“A generation of Christians reared among pushbuttons and automatic-machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions, and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar. The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit; these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul.” —A. W. Tozer
Tozer looked at the church and told it like it was. He died in 1963. I wonder what he’d tell the church today?
P.S. We’re the lamps of His light—not the salesmen or the customers of His fire. How could we be? He fits no category, exceeds every attribution, defies all description. We confine Him to the object of our study, yet He is the unleashed subject of the universe itself. “He’s the superlative of everything good you choose to call Him”, Rev Lockwood called Him—yet we still tread the surface of the Sea of Him seeking to stay afloat, waters in which He intended us to drown.
—j
Jay McCarl 