The following radio show, on September 12, is about how we're witnessing an attempt at a Communist revolution in the rioting.   How ordinary liberals and leftists who support BLM are what the Communists call "useful idiots" who won't be needed when the revolution has done its work.  Listen up.   

http://www.noiseofthunderradio.com/show-downloads/