I’m still wondering about it. How are you spiritual? I read on so many blogs what seems increasingly like a meaningless cacophony.
How are they spiritual? They even apprehend matters of the spirit in ways they fancy objective. How are they anything but idolaters? These are matters apprehended in communion, from which they would remove themselves as subject. They do not know that they participate except for the vague warnings of those who cannot escape the hermeneutical observations that we must bring ourselves along. They want something other and have reified whatever it is they perceive, and by this measure, an idolatrous measure, judge spirituality, like barking dogs and lowing cattle. For the reified perceptions are mechanical, independent, irrational and anti-metaphysical, the nonsense of naturalism. How we are spiritual, the apprehension of spiritual matters cannot be had without imagination. Piety must grow with consciousness; and this nonsense of cacophony has an effect of making us more unconscious. How long before they turn to the vicious deconstruction of what they fancy certainty? When the world they are increasingly less conscious of grows smaller than the self?
Is it any hope that the tedious years of nominalism will be spent?
Joel
/ March 28, 2006Some who desire to be teachers of the Word, but who understand neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm, insist upon “naked” faith as the only way to know spiritual things. By this they mean a conviction of the trustworthiness of the Word of God (a conviction, it may be noted, which the devils share with them). But the man who has been taught even slightly by the Spirit of Truth will rebel at this perversion. His language will be, “I have heard Him and observed Him. What have I to do any more with idols?” For he cannot love a God who is no more than a deduction from a text. He will crave to know God with a vital awareness that goes beyond words, and to live in the intimacy of personal communion. “To seek our divinity merely in books and writings is to seek the living among the dead; we do but in vain many times seek God in these, where His truth too often is not so much enshrined as entombed. He is best discerned by an intellectual touch of Him. We must see with our eyes, and hear with our ears, and our hands must handle of the word of life.” Nothing can take the place of the touch of God in the soul and the sense of Someone there. Real faith, indeed, brings such realization, for real faith is never the operation of reason upon texts. Where true faith is, the knowledge of God will be given as a fact of consciousness altogether apart from the conclusions of logic.
Were a man to awaken in the pitch dark at midnight and hear someone moving about in his room, and know that the unseen presence was a loved member of his family who had every right to be there, his heart might be filled with a sense of quiet pleasure; but should he have reason to believe that an intruder had entered, perhaps to rob or to kill, he would lie in terror and stare at the darkness not knowing from which direction the expected blow might come. But the difference between experience and no experience would be that acute sense of someone there. Is it not true that for most of us who call ourselves Christians there is no real experience? We have substituted theological ideas for an arresting encounter; we are full of religious notions, but our great weakness is that for our hearts there is no one there.
http://www.cmalliance.org/devotions/tozer/tozer.jsp?id=1449
Joel
/ March 28, 2006Whatever else it embraces, true Christian experience must always include a genuine encounter with God. Without this, religion is but a shadow, a reflection of reality, a cheap copy of an original once enjoyed by someone else of whom we have heard. It cannot but be a major tragedy in the life of any man to live in a church from childhood to old age and know nothing more real than some synthetic god compounded of theology and logic, but having no eyes to see, no cars to hear, and no heart to love.
The spiritual giants of old were men who at some time became acutely conscious of the real Presence of God and maintained that consciousness for the rest of their lives. The first encounter may have been one of terror, as when a “horror of great darkness” fell upon Abram, or as when Moses at the bush hid his face because he was afraid to look upon God. Usually this fear soon lost its content of terror and changed after a while to delightsome awe, to level off finally into a reverent sense of complete nearness to God. The essential point is, they experienced God. How otherwise can the saints and prophets be explained? How otherwise can we account for the amazing power for good they have exercised over countless generations? Is it not that they walked in conscious communion with the real Presence and addressed their prayers to God with the artless conviction that they were addressing Someone actually there?
http://www.cmalliance.org/devotions/tozer/tozer.jsp?id=1450