© 1993 Dr. A. W. Tozer
© 1993 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
| “I Salute The God Within You” | Vol 14 No 5 Sept 1993 — Index | The 1993 International Conference For Urantia Book Readers, Montreal, Canada |
Dr. A. W. Tozer
(Dr. Tozer was a pastor of the Southside Alliance Church in Chicago from 1928 to 1959. These excerpts are taken from his writings. It is fascinating to compare the concepts he expresses with The URANTIA Book.)
A doctrine or concept has practical value only as far as it is prominent in our thoughts and makes a difference in our lives. Paul said: “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned”. (1 Cor. 2:14)
In religion more than in any other field of human experience, a sharp distinction must always be made between ‘knowing about’ and ‘knowing’. To the question “What is Spirit like?” the answer must always be, “He is like Jesus”. Man, by reason, cannot know God; he can only know about God. But there is such a thing as a gift of knowledge, a gift that comes from heaven. Jesus taught his disciples to expect the coming of the Spirit of Truth who would teach them all things — even to know God.
Everywhere we find Christians who are book-taught but not Spirit-taught. They conceive truth to be something they can grasp with the mind. But there is no truth apart from the Spirit. The most brilliant intellect may be imbecilic when confronted with the mysteries of God. For a person to understand revealed truth requires an act of God.
Jesus said: “Tarry in the City of Jerusalem until ye be endued with Power from on high”. By these words Jesus raised the expectation of his disciples and taught them to look forward to the coming of a supernatural potency into their natures from a source outside themselves. This was to be nothing less that God himself entering into them with the purpose of ultimately reproducing his own likeness within them.
Jesus also said: "Ye shall have power. This power is sufficient; no additional help is needed, for it is the Holy Spirit of God come where weakness lay, to supply power and grace to meet the moral need.
Set over against this, ethical Christianity is seen to be no Christianity at all. It is an infantile copying of Jesus’ ‘ideals’, a pitiable effort to carry out the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount! All this is but child’s play. It is not the faith of Jesus.
The power from the Spirit operates on another level and affects another department of God’s creation. It is spiritual power. It is the kind of power that God is. It is the ability to achieve spiritual and moral ends. Its long range result is to produce God-like character in men and women who were once much less than holy by nature and choice.
How does the Spirit operate? At its purest, it is an unmediated force directly applied by the Spirit of Truth to the spirit of man.
In the light of this it will be seen how empty and meaningless is the average church service [conference, study group] today. All the means are in evidence; the one ominous weakness is the absence of the Spirit’s power.
To the absence of the Spirit may be traced that vague sense of unreality which almost everywhere invests religion in our times. We hear words but they do not register; we cannot relate them to anything in our own life-level. We are aware of no ‘Power’, no ‘Presence’, no ‘Spiritual reality’.
One meaning of the word ‘power’ is the ability to do. There, precisely, is the wonder of the Spirit’s work — his sure ability to make spiritual things real to the soul. This power can go straight to its object with piercing directness. Reality is its subject matter. It does not create objects which are not there but reveals objects already present and hidden from the soul. In actual human experience this is likely to be first felt in the heightened sense of the presence of Jesus — who is felt to be a real person and to be intimately, ravishingly near.
Grace, forgiveness, cleansing take on a form of almost bodily clearness. Prayer loses its unmeaning quality and becomes sweet conversation with someone who is actually there. Love for God and for the children of God take possession of the soul. The world comes to take on a hard outline before our minds and begins to invite our interest and devotion. Then the whole life changes to suit the new reality and the change is permanent.
I think there can be no doubt that the need above all other needs at this moment is the power of the Spirit of Truth. More education, better organization, finer equipment, more advanced methods — all are unavailing. They are like administering resuscitation after the patient is dead. Good as these things are they can never give life. “It is the Spirit that quickeneth.” Good as they are they can never bring power. “Power belongeth to God.”
I should like to suggest that we believers announce a moratorium on religious activity and set our house in order preparatory to the coming of the afflatus from above. I believe we should profit immensely were we to declare a period of silence and self-examination during which each one of us searched his own heart and sought to meet every condition for a real baptism from on high.
We may be sure of one thing, that for our deep trouble there is no cure apart from a visitation, yes, an invasion of power from above. Only the Spirit himself can show us what is wrong with us and only the Spirit can prescribe the cure.
Only the Spirit can save us from the numbing unreality of a Spiritless revelation. Only the inworking of the Spirit’s power can discover the solemn majesty and the heart ravishing mystery of the Triune God.
Here is the whole final message of the gospel: through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we mortals may become one with God — Deity indwelling men! That is the gospel’s fullest effectuation, and even those glories of the world to come will be, in essence, but a greater and more perfect experience of the soul’s union with God. Deity indwelling men! That, I say, is the gospel and no one has experienced rightly the power of belief until they have known this for themselves as a living reality.
The deep disease of the human heart is a will broken loose from its center. Any adequate scheme for cure must undertake to restore again the human will to its proper place in the will of God. In accord with this underlying need for healing, the Spirit, when he effects his gracious invasion of the believing heart, must win that heart to glad and voluntary obedience to the whole will of God. The cure must be wrought from within; no outward conformity will do.
The Spirit achieves this inward cure by merging our will with his own. It is the work of the in-living Spirit to point out our moral discrepancies and correct them. But he does not, as is sometimes said, ‘break’ the human will. He invades it and brings it gently to joyous union with the will of God.
To will the will of God is more than just an unprotesting consent to it; it is rather to choose God’s will with positive determination. Then, as the work of the Spirit advances, we find ourselves free to choose whatever we will, and we gladly choose the will of God as the highest conceivable good. Such then is life’s goal, one that places us beyond the disappointments that plague the rest of humanity. Whatever happens now is the will of God for us.
I want here to assert that is my happy belief that every Christian can have a copious outpouring of the Spirit of Truth in a measure beyond what most of us think possible. But we must get this straight — until all doubts are removed, faith is impossible — and the outpouring will not happen.
| “I Salute The God Within You” | Vol 14 No 5 Sept 1993 — Index | The 1993 International Conference For Urantia Book Readers, Montreal, Canada |