Tozer in the Morning – WITHOUT FEELING?
I do know something of the emotional life that goes along with conversion to Jesus Christ. I came into the kingdom of God with joy, knowing that I had been forgiven. I have had people tell me very dogmatically that they will never allow “feeling” to have any part in their spiritual life and experience. “Too bad for you!” is my reply. I say that because I have voiced a very real definition of what I believe true worship to be: “Worship is to feel in the heart!” In the Christian faith, we should be able to use the word “feel” boldly and without apology. What worse thing could be said of us as the Christian church if it can be said of us that we are a feelingless people? I think we must agree that those of us who have been blest within our own beings would not join in any crusade to “follow your feelings.” But if there is no feeling at all in our hearts, then we are dead!
Tozer in the Evening – God Hunger
These words are addressed to those of God’s children who have been pierced with the arrow of infinite desire, who yearn for God with a yearning that has overcome them, who long with a longing that has become pain.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6). Hunger is a pain. It is God’s merciful provision, a divinely sent stimulus to propel us in the direction of food. If food-hunger is a pain, thirst, which is water-hunger, is a hundredfold worse, and the more critical the need becomes within the living organism the more acute the pain. It is nature’s last drastic effort to rouse the imperiled life to seek to renew itself. A dead body feels no hunger and the dead soul knows not the pangs of holy desire. “If you want God,” said the old saint, “you have already found Him.” Our desire for fuller life is proof that some life must be there already. Our very dissatisfactions should encourage us, our yet unfulfilled aspirations should give us hope. “What I aspired to be, and was not, comforts me,” wrote Browning with true spiritual insight. The dead heart cannot aspire.