Panting After God
The bold claims that we are sons of God, that we are risen with Christ and seated with Him in heavenly places, that we are indwelt by the life-giving Spirit, that we are members of the body of Christ and children of the new creation, are negated by our attitudes, our behavior and, most of all, by our lack of fervor and by the absence of a spirit of worship within us.
Paul was a seeker and a finder and a seeker still. (Many) seek and find and seek no more. After "accepting" Christ they tend to substitute logic for life and doctrine for experience.
For them the truth becomes a veil to hide the face of God; for Paul it was a door into His very Presence.
When the apostle cries "That I may know him," he uses the word know not in its intellectual but in its experiential sense. We must look for the meaning - not to the mind but to the heart. Theological knowledge is knowledge about God. While this is indispensable it is not sufficient. . . It is not intellectual knowledge about God that quenches man's ancient heart-thirst, but the very Person and Presence of God Himself. These come to us through Christian doctrine, but they are more than doctrine. Christian truth is designed to lead us to God, not to serve as a substitute for God.
It has been the unanimous testimony of the greatest Christian souls that the nearer they drew to God the more acute became their consciousness of sin and their sense of personal unworthiness. The purest souls never knew how pure they were and the greatest saints never guessed that they were great
If we are alert enough to hear God's voice we must not content ourselves with merely "believing" it. How can any man believe a command? Commands are to be obeyed, and until we have obeyed them we have done exactly nothing at all about them. And to have heard them and not obeyed them is infinitely worse than never to have heard them at all, especially in the light of Christ's soon return and the judgment to come.
-A.W. Tozer; Keys to The Deeper Life; pp. 27-36
Paul was a seeker and a finder and a seeker still. (Many) seek and find and seek no more. After "accepting" Christ they tend to substitute logic for life and doctrine for experience.
For them the truth becomes a veil to hide the face of God; for Paul it was a door into His very Presence.
When the apostle cries "That I may know him," he uses the word know not in its intellectual but in its experiential sense. We must look for the meaning - not to the mind but to the heart. Theological knowledge is knowledge about God. While this is indispensable it is not sufficient. . . It is not intellectual knowledge about God that quenches man's ancient heart-thirst, but the very Person and Presence of God Himself. These come to us through Christian doctrine, but they are more than doctrine. Christian truth is designed to lead us to God, not to serve as a substitute for God.
It has been the unanimous testimony of the greatest Christian souls that the nearer they drew to God the more acute became their consciousness of sin and their sense of personal unworthiness. The purest souls never knew how pure they were and the greatest saints never guessed that they were great
If we are alert enough to hear God's voice we must not content ourselves with merely "believing" it. How can any man believe a command? Commands are to be obeyed, and until we have obeyed them we have done exactly nothing at all about them. And to have heard them and not obeyed them is infinitely worse than never to have heard them at all, especially in the light of Christ's soon return and the judgment to come.
-A.W. Tozer; Keys to The Deeper Life; pp. 27-36
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