We Should Always Seek to Know Christ Better: by AW Tozer

 Seek the LORD and his strength; seek his face always. Psalm 105:4

ARE YOU AWARE THAT WE HAVE BEEN SNARED in the coils of a modern spurious logic which insists that if we have found Christ we need no more seek Him!
This is set before us as the last word in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever believed otherwise. Thus the whole testimony of the worshiping, seeking, singing Church on that subject is crisply set aside!
The experiential heart-theology of a grand army of fragrant saints is rejected in favor of a smug interpretation of Scripture which would certainly have sounded strange to an Augustine, a Rutherford or a Brainerd.
In the midst of this great chill there are some, I rejoice to acknowledge, who will not be content with shallow logic. They will admit the force of the argument, and then turn away with tears to hunt some lonely place and pray,

O God, show me Thy glory! They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God.
Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted!
Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain!

We Need Real Light: by TA Sparks

The city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its light. Revelation 21:23

Light is not a mental thing: that is to say, it is not just a matter of having a store of mental knowledge. That is not light. It is possible to have an enormous amount of doctrine and truth and never be luminaries, that is, never register impact upon darkness. Real light is experimental: that is to say, it is the fruit of experience, the experience of suffering. How have you children of God come to know what you do know of the Lord, that real kind of knowledge of the Lord which is so precious to us, which means so much and which makes you in that measure of value to others? It is through suffering, it is through the difficult way the Lord has led you, it is through the work of the Cross that He has wrought in you. “The Lamb is the lamp” – suffering leading to knowledge, to light, to understanding. It is the only way. These people at the end will be in the good of a great and wonderful revelation which has come by their fellowship with Christ in His sufferings. It is very true. It may not be too comforting from one standpoint, but it is true; and it ought to help us to realize this: that the Lord, in the way in which He is dealing with us, in the sufferings which He allows to come upon us, is really seeking our education, that we may have a knowledge of Himself which can only come that way, and which is a peculiar kind of knowledge of tremendous value to us and through us to others. We do not learn in any other way. It is the Lamb, always the Lamb-principle, the way of suffering and sacrifice and self-emptying, that brings us into the knowledge of the Lord. “The Lamb is the lamp thereof”; and, just as it is deeper death unto fuller life, so it may often be deeper darkness unto fuller light.

The Lord seems to lead us in a way where we are less and less able naturally to understand Him. He gets us altogether out of our natural capacity, beyond our capacity for interpreting His ways. We just do not know what the Lord is doing, or why He is doing what He is doing; yet it is the way by which we come to a very real kind of inward knowledge of Himself. It may not be capable of explanation in words to anybody, but we know, somehow or other we know, and that is a mighty thing, a mighty power of knowledge. It is light through the Cross.

THE INDWELLING CHRIST: by Andrew Murray

For this reason I kneel before the Father,
 from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.
 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,
 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,
 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,
 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.     Ephesians 3:14-19

The great privilege that separated Israel from other nations was this:  They had God dwelling in their midst.  He made His home in the tabernacle and the temple.  In the New Testament we see God dwelling in the heart of the believer.  Jesus said: "All those who love Me will do what I say. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and live with them" (John 14:23). Or, as Paul says of himself, "Christ lives in me: (Galatians 2:20).  

The gospel is the dispensation of the indwelling Christ.  In Ephesians 3:14-19 Paul teaches how we can experience this blessing of the Christian life.

1) "I fall on my knees and pray to the Father." The blessing must come from the Father to the praying believer.

2) "I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources He will give you might inner strength through His Holy Spirit."

3) "I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts as you trust in Him." It is in the very nature of Christ to desire to live in the heart of faith.

4) "May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love."  

Prayerfully meditate on what Christ, through the Holy Spirit, has chosen to do.  He has chosen to make His home in our hearts! 

A Jubilant Longing and Pining for God: by AW Tozer

but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." John 4:14

Almost every day of my life I am praying that “a jubilant pining and longing for God” might come back on the evangelical churches everywhere!

We do not need to have our doctrine straightened out; we are as orthodox as the Pharisees of old. But this longing for God that brings spiritual torrents and whirlwinds of seeking and self-denial—this is almost gone from our midst.

I believe that God wants us to long for Him with the longing that will become homesickness, that will become a wound to our spirits, to keep us always moving toward Him; always finding and always seeking; always having and always desiring!

So the earth becomes less and less valuable and heaven gets closer as we move into God and up into Christ.

Dare we bow our hearts and say, “Father, I have been an irresponsible, childish kind of Christian—more concerned with being happy than with being holy. O God, wound me with a sense of my own sinfulness. Wound me with compassion for the world, and wound me with love of Thee that will always keep me pursuing and always exploring and always seeking and finding!”

If you dare to pray that prayer sincerely and mean it before God, it could mean a turning point in your life. It could mean a great door of spiritual victory opened to you!

Our Moral Climate Does Not Encourage Faith: by AW Tozer (written in the 1950’s)

All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. Matthew 10:22

There is a plain and evident fact in genuine Christianity that is often overlooked by eager evangelists bent on getting results: that to accept Christ it is necessary that we reject whatever is contrary to Him!

Let us not be shocked by the suggestion that there are disadvantages to the life in Christ. Everyone who has lived for Christ in a Christless world has suffered some losses and endured some pains that he could have avoided by the simple expedient of laying down his cross.

The contemporary moral climate does not favor a faith as tough and fibrous as that taught by our Lord and His apostles. The delicate, brittle saints being produced in our religious hothouses today are hardly to be compared with the committed, expendable believers who once gave their witness among men. And the fault lies with our leaders. They are too timid to tell the people all the truth. They are now asking men to give to God that which costs them nothing!

When will Christians learn that to love righteousness it is necessary to hate sin? that to accept Christ it is necessary to reject self? that to follow the good way we must flee from evil? that a friend of the world is an enemy of God? that God allows no twilight zone between two altogethers where the fearful and the doubting may take refuge at once from hell to come and the rigors of present discipline?