I would like to share the following quotation from Forgotten God
, by Francis Chan:
“I don’t want my life to be explainable without the Holy Spirit. I want people to look at my life and know that I couldn’t be doing this by my own power. I want to live in such a way that I am desperate for Him to come through. That if He doesn’t come through, I am screwed.”
Convicted? Encouraged? Challenged? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
This is a quote from How to be Filled with the Holy Spirit, by A. W. Tozer.
“[T]here is an unseen Deity present, a knowing, feeling Personality, and He is indivisible from the Father and the Son, so that if you were to be suddenly transferred to heaven itself you wouldn’t be any closer to God than you are now, for God is already here. Changing your geographical location would not bring you any nearer to God nor God any nearer to you, because the indivisible Trinity is present, and all that the Son is the Holy Ghost is, and all that the Father is the Holy Ghost is, and the Holy Ghost is in His Church.”
As I read this, the question came to me, what would the church look like if we lived this out? What would my life look like if I always remembered that God is beside me every step of the way?
If Jesus was riding shotgun, would I loose my cool when I’m cut off in traffic? If I took into consideration the presence of the Holy Spirit, would I think the thoughts that I do or react to people and events the way that I do? In many instances, I would not.
The point of Tozer’s paragraph is that the Holy Spirit is within us and sees what we think and do.
In Psalm 139:7 David writes, “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence?” (NASB) The answer to this rhetorical question is “nowhere.” There is no where I can go to get away from God in the person of the Holy Spirit. None, zip, nada.
The point of this post is to remind myself and by extension, you the reader, that God is always present and that I should act accordingly.
The good news is that when I fail (not if I fail), God has provided a means of dealing with the failure (see 1 John 1:9).
I received an email containing the quote from A. W. Tozer and thought it worth sharing:
Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.
In the Confessions, Saint Augustine describes a depraved soul as “falling away from security in you to destruction in itself.”
I like the way that Augustine puts this. When I make moral choices, I am choosing between God or self, light or darkness, building or destruction. There is no middle ground.
Yet there is hope. The first source of hope is found in Romans 8:1 – there is no condemnation for me if I am in Christ.
The second source of hope is that God can take my half-hearted attempts at obedience and use them for His purpose and His glory. Later on in Romans 8, Paul says, “all things work together for good.” In this context, I take the word good to mean good from God’s perspective, which too often is different than mine.
