Apprehended. . .

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Apprehended for diligent exploration

 

 

Reading: 1 Pet 1:10-11.

 

A man absorbed by the mystery of Christ. A person taken captive by the prospect of salvation. A fragile vessel gripped and held by the revelation of the glory of God. These are descriptive statements defining the prophetic man.

Apprehended for the sake serving fellow men in the delivering of a living, a penetrating word from Heaven. Apprehended, chosen, set aside for the sake of ministry. God marks a man for ministry. Approval of any other kind will only cause distraction.

 

The Spirit of God brings the reality of Christ in the making of a man. Speaking before men, a speaking in obedience to the instruction of the Holy Spirit has no other target than a growing revelation of Christ. The Holy Spirit describes Christ, reveals Christ, draws hearts to Christ and is constantly engaged in the formation of Christ. The issue of prophecy is the issue of testimony, the Holy Spirit speaks Christ. ’Testimony to Jesus is the spirit which underlies prophecy’. Rev 19:10. (Weymouth, 1912.)

 

A prophetic statement embodies evaluation, it contains salvation, it brings Christ. Prophetic speaking gathers proficiency to praticularize grace and judgment. The apostle saw Christ, the risen Christ, dressed for his role as the Redeemer, indeed with a sword in mouth. The rule of the Righteous comes along the lines of sacrifice. It speaks refinement, it speaks severing.

 

The prophet is a man of diligent probing. He is set to inquiry, he is set apart for a requiring task of searching. His gift to man is one of examination, placed among them as an assayer. He is a trier and a fortress. Jer 6:27. He is constantly engaged by matters of measuring. Christ is the measure to be set forth in every form in every way of man.

 

This man, the prophetic man, finds but one subject worthy his attention, to this he restricts himself by discipline and by joy of the purest quality. His mind and spiritual faculties is set to thinking and praying its way to an understanding of the magnitude of the glory of God. He is ever concerned in a laying hold of a greater revelation of the power and the procedures of salvation. He is taken in by the necessity and possibility to grasp a fuller, an even fuller view of the context of the sufferings of Christ.

 

God’s truth comes by men who inquire. God’s truth is given to men who follow hard after him in a daring effort to secure understanding. He guides the meek into a seeing which befits and strengthens man on his road to Zion.

 

A prophet studies under the Holy Spirit in devastating solitude. A probing of this kind will not develop in fellowships of merriment. An assayer must pass through severe testing.

But the man marked for such a task will not be engaged because of his qualifications. The lack of qualifications makes him better off. His ordinariness is a bonus. His hunger for righteousness, his recognition of his inherent disadvantages, his resourcelessness and emptiness, his bankruptcy fits him for the first round in the refiners fire.

 

The prophetic man dares to do what is needed. The prophetic person shuns no personal sacrifice to lay hold of a perfected view into the mystery of Christ. Elijah was a man like any of us – in this simple truth one finds hope and solace. An understanding of the realities laid up for us in the grace and salvation of our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, may be secured by daring men who take the risk of thinking, praying and diligent study under the Holy Spirit. Such a man will be apprehended and made fit for diligent exploration.

 

L. Widerberg

Tozer on entertainment 01

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The Anathema of Entertainment

 

In our day we must be dramatic about everything. We don’t want God to work unless He can make a theatrical production of it. We want Him to come dressed in costumes with a beard and with a staff. We want Him to play a part according to our ideas. Some of us even demand that He provide a colorful setting and fireworks as well!

Tozer Pulpit, Book 8, pp. 48-49

 

 

Then there are some among us these days who have to depend upon truckloads of gadgets to get their religion going, and I am tempted to ask: What will they do when they don’t have the help of the trappings and gadgets? The truck can’t come along where they are going! 

Tozer Pulpit, Book 8, p. 50

 

 

Schleiermacher held that the feeling of dependence lies at the root of all religious worship, and that however high the spiritual life might rise it must always begin with a deep sense of a great need which only God could satisfy. If this sense of need and a feeling of dependence are at the root of natural religion it is not hard to see why the great god Entertainment is so ardently worshipped by so many.

For there are millions who cannot live without amusement; life without some form of entertainment for them is simply intolerable; they look forward to the blessed relief afforded by professional entertainers and other forms of psychological narcotics as a dope addict looks to his daily shot of heroin. Without them they could not summon courage to face existence.

 

The Root of the Righteous

Tozer on Worship 02

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Priority in Worship

 

I am going to say something to you which will sound strange. It even sounds strange to me as I say it, because we are not used to hearing it within our Christian fellowships. We are saved to worship God. All that Christ has done for us in the past and all that He is doing now leads to this one end.

 

There is a necessity for true worship among us. If God is who He says He is and if we are the believing people of God we claim to be, we must worship Him. I do not believe that we will ever truly delight in the adoring worship of God if we have never met Him in personal, spiritual experience through the new birth from above, wrought by the Holy Spirit of God Himself!

 

I have come to believe that when we are worshipping—and it could be right at the drill in the factory—if the love of God is in us and the Spirit of God is breathing praise within us, all the musical instruments in heaven are suddenly playing in full support.

 

From:

Whatever Happened to Worship?

Katz Prophecy 04

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4 – Prophetic Proclamation

 

The prophets of God in the redemption history of the faith have always been the oracular kind. Their word distinguishes their calling. The prophetic word is weighty and we know it when we hear it. It makes a particular demand upon our attention and likewise a requirement in our obedience. That kind of word can only come out of the council of God. Our concern is the debasing of the church, a decline in the value and the valuing of the spoken word, when that which is not out of His council is being announced as the prophetic word.

 

What an importance, therefore, this puts on true prophetic proclamation. The prophet speaks with an urgency. If you can hear God in that speaking and take it to heart and repent, then you will be saved from the very thing of which he is forewarning. To compound the issue, it may well be that the man is offensive in your sight, and you want to discredit him and find every reason for doing so. That gives, therefore, an urgency to the message of the prophet that makes prophetic proclamation distinctively different from teaching, evangelism or pastoral preaching. Jesus said about Himself:

 

If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin (John 15:22).

In other words, “My appearing and My speaking have removed from you all pretense. The truth has come in Myself, and now you are responsible. Before I came you had an excuse for your superficiality and for your religious ‘carryings on’ that you thought was the real thing, but now that I have come, now that I have spoken, you have no excuse. The divine standard has fallen. The reality of God, the revelation of His purposes has been presented, and now you are responsible for that. You cannot go on as you were before. If you choose to reject what has come, then be assured that you cannot go on as before. You will either fall back to something much less even than what you had before, or go on to a qualitatively new thing.”

 

The truly prophetic man not only embraces both the past and the future; he himself is both. He is living in the eternal future while at the same time being in a clear continuum with the biblical past. There is something about his whole manner and being that shows in the unselfconscious and unpretentious way he bears himself. He is not in this world. We do not mean by that that he is a vain kind of flighty creature. He already hears a resonance of the things that are coming to pass.

His anticipation, awareness and appropriation of that reality are so real for him, that even when he does not explicitly speak it as a subject matter, he already unwittingly expresses the aura of it. He brings a sense of the unbroken continuum of the faith. He is in the Son, the eternal and changeless One. He comes to a people who are locked in time and culture and who are slavish products, if not victims, of their age. He shows forth the one, timeless, irrevocable statement of God on truth and reality throughout all ages and the ages to come. The prophet stands more than any other beyond the conventional categories of time. He sees the eternal thing toward which everything is tending, and in a compelling manner, he brings the significance of that into the present moment for those who are hearing him.

 

To obtain ‘the mind of God’ and to be able to articulate that is inherent in the prophetic calling. There is always going to be a tension of opposition between the mind of the world and the mind of God, between our own thoughts and His thoughts. Prophets are always, therefore, going to run into a place of opposition and resistance, because God’s thoughts are not only pure, they are also contrary to our own and invariably make a painful requirement. You cannot hear God without being required of. We came to that conclusion in our weekly Bible studies: “If we are not hearing some requirement from God every time we assemble in the examination of His Word, then we are not hearing God. We are only using His Word as a text to have a study.”

 

When God speaks, something has got to give. If we do not want to give that something, then there is going to be a tension of resistance and rejection of the word. If people cannot find their opportunity to oppose the word by virtue of rejecting the word, they will find their point of opposition in rejecting the man. And God will always give them something to find to fasten on to. There will always be something provided if men want to find a way to absolve themselves from the implications and the requirements of God’s word. Yet at the same time, for the man who is bringing it, he is not to justify it as an excuse where if he has defect he says, “Well, that is what God uses.” He needs to be grieved over the fact that there is any defect and seek in every way to rectify and make right, and to be impeccable and without offense before God and man. However earnest he will be in that, men will still find offense. They found it in Jesus, and they will find it in us, but “…blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Me (Luke 7:23b – King James Version)”.

Formulaic prophecy

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God requires obedience according to patter, even according to Christ.

God orders and structures reality according to law and procedure.

But, he never sends his word according to formula.

 

Formulaic prophecy consists of that which is repetitious. The itinerant so called prophet or prophetess moves from place to place, conference to conference, country to country, bringing words to audiences of different background, history and cultural setup, words which do not hold enough specificity to direct mature men’s steps further into the purposes of the Lord.

 

If ever checked properly in the light of the Word of God these words would immediately fall flat, first of all because they are too broad, too vague, too general. Words of this kind follow modern methods of measurement – one size fits all. The major mood of the prophesying according to formula is outright flattery; it speaks to, charms and entices man’s religious fantasies. It leads man’s mind to misunderstand and misinterpret the mind of God. It deceives the poor and needy into believing that which is not worth believing in. Formula may bring certain truths, but it is never followed by life and authenticity.

 

God does not tolerate the frivolous prophet, and yet, they are many. God does not tolerate the flippant and superficial prophetess, and yet, they dare to appear and move to and fro in large hordes in these days when so much of the true prophetic word is about to be fulfilled. It does not occur to any of them that they themselves are a sign which declares the near end of this dispensation. Many are they that will come and prophesy falsely – Mt 24:11.

The flippant formulaic prophesying disengages discernment. It results in unruliness, its fruit is a people without discipline – Prov 29:18. Where the Spirit of prophecy is allowed to work according to the rules of Heaven, the people honours discernment, welcomes saintliness and begins to stand for veracity.

 

Formulaic prophecy presents God as being out of balance, being disordered, not knowing what was said by the prophet before today’s man of God. This kind of approach never tells what God is about to do among his people – except for telling them that it is going to be very new and very different. And, man has no practical role in this new thing except as a cheering audience. Obedience, holiness and the formation of saintly characters are concepts over-ruled and obsolete.

 

The formulaic prophet is a copycat. He prophesies according to latest trends and echoes men who hold prominent positions. He never dares to go against the tide for fear of loosing his place as one of the boys. Copycats secure mutual endorsement for the sake of overriding processes of discernment. The copycat operates in the realm of the sensational to gather followers who are not too eager to honour spiritual values. He attracts minds and hearts, who do not care for discerning the source of revelation as long it stimulates positively. He misuses the concept of edification, exhortation and comfort to set the mind of the audience to pleasure-seeking and self-exaltation and thereby to fleshliness.

 

The prophet holds a ministry of spiritual interpretation. He is constantly occupied, trying to find ways to express and explain the heart of God among the saints. His never-ending work includes the revealing of what might be found at the core of a revival according to Christ – which is a bringing of order, a bringing of obedience and a re-establishing of truth among the saints. The prophet holds things to the full thought of God. He represents God’s mind as against the prevailing course of things. There is never any place for that which is formulaic in his appearance. He is a living testimony to that which comes from the Living God.

 

God requires obedience according to patter, even according to Christ.

God orders and structures reality according to law and procedure.

But, he never sends his word according to formula.

 

Our prayer includes a desire for, a returning to the necessity of proper discernment for the sake of veracity among saints and Christians.

 

Lars Widerberg

Fearless Church

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A Scared World Needs a Fearless Church

 

No one can blame people for being afraid. The world is in for a baptism of fire, and whether or not this present conflict is the beginning of the ordeal, such a baptism will surely come sooner or later. God declares this by the voice of all the holy prophets since time began – there is no escaping it.

 

But are not we Christians a people of another order? Do we not claim a place in the purpose of God altogether above the uncertainties of time and chance in which the sons of this world are caught? Have we not been given a prophetic preview off all those things that are to come upon the earth? Can anything take us unaware?

 

Surely Bible-reading Christians should be the last persons on earth to give way to hysteria. They are redeemed from their past offenses, kept in their present circumstances by the power of an all-powerful God, and their future is safe in His hands. God has promised to support them in the flood, protect them in the fire, feed them in famine, shield them against their enemies, hide them in His safe chambers until the indignation is past and receive them at last into eternal tabernacles.

 

If we are called upon to suffer, we may be perfectly sure that we shall be rewarded for every pain and blessed for every tear. Underneath will be the Everlasting Arms and within will be the deep assurance that all is well with our souls. Nothing can separate us from the love of God – not death, nor life, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature.

 

This is a big old world, and it is full of the habitations of darkness, but nowhere in its vast expanse is there one thing of which a real Christian need be afraid. Surely a fear-ridden Christian has never examined his or her defenses.

 

A fear-stricken church cannot help a scared world. We who are in the secret place of safety must begin to talk and act like it. We, above all who dwell upon the earth, should be calm, hopeful, buoyant and cheerful. We’ll never convince the scared world that there is peace at the Cross if we continue to exhibit the same fears as those who make no profession of Christianity.

 

A.W. Tozer

From:

This World: Playground or Battleground?

Tozer Majesty 01

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The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us.  A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.

With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence.  We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence.  Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life in the Spirit.  The words, ”Be still, and know that I am God,” mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshipper in this middle period of the twentieth century.

 

 

This loss of the concept of majesty has come just when the forces of religion are making dramatic gains and the churches are more prosperous than at any time within the past several hundred years.  But the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly internal; and since it is the quality of our religion that is affected by internal conditions, it may be that our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field.

The only way to recoup our spiritual losses is to go back to the cause of them and make such corrections as the truth warrants.  The decline of the knowledge of the holy has brought on our troubles.  A rediscovery of the majesty of God will go a long way toward curing them.  It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate.  If we would bring back spiritual power to our lives, we must begin to think of God more nearly as He is.

 

From: The Knowledge of the Holy

Tozer on Worship 01

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THE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF GOD IN CREATION

 

The primary purpose of God in creation was to prepare moral beings spiritually and intellectually capable of worshipping Him.

This has been so widely accepted by theologians and Bible expositors through the centuries that I shall make no attempt to prove it here.

It is fully taught in the Scriptures and demonstrated abundantly in the lives of the saints.

We may safely receive it as axiomatic and go on from there.

 

(Born after Midnight, p. 123)