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Knowledge Of The Holy CLICK HERE
Here is our first Christian classic writing. read the preface.
Biography
Aiden Wilson Tozer was born 1897, died 1963. He was an American pastor, preacher, author, and speaker.
Born in western Pennsylvania, he was converted as a teenager in Akron, Ohio, after hearing a street preacher while on his way home from work at a tire company. In 1919, just five years after his conversion, and without formal theological training, he accepted his first pastorate in West Virginia, and commenced a forty-four year ministry.
associated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) Protestant evangelical denomination.
During the course of ministry, as he observed contemporary Christian living, he regularly expressed that the church was on a dangerous course towards compromising with “worldly” concerns,
In 1950, Tozer was elected editor of the Alliance Weekly magazine, now called, Alliance Life, the official publication of the C&MA.
Tozer authored more than forty books, and at least two of them are regarded as Christian classics: The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy. His writings challenge the reader to the possibility and necessity for a deeper relationship with God. He lived a “simple” non-materialistic life with his wife and seven children, as he never owned a car but travelled by bus and train. Even after becoming a well-known Christian author, he signed away much of his royalties to those in need. It was said by his biographer that he had the ability to make his hearers face themselves in the light of what God was saying to them.
Wow, so many things stood out to me in this chapter. Here’s what touched me the most:
ReplyDelete“…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.
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…”
Two things go hand and hand – what we believe about the sinfulness of man and what we believe about the holiness of God. To the extent that we can realize one, the other is contrasted in the same magnitude. And the power and significance of the gospel depends on these understandings. Wow. No wonder there are so many unbelievers! They do not realize the extent of God’s holiness because we are not properly reflecting it. We, as Christians, have an obligation to seek the right belief about God and allow that belief to bring right glory to Him through us. The better others can understand the real God just through observing us, the better chance they have at understanding the weight of sin and, in turn, the significance of the gospel.
oops... looks like I "jumped the gun" on this. I guess I was just excited :)
ReplyDeleteFreckles
ReplyDeleteBetter to "jump the gun" than never get out of the starting blocks; or worse yet, the grandstands.