I’m disappointed that nobody’s written back with excitement over their decision to quit their jobs with reckless abandon and become a world-class cup-stacker. I really am. Did anyone even check out the video? 7.43 seconds, ladies and gentlemen!
I’m feeling thin after dropping $1000 in car repairs in the past week (new tires, belts, brake pads, shoes, rotors) for a used car that I’m trying to sell for a measly $4000. What a nasty surprise. You do the math. Well, at least now I can sell the car with the satisfaction of knowing that I did everything I possibly could to prevent some poor sap from veering off the highway into a crumpled heap of scrap metal because some silly belt snapped under the hood of his otherwise amazing and perfect used car.
I’m ecstatic that:
1) there are websites galore on such intriguing and mystifying stupid human tricks such as: pen spinning, lighter tricks, modular geometric origami, and sand sculptures!!
2) A. W. Tozer has helped me pinpoint a critical piece of my doubts, fears, and skepticism in Chapter 4 of his book, “The Pursuit of God”:
“These notions about God are many and varied, but they who hold them have one thing in common: they do not know God in personal experience. The possibility of intimate acquaintance with Him has not entered their minds. While admitting His existence they do not think of Him as knowable in the sense that we know things or people.” [Okay… I don’t think this is supported by my personal observations, but…]
“Christians, to be sure, go further than this, at least in theory. Their creed requires them to believe in the personality of God, and they have been taught to pray, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ Now personality and fatherhood carry with them the idea of the possibility of personal acquaintance. This is admitted, I say, in theory, but for millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.”
I believe Tozer remained a Christian by the conclusion of this book, and I desperately want to know WHY.
De Profundis
Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.
The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.
Four thousand years of toil and hope and thought
Wherein men laboured upward and still wrought
New worlds and better, Thou hast made as naught.
We built us joyful cities, strong and fair,
Knowledge we sought and gathered wisdom rare.
And all this time you laughed upon our care,
And suddenly the earth grew black with wrong,
Our hope was crushed and silenced was our song,
The heaven grew loud with weeping. Thou art strong.
Come then and curse the Lord. Over the earth
Gross darkness falls, and evil was our birth
ANd our few happy days of little worth.
Even if it be not all a dream in vain
–The ancient hope that still will rise again–
Of a just God that cares for earthly pain,
Yet far away beyond our labouring night,
He wanders in the depths of endless light,
Singing alone his musics of delight;
Only the far, spent echo of his song
Our dungeons and deep cells can smite along,
And Thou art nearer. Thou art very strong.
O universal strength, I know it well,
It is but froth of folly to rebel,
For thou art Lord and has the keys of Hell.
Yet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee,
For looking in my own heart I can prove thee,
And know this frail, bruised being is above thee.
Our love, our hope, our thirsting for the right,
Our mercy and long seeking of the light,
Shall we change these for thy relentless might?
Laugh then and slay. Shatter all things of worth,
Heap torment still on torment for thy mirth–
Thou art not Lord while there are Men on earth.
–Clive Hamilton
————————————
…Perhaps for the same reason that this guy became one–because despite the distance, despite the ethereal nature of this thing they called God, they learnt that that distance alone could not be a basis for love or unlove; that closeness, or whatever we perceive of it, is simply -our- means of continuing to comprehend someone who lies many miles away.
A few ways to look at Mr. Tozer:
1. The archaeologist–by tracing the footsteps, the remains of this one who presently lies so distant; by observing the effects he has had on this land and analyzing what remains in his wake, one comes to learn so much of his life, his values, and his behaviors that the counterarguing noise is paled in comparison.
2. The logician–by examining the verity of all possible explanations and coming to the final concession that this being did indeed do what we say he did, for no other explanation, despite legitimacy on certain points, is quite nearly as plausible
3. The faithful–precisely -because- they do not know the truth, they embark on one path in nothing but good faith, and come to see if not a truth, then at least a palpable reality that may someday be refuted, but quite possibly will also be the truth that they so desparately sought.
4. Perhaps that distance really isn’t quite as great as one might predict. Perhaps because we continually search for the God of Big Things, of grandeur…rather than the god of small things.
Oh–and Clive Hamilton? He stopped looking for the God of the sublime and started seeing God of the subtle. And he stopped using a nom de plume and started to write under his real name.
You know him as C.S. Lewis.
“for millions of christians” is not “for all christians”. maybe he saw himself as one of the few who wasn’t loving an ideal and being loyal to a principle.
…come to think of it, i kinda agree with him…i’ve seen too many “christians” spend too much time thumping their books and thumbing through their already well-worn pages searching for truth and too little time (if any) out looking for it in the world we’ve been given.
for me, anyway, i see god every day, in the faces of the people around me, the wind in the trees, and the air i breathe. how’s that for personal experience? he probably shoots that down somewhere in his book, but that’s alright, i’ve never read it. ignorance is bliss.
God is a person, more real than any human. So, one way to understand knowing God is by looking at how we get to know people, since our relationships with people are an imperfect reflection of what our relationship with God was originally intended to be.
We have different levels of relationships: strangers, acquaintances, friends, close friends, spouses, etc.
Non-Christians are strangers with God. They don’t know God at all. They may know something about God or have heard about him, like how we know about celebrities, but there is no real relationship.
The Christians Tozer was talking about are acquaintances. I agree that many if not most Christians (even some devout ones) are acquaintances. We know a little more about acquaintances and have a working relationship (like classmates or coworkers), but we don’t really *know* the person. In the same way, it’s easy for a Christian to have a working relationship with God, having accepted Jesus, and they know something about God from reading the Bible and listening to sermons, but not much more than that.
Then, you have friends. Friends are a bit more than acquaintances because they not only know facts about you, but they actually know you and know a little about how you think. They probably even care for your well being too. In the same way, there are also many Christians who are friends with God. They know more about him, and they know a little about what drives his heart, and they also love God instead of just using God to get into heaven or solve their problems.
But I think Tozer remained a Christian because he was closer to God than this. After friends, you have close friends (covenant partners, spouses, etc.) A close friend not only knows you, but they *know* you: they know how you feel, how you think, they know what you’re going to say before you say it. They can see the world from your perspective. They not only know you but love you, and are willing to sacrifice for your well-being, even if you don’t know it or don’t thank them.
In the same way, to really know and love God means more than knowing about God and even more than caring about God. It means really knowing God, understanding his heart, understanding what drives him, what he cares about, what he would say/think/feel in different situations. If we really know God, when we read the Bible, including stuff in the Old Testament about kings and history, we can see God’s heart and understand what he was getting at beyond the words on the page. When we interact with other people, we don’t just know “what Jesus would do”, but we can also see those people from God’s perspective and understand inside how God feels about those people.
This is the kind of relationship with God Tozer was getting at (I’m reading the book too, I’m about 2/3 done). It’s a real, deep, genuine relationship without pretense, posturing or self-deception. It’s also something I realized a little while ago I was lacking, and still lack. The standard church answer to how to experience this is to pray and read the Bible. Cliche, but true. To know God we must read about him and read his words. And we won’t receive blessings like this unless we ask, so we must pray and ask.
If we don’t love God or know God very much, we can’t conjure the love or knowledge with our own brains, but must ask him, even if we don’t completely understand what we’re asking for. If we don’t even have much of a desire to know or love God, then we must ask him for that desire. It’s kind of like that guy who said to Jesus, “I believe, help my unbelief.” I think every Christian, for his or her whole life, should pray, “I love you God a little, help me love you more”. We’ll never be done praying that until we die.
niftyken – parts of your xanga-ings are starting to sound like parts of my internal monologue – you know, some of those not-so-happy parts. xanga-suicide hotline indeed…! be well, be happy, be content, and try not to think so much (that’s the only thing that ever seems to help me… =)
I don’t get your confusion… One can’t talk about that more intimate knowing if one doesn’t believe that it is possible to achieve, and if it is attainable what is to stop him (Tozer) from trying?