begin.

oh L-RD,

"begin in mercy a new work of love within me.  say to my soul, 'rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.'  then give me grace to rise and follow You from this misty lowland where i have wandered so long." 

in the mighty and gentle name of Jesus,
amen.

favored creatures.

"With the goodness of God to desire our highest welfare, the wisdom of God to plan it, and the power of God to achieve it, what do we lack? Surely we are the most favored of all creatures."

-aw tozer.

infinitude.

"We poor human creatures are constantly being frustrated by limitations imposed upon us from without and within. The days of the years of our lives are few, and swifter than a weaver's shuttle. Life is a short and fevered rehearsal for a concert we cannot stay to give. Just when we appear to have attained some proficiency we are forced to lay our instruments down. There is simply not enough time to think, to become, to perform what the constitution of our natures indicates we are capable of.

How completely satisfying to turn from our limitations to a God who has none. For Him time does not pass, it remains; and those who are in Christ share with Him all the riches of limitless time and endless years. God never hurries. Only to know this is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves. For those out of Christ, time is a devouring beast; before the sons of the new creation time crouches and purrs."

-aw tozer.

God-sufficient.

To God alone nothing is necessary. He did not bring His worlds into being to meet some unfulfilled need in Himself. The word necessary is wholly foreign to God.

Since He is the Being supreme over all, it follows that God cannot be elevated. Nothing is above Him, nothing beyond Him. Any motion in His direction is elevation for the creature; away from Him, descent. As no one can promote Him, so no one can degrade Him. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections; to doubt Him takes nothing away.

The picture of a nervous, ingratiating God fawning over men to win their favor is not a pleasant one; yet if we look at the popular conception of God that is precisely what we see. Twentieth-century Christianity has put God on charity. So lofty is our opinion of ourselves that we find it quite easy, not to say enjoyable, to believe that we are necessary to God.

We commonly represent Him as a busy, eager, somewhat frustrated Father hurrying about seeking help to carry out His benevolent plan to bring peace and salvation to the world, but, as said the Lady Julian, 'I saw truly that God does all things, be they ever so little.'

I fear that thousands of younger persons enter Christian service from no higher motive than to help deliver God from the embarrassing situation His love has gotten Him into and His limited abilities seem unable to get Him out of.

Again, God needs no defenders. He is the eternal undefended.

To be right, we must think worthily of God.

That God exists for Himself and man for the glory of God is the emphatic teaching of the Bible. The high honor of God is first in heaven as it must yet be in earth.

Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its trust not in the living God but in dying men. The unbeliever denies the self-sufficiency of God and usurps attributes that are not his. This dual sin dishonors God and ultimately destroys the soul of the man.

In His love and pity God came to us as Christ. In recent times, this has come to mean something different from, and less than, what it meant to the early church. The Man Jesus as He appeared in the flesh has been equated with the Godhead and all His human weaknesses and limitations attributed to the Deity. The truth is that the Man who walked among us was a demonstration, not of unveiled deity but of perfect humanity. The awful majesty of God was mercifully sheathed in the soft envelope of human nature to protect mankind.

Christians today appear to know Christ only after the flesh. They try to achieve communion with Him by divesting Him of His burning holiness and unapproachable majesty, the very attributes He veiled while on earth but assumed in fullness of glory upon His ascension to the Father's right hand.

This truth, while a needed rebuke to human self-confidence, will when viewed in its Biblical perspective lift from our minds the exhausting load of mortality and encourage us to take the easy yoke of Christ and spend ourselves in Spirit-inspired toil for the honor of God and the good of mankind.

For the blessed news is that the God who needs no one has in sovereign condescension stooped to work by and in and through His obedient children."

-aw tozer excerpts, the knowledge of the holy.

bold and avid souls.

"We may plead for mercy for a lifetime in unbelief, and at the end of our days be still no more than sadly hopeful that we shall somewhere, sometime, receive it. This is to starve to death just outside the banquet hall in which we have been warmly invited. Or we may, if we will, lay hold on the mercy of God by faith, enter the hall, and sit down with the bold and avid souls who will not allow diffidence and unbelief to keep them from the feast of fat things prepared for them."

a.w. tozer.

the opaque veil.

"Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free.

Let us remember that when we talk of the rendering of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant, but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross at all and death no death. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.

Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life, hoping ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and to trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it crucified.

Insist that the work be done in very truth and it will be done. The cross is rough and it is deadly, but it is effective. There comes a moment when its work is finished and the suffering victim dies. After that is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered in actual spiritual experience the presence of the living God."

-aw tozer.

love and faith. and reason.

"Love and faith are at home in the mystery of God. Let reason kneel in reverence outside."

-aw tozer.

The Weight of Glory.

(Ancient well near Arad - Abraham most likely stopped at this spot on his journeys - Israel, 2009).

"The sacred writer spares us a close-up of the agony that night on the slopes near Beersheba when the aged man had it out with his God, but respectful imagination may view in awe the bent form wrestling convulsively under the stars. Possibly not again until One greater than Abraham wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane did such mortal pain visit a human soul."

- A.W. Tozer.

...

The Hebrew word for glory is Kavod. It comes from the root word Keved, which means"heavy."

And to me, that is such a perfect word to describe what glory is.

Because not only do we give weight in our lives to the One that deserves glory, but also, to honor him, sometimes it requires us to make weighty decisions - hard sacrifices.

Think about the people in the Bible who went before us - the ones that are written about that God has given us as examples...

 

Elijah. Noah. Moses. Mary. Miriam. Ruth. Esther. Paul. Peter. Abraham. Jesus.

And who better to give us a picture of the weight of what God sometimes requires of us than the two men spoken of in the quote above, Abraham and Jesus?

They were men who walked with God intimately.

They were men of obedience.

They were men willing to sacrifice.

And from both of them, much was required.

 

In fact, the weight of what God asked of these two men was almost more than each of them could bear.

- Abraham, wrestling with his God under the stars, feeling the weight of his love for Isaac battling against the weight of his respect for God.

- Jesus, wrestling with God in the garden, the weight of His life and His fear battling against the weight of His responsibility to His Father.

Both of these men are now known for their righteousness, because in the end, the heaviness of God's glory outweighed any other priority in their lives.

Their obedience (to the very end) shows us that.

Through their choices, God's glory becomes known in even greater depth to those of us who are blessed to come after them and read their stories.

It was not until each man made the choice to allow his own desires to be ripped out and pulled from his heart, not until then could God's glory manifest fully in their lives.

Because God's glory has to take priority and preference over everything else, and that is not easy. Following.God.is.not.easy...in fact, it is the hardest thing a person can choose to do.

He requires much of us.

And so often, the weight of it, the burden of it, is heavy...

But in return for our choice to put God first, an even greater weight,

the weight of His glory,

covers us and surrounds us and is made known.

The blessing comes after the burden. Always.

And I want to wrestle like those great men and women

who went before me.

I want to conquer like my Rabbi.

I want to do my part -

to carry my share of this burden.

I

want

to

feel

the

weight.

The weight of His glory.

Because where His glory is,

there He is also.

...

And He is enough.

In Some Measure...

-----

"O Majesty unspeakable, my soul desires to behold You. I cry to You from the dust.
Yet when I inquire after Your name it is secret. You are hidden in the light which no man can approach unto. What You are cannot be thought or uttered, for Your glory is ineffable.
Still, prophet and psalmist, apostle and saint have encouraged me to believe that I may in some measure know You. Therefore, I pray, whatever of Yourself You have been pleased to disclose, help me to search out as treasure more precious than rubies or the merchandise of fine gold: for with You shall I live when the stars of the twilight are no more and the heavens have vanished away and only You remain. Amen."

A prayer from A.W. Tozer.