Faith in God Is more Than Sensitivity to Religion

Faith in God doesn’t simply mean to have an area of your hide somewhere that is sensitive to religion.
It doesn’t mean that.
You can find more carnal, unregenerate, self-centered characters who have religion and are sensitive toward it than you can bury in Grand Canyon.
You can find plenty of men from all walks of life who live like the devil, but they’re sensitive to religion.

If an evangelist sweeps through and the excitement gets big enough, they’ll go to the meeting and swell the crowd, and give a dollar, and get photographed—and it will look big!
But here’s the catch. After it is all over, the moral standards of the community are right where they were before. I contend that whatever does not raise the moral standard of the church or community has not been a revival from God.
This kind of thing allows us to become altogether too chummy with God.
We have dragged God down to our level in place of painstakingly trying to help Him bring us to His, humanly speaking.

Further, the God we believe in is not the sovereign God who judges men. Even among the fundamentalists there are now those who are squeamish about teaching the doctrines of hell and judgment.
“Oh, yes, we believe it,” they say, “but we don’t think we ought to teach it to our youth.”
The God that men believe in now, the God to whom they are “sensitive,” is a kind of divine Pan with a pipe who plays lovely music while they dance, but he’s not a God that makes any moral demands on them.

I still say that any revival that will come to a nation and leave people as much in love with money as they were before is a falsehood and it’s from the devil.
And any revival that can come to a nation and leave men as worldly as they were before, and as engrossed in human pleasures, is a snare and a delusion.
Faith in God—not in any god, not in religion—but faith in the sovereign God who made heaven and earth, who judges among the gods, and whose throne is justice and judgment, and who will require men’s deeds—that’s the God we must believe in, my friends.

And when we believe in that kind of God, we will change our way of living, and we’ll change for the better. We will repent, and we will reform and turn to God, and we will cease to do evil and begin to do good, and turn from the world.
We will seek to crucify our flesh and put on the new man which is renewed in holiness.
Faith in God is all but gone. When the Son of Man cometh, will He find faith on the earth?
Yes, but don’t you be taken in by statistics—those that say there is a resurgence of religion, that more people are buying books about religion, and more people going to church.
Faith in God actually is becoming a rarity!
A.W.T.

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Lars Widerberg

Ah, the wonderful "[b]Random Article[/b]" stikes again!

[u]"TEARS OF JOY - AMEN!"[/u]

We need not be afraid of a genuine visitation of the Spirit of God! Blaise Pascal, the famed 17th-century French scientist and philosopher, experienced in his lifetime a personal, overwhelming encounter with God that changed his life. Those who attended him at his death found a worn, creased paper in his clothing, close to his heart; apparently a reminder of what he had felt and sensed in God's very presence. In Pascal's own hand it read:

[i]From about half-past ten at night, to about half after midnight-fire! O God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob - not the God of philosophers or the wise. The God of Jesus Christ who can be known only in the ways of the Gospel. Security. Feeling. Peace. Joy. Tears of joy-Amen![/i]

Were these the expressions of a fanatic, an extremist? No; it was the ecstatic utterance of a yielded man during two awesome hours in the presence of God. The astonished Pascal could only describe the visitation in one word-

"Fire!"

[url=https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=category&cid=2] A.W. Tozer [/url]

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Mike Balog