We are living in peril
ous times characterized by the generally low and loathful view of God in the culture. Everything from the celebrity and television preacher's prosperity gospel to the casual, almost flippant, at...titude of many church goers reeks with the stench of false religion. Frightfully little has changed in the recent decades. A. W. Tozer, in his book "The Knowledge of the Holy," said, "The Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to consitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity."
Christians in the early centuries after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ through the reformation of the sixteenth century up to and including the awakenings in the American colonies would never have tolerated today's casual acceptance of a "so called" faith that demands a guarantee of heaven while simultaneously resisting any obligation to God.
Materialism has generated a strange kind of human being indeed: the person who believes he or she is too good to be damned to hell when the Bible and human experience plainly teaches that every person before experiencing the Holy Spirit's life-transforming, regenerating work of salvation is nothing more than a rebel against God.
More than six decades ago Tozer summarized today's need perfectly when he wrote:
ous times characterized by the generally low and loathful view of God in the culture. Everything from the celebrity and television preacher's prosperity gospel to the casual, almost flippant, at...titude of many church goers reeks with the stench of false religion. Frightfully little has changed in the recent decades. A. W. Tozer, in his book "The Knowledge of the Holy," said, "The Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to consitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity."Christians in the early centuries after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ through the reformation of the sixteenth century up to and including the awakenings in the American colonies would never have tolerated today's casual acceptance of a "so called" faith that demands a guarantee of heaven while simultaneously resisting any obligation to God.
Materialism has generated a strange kind of human being indeed: the person who believes he or she is too good to be damned to hell when the Bible and human experience plainly teaches that every person before experiencing the Holy Spirit's life-transforming, regenerating work of salvation is nothing more than a rebel against God.
More than six decades ago Tozer summarized today's need perfectly when he wrote:
The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which at the most cannot concern him for very long; but even if the multiple burdens of time may be lifted from him, the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another. That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably. And when the man's laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear.
Tozer, offering the solution, said,
The gospel can lift this destroying burden from the mind, give beauty for ashes, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. But unless the weight of the burden is felt the gospel can mean nothing to the man; and until he sees a vision of God high and lifted up, there will be no woe and no burden. Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them.
Haven't we learned the hard way that a high view of self with a low view of God leads to a myriad of wrecked lives and a sin-soaked culture? Our only hope is an immediate return to a low (humble) view of self with a high (exalted) view of God and of the gospel of Jesus Christ; may it begin with you and me.
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