Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God.
The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted.
Jesus called it "life" and "self," or as we would say, the self-life. Its chief characteristic is its possessiveness.
[Jesus] had everything, but he possessed nothing. There is the spiritual secret. There is the sweet theology of the heart which can be learned only in the school of renunciation.
God made us for Himself: that is the only explanation that satisfies the heart of a thinking man, whatever his wild reason may say. Should faulty education and perverse reasoning lead a man to conclude otherwise, there is little that any Christian can do for him.
The Presence of God is the central fact of Christianity. At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His Presence.
Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they?
Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. As well try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us.
To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains personally unknown to the individual. "He must be," they say, "therefore we believe He is. . . ." While admitting His existence they do not think of Him as knowable in the sense that we know things or people.
But the very ransomed children of God themselves: why do they know so little of that habitual conscious communion with God which the Scriptures seem to offer? The answer is our chronic unbelief. Faith enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things.
God has objective existence independent of and apart from any notions which we may have concerning Him. The worshipping heart does not create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration.
Another word that must be cleared up is the word reckon. This does not mean to visualize or imagine. Imagination is not faith. The two are not only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other. Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there.
What now does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience? It means simply that God is here.
These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within us.
I venture to suggest that the one vital quality which [faithful believers] had in common was spiritual receptivity. Something in them was open to heaven, something which urged them Godward.
Receptivity is not a single thing; it is a compound rather, a blending of several elements within the soul. It is an affinity for, a bent toward, a sympathetic response to, a desire to have.
The tragic results of this spirit [of quick spirituality] 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.
The Voice of God is the most powerful force in nature, indeed the only force in nature, for all energy is here only because the power-filled Word is being spoken.
God's word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God's word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful.
That God is here and that He is speaking—these truths are back of all other Bible truths; without them there could be no revelation at all.
The Voice of God is a friendly Voice. No one need fear to listen to it unless he has already made up his mind to resist it.
This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion.
"Looking" on the Old Testament serpent [as in John 4] is identical with "believing" on the New Testament Christ. That is, the looking and the believing are the same thing. And he would understand that while Israel looked with their external eyes, believing is done with the heart. I think he would conclude that faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.
Indeed Jesus taught that He wrought His works by always keeping His inward eyes upon His Father. His power lay in His continuous look at God (John 5:19-21).
The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. While he looks at Christ the very things he has so long been trying to do will be getting done within him.
"Be thou exalted" is the language of victorious spiritual experience.
Another saying of Jesus, and a most disturbing one, was put in the form of a question, "How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God alone?" If I understand this correctly Christ taught here the alarming doctrine that the desire for honor among men made belief impossible. Is this sin at the root of religious unbelief? Could it be that those "intellectual difficulties" which men blame for their inability to believe are but smoke screens to conceal the real cause that lies behind them?
A whole world of literature has been created to justify this kind of life [without God] as the only normal one.
The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing. The word Jesus used means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do.
Advertising is largely based upon this habit of pretense. "Courses" are offered in this or that field of human learning frankly appealing to the victim's desire to shine at a party. Books are sold, clothes and cosmetics are peddled, by playing continually upon this desire to appear what we are not.
The Lord Jesus Christ Himself is our perfect example, and He knew no divided life. In the Presence of His Father He lived on earth without strain from babyhood to His death on the cross. God accepted the offering of His total life, and made no distinction between act and act. "I do always the things that please him," was His brief summary of His own life as it related to the Father.
His presence in human flesh sweeps away forever the evil notion that there is about the human body something innately offensive to the Deity.
We need no more be ashamed of our body—the fleshly servant that carries us through life—than Jesus was of the humble beast upon which He rode into Jerusalem. "The Lord hath need of him" may well apply to our mortal bodies. If Christ dwells in us we may bear about the Lord of glory as the little beast did of old and give occasion to the multitudes to cry, "Hosanna in the highest."
It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it. The motive is everything.
"God made us for himself." My desire after God then has purpose and reason. "The pursuit of God" is the foundation of my being and the reason for my creation. Where this desire dissipates or disappears real violence has been done to the human soul. It is the "natural" order which has been distorted and destroyed by sin, which is also a desire, but not with God at its center.
Because God made me for himself, "he waits to be wanted." This is the only action God can take essentially, if he wanted spiritual beings to be made for himself. If the my spirit is coerced or forced to seek or take something, there is resentment and rebellion. Choice is the heart of the inner world. I am what I choose to desire.
The heart of sin says, "If I cannot possess it, I do not want it." Sin withers and dies in the light of desire after God, because he cannot be possessed. Possession implies control. God made us so we could have him while not possessing him. When I can find the desire to want God without possessing him, then the rest of life - full of God's creation of people, creatures, and things - is mine for the having and enjoying. If only I can be free of possessing!
The possessiveness of sin comes from the thought that the most "real" thing I can count on is myself - what I possess in things, abilities, and status. With this view of reality, God is decidedly unreal. He becomes an idea or sentiment that I can possess and manipulate to please and aid my flesh - the abilities and status I possess. At the heart of sin is this distorted view of reality based on "self-life."
Belief is the trust that reality is God-centered, God-initiated, and God-sustained. Such trust is practiced through reckoning. Faith is confidence. Faith is expectation. Faith sees and beholds God and so is opposed to sight that does not see God.
What does faith see? The reality of God is based on his Word. By his Word everything comes into being, is order, and is sustained. Listening starts the journey into God's reality. In order to behold God I must listen to him, just like Mary, the friend of Jesus, sat at his feet to hear him. When I trust, I listen. If I do not listen, I am not trusting. If I do not trust, I will not listen. The eyes direct the ears and the ears instruct the eyes. "Come and see," says Jesus. "He who has ears, let him hear!" And finally, "Faith comes from hearing." With my eyes I find food for my soul to hear. With my ears, I feed the faith of my eyes.
The veil of self-life keeps me from overcoming sin and seeing God. Self-life serves the body and assumes that God will not. Self-life lives a life of pretending. It pretends that God will not care for my whole being, so I have to do it myself. It pretends that only in tricking other people into thinking I am what I am not can I really get what I want and need out of them. Self-life never trusts. It always pretends, presumes, and pushes. The desire and pursuit of God is far from this life since he made me for trusting and waiting for him rather than grabbing what I can when I can.
Lord, the foundation of life is the fact the you made me for you. These words bring trust, hope, and peace. They deeply communicate your love. Let me not pretend to live, but really live. Let me not live blinded by my flesh, my self-life, but with open eyes of faith. Let me listen so that I might be fed and strengthened. I am for you, Father. Amen.
"God made us for himself." This is why my life must be the pursuit of God. I think of certain kinds of software that are made for certain operating systems. So it is with God. I am "made for God," just like some things are "made for Windows." I operate in him best. Without him, whatever I am remains either poorly used or unused entirely.
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