In this hour of all but universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: Within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct “interpretations” of truth. They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water.
This is the only real harbinger of revival which I have been
able to detect anywhere on the religious horizon. It may be the cloud the size
of a man’s hand for which few saints here and there have been looking. It can
result in a resurrection of life for many souls and a recapture of that radiant
wonder which should accompany faith in Christ, that wonder which has all but
fled the Church of God in our day.
But this hunger must be recognised by our religious leaders.
Current evangelism has (to change the figure) laid the altar and divided the
sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange
the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of
lofty Carmel. But God be thanked that there are a few who care. They are those
who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, are yet unable to
reconcile themselves the “piercing sweetness” of the love of Christ about whom
all the holy prophets did write and the psalmists did sing.
There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth
correctly the principles and the doctrines of Christ, but too many of them seem
satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely
unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything
unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel
within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.
I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is
real. Milton’s terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to
his: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.” It is a solemn thing, and no
small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually
seated at the Father’s table. The truth of Wesley’s words is established before
our eyes: “Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of
religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right
opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God
without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.”
Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other
effective agencies for dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions
of people who hold “right opinions” probably more than ever before in the
history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true
spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art
of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and
foreign thing called the “program”. This word has been borrowed from the stage
and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for
worship among us.
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 the term. But exposition may be carried on in such a way as
to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatsever. 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 centre of their hearts.
This book is a modest attempt to aid God’s hungry children
so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery
which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and
wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy
mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and
there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.
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A.W. Tozer, Chicago, Illinois, June 16, 1948
