ANOTHER GEM from TOZER
Posted by: prophetic <prophetic@...>
by A.W Tozer
The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the
Church is famishing for want of His Presence. The instant cure
of most of our religious ills would be to enter the Presence in
spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that we are in
God and that God is in us. This would lift us out of our pitiful
narrowness and cause our hearts to be enlarged. This would
burn away the impurities from our lives as the bugs and fungi
were burned away by the fire that dwelt in the bush...
Hearts that are "fit to break" with love for the Godhead are those
who have been in the Presence and have looked with opened
eye upon the majesty of Deity. Men of the breaking hearts had
a quality about them not known to or understood by common
men. They habitually spoke with spiritual authority. They had
been in the Presence of God and they reported what they saw
there. They were prophets, riot scribes, for the scribe tells us
what he has read, and the prophet tells what he has seen.
The distinction is not an imaginary one. 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? The hard
voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the Church
waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the
veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is
God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living
experience into the holy Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.
With the veil removed by the rending of Jesus' flesh, with
nothing on God's side to prevent us from entering, why do we
tarry without? Why do we consent to abide all our days just
outside the Holy of Holies and never enter at all to look upon
God? We hear the Bridegroom say, "Let me see thy
countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice
and thy countenance is comely." We sense that the call is
for us, but still we fail to draw near, and the years pass and
we grow old and tired in the outer courts of the tabernacle.
What doth hinder us?
The answer usually given, simply that we are "cold," will not
explain all the facts. There is something more serious than
coldness of heart, something that may be back of that coldness
and be the cause of its existence. What is it? What but the
presence of a veil in our hearts? a veil not taken away as the
first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light
and hiding the face of God from us. It is the veil of our fleshly
fallen nature living on, unjudged within us, uncrucified and
unrepudiated. It is the closewoven veil of the self-life which we
have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been secretly
ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought
to the judgment of the cross. It is not too mysterious, this
opaque veil, nor is it hard to identify. We have but to look in
our own hearts and we shall see it there, sewn and patched
and repaired it may be, but there nevertheless, an enemy to
our lives and an effective block to our spiritual progress...
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. We dare not rest content with a neat doctrine of
self-crucifixion. That is to imitate Saul and spare the best of
the sheep and the oxen. We must invite the cross to do its
deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the
cross for judgement. It is never fun to die. To rip through the
dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be
anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did
to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to
set him free. The cross is rough and it is deadly, but it is
effective. It does not keep its victim hanging there for ever.
There comes a moment when its work is finished and the
suffering victim dies. After that is resurrection glory and power,
and the pain is forgotten for the joy that that veil is taken away
and we have entered, in actual spiritual experience, the
Presence of the Living God.
-from A.W Tozer's book, "The Pursuit of God".