Tozer in the Morning – Saying Goodbye to the Rut
Jesus gives the story of the man who was covetous and lost his soul. So do not be covetous–be generous. Do not be stingy, but be free with your money. Do not be afraid–thank the Lord, trust Him and put fear away. These are examples of the constituted means of faith and obedience. We sing this and do not know we are singing it: “Trust and obey, for there”s no other way/ To be happy in Jesus, But to trust and obey.” We sing that, but we have sung it so long that we might as well sing Mother Goose rhymes, because we do not know what we are singing. Some of us are down in a spiritual rut, the old routine. Nothing has any taste to it. Some churches try to handle that by pandering to the situation, bringing in every kind of weird claptrap in order to get some of the poor half-dead people to get a little taste again. We have God. We have Christ. We have truth. We have a world needing help. We have the saints, and we have the power of prayer. We have the joy of obedience and we have the sweet wonder of His presence. We have the joy of Christian song. We have all this and we do not need garbage. We have God. All we have to do is trust in His Son Jesus Christ and obey the truth, and the Lord will manifest Himself, show Himself through the lattice.
Tozer in the Evening – Forgiveness for the Past and Provision for the Present
. . . To offer a sinner the gift of salvation based upon the work of Christ, while at the same time allowing him to retain the idea that the gift carries with it no moral implications, is to do him untold injury where it hurts him worst. Many evangelical teachers insist so strongly upon free, unconditional grace as to create the impression that sin is not a serious matter and that God cares very little about it. He is concerned only with our escaping the consequences. The gospel then in practical application means little more than a way to escape the fruits of our past. The heart that has felt the weight of its own sin and along with this has seen the dread whiteness of the Most High God will never believe that a message of forgiveness without transformation is a message of good news. To remit a man’s past without transforming his present is to violate the moral sincerity of his own heart. To that kind of thing God will be no party. We must have courage to preach the whole message. By so doing we shall undoubtedly lose a few friends and make a number of enemies. But the true Christian will not grieve too much about that. He has enough to do to please his Lord and Savior and to be true to the souls of all men. That may well occupy him too completely to leave much time for regrets over the displeasure of misguided men.