Growing in Grace

Too many praying persons seek to use prayer as a means to ends that are not wholly pure. "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man," wrote the inspired James, "availeth much." With this the whole Bible and Christian experience agree: Prayer is effective. When it is not answered something is wrong. The same apostle who affirmed the effective power of prayer admitted also that prayer is sometimes ineffective: "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts." To pray effectively we must want what God wants - that and only that is to pray in the will of God. And no petition made in the will of God was ever refused. "This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us: and if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him" (1 John 5:14, 15). Furthermore, to pray effectively we must pray within t...

Today there is no reason for our remaining longer in doubt. We have every right to expect our Lord to grant to His Church the spiritual gifts which He has never in fact taken away from us, but which we are failing to receive only because of our error of unbelief. -A.W. Tozer After a man is convinced that he can be filled with the Spirit he must desire to be. If. . . your soul cries out for God, for the living God, and your dry and empty heart despairs of living a normal Christian life without a further anointing, then I ask you: Is your desire all-absorbing? Is it the biggest thing in your life? Does it crowd out every common religious activity and fill you with an acute longing that can only be described as the pain of desire? If your heart cries "Yes" to these questions you may be on your way to a spiritual breakthrough that will transform your whole life. Before there can be fullness there must be emptiness. Before God can fill us with Himself we must first be empti...

If. . . your soul cries out to God, for the living God, and your dry and empty heart despairs of living a normal Christian life. . . then I ask you: Is your desire all absorbing? Is it the biggest thing in your life?. . . If your heart cries "Yes" to the questions you may be on your way to a spiritual breakthrough that will transform your whole life . "Concerning spiritual gifts, brethren," wrote Paul to the Corinthians, "I would not have you ignorant." Certainly Paul meant nothing derogatory by this. Rather, he was expressing a charitable concern that his fellow believers should be neither uninformed nor in error about a truth so vastly important as this one. For some time it has been evident that we evangelicals have been failing to avail ourselves of the deeper riches of grace that lie in the purposes of God for us. . . One blessed treasure we have missed is the right to possess the gifts of the Spirit as set forth in such fullness and clarity in ...

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 kn...

I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than the symptoms. The separating line between the Church and the world has been all but obliterated. Aside from a few of the grosser sins, the sins of the unregenerated world are now approved by a shocking number of professedly "born-again" Christians, and copied eagerly. . . We are busy these days proving to the world that they can have all the benefits of the gospel without any inconvenience to their customary way of life. It's "all this, and heaven too." We must have a reformation within the Church. . . God is not interested in increasing church attendance unless those who attend amend their ways and begin to live holy lives. . . Prayer revival will prevail when it is accompanied by radical amendment of life; not before. . . ...