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Online! | [revival] TOZER on GOD's HOLINESS - POWERFUL! | | [b]THE HOLINESS of GOD[/b]
-excerpts by A.W. Tozer.
God is not now any holier than He ever was. And He never was holier than now. He did not get His holiness from anyone nor from anywhere. He is Himself the Holiness. He is the All-Holy, the Holy One; He is holiness itself, beyond the power of thought to grasp or of word to express, beyond the power of all praise.
Language cannot express the holy, so God resorts to association and suggestion. He cannot say it outright because He would have to use words for which we know no meaning. He would have to translate it down to our unholiness. If He were to tell us how white He is, we would understand it in terms of only dingy grey.
It was a common thing in olden days, when God was the center of Human worship, to kneel at an altar and shake, tremble, weep, and perspire in an agony of conviction. We dont see it now because the God we preach is not the everlasting, awful God, mine Holy One (Habakkuk 1:12), who is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity (Habakkuk 1:13).
Weve used the technical interpretation of justification by faith and the imputed righteousness of Christ until weve watered down the wine of our spirituality. God help us in this evil hour!
We come into the presence of God with tainted souls. We come with our own concept of morality, having learned it from books, from newspapers and from school. We come to God dirty our whitest white is dirty, our churches are dirty and our thoughts are dirty and we do nothing about it!
If we came to God dirty, but trembling and shocked and awestruck in His presence, if we knelt at His feet and cried with Isaiah, I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips (Isaiah 6:5), then I could understand. But we skip into His awful presence. Were forgetting holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14).
O God, soon every person must appear before you to give an account for the deeds done in the body. Father, keep upon us a sense of holiness so that we cant sin and excuse it, but that repentance will be as deep as our lives. This we ask in Christs name. Amen.
-A.W. Tozer.
_________________ SI Moderator - Greg Gordon
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| 2010/3/11 14:31 | Profile | Galations220 Member
Joined: 2010/2/12 Posts: 22
| Re: [revival] TOZER on GOD's HOLINESS - POWERFUL! | | It's true, we reach this state to where we're ok, but I would love to be like Isaiah and see the Lord high and lifted up! |
| 2010/3/11 18:21 | Profile | narrowpath Member
Joined: 2005/1/9 Posts: 1522 Germany NRW
| Re: [revival] TOZER on GOD's HOLINESS - POWERFUL! | | Quote:
Weve used the technical interpretation of justification by faith and the imputed righteousness of Christ until weve watered down the wine of our spirituality. God help us in this evil hour!
doh! |
| 2010/3/11 18:48 | Profile |
| Re: | | Galations220 writes..........
"It's true, we reach this state to where we're ok, but I would love to be like Isaiah and see the Lord high and lifted up!'
Brother , this is what Tozer is teaching. There is that place for every Christian today. Its a place that will ruin you for life. God will reward those who diligently seek Him. Jesus does stand at the door of the hearts of His people and He does knock.
Rev 3:20 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him and he with Me."
Two sentences later.................
Rev 4:1 After these things I looked, and behold, a door was opened in Heaven. And the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me, saying, Come up here, and I will show you what must occur after these things.Rev 4:2 And immediately I became in spirit. And behold, a throne was set in Heaven, and One sat upon the throne.
If we are to be a powerful witness in this life, we must encounter the Living God. We must be able to say "My eyes have seen the King." This intimacy, this drawing in to the Holy of Holy's is the pursuit of God. We must seek Him with our whole heart. One of the tragedies of modern evangelicalism is the notion that you get saved and thats it. We must continue, all of our lives, to go deeper in our relationship with the Lord. Continue to seek Him, as the deer panteth for the waterbrooks then so should your soul longeth after Him. These are not the words of an unbeliever. These should be the words of every believer.
He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, to those who pursue Him with their whole hearts He will be found. Perhaps you have had that and let it slip away, perhaps you have left your first love! Seek again, redouble your longing, lay down all distractions, quieten your life until once again you find yourself in that place. There is no time or room today for cold orthodoxy, the world is looking for a people that speak with the power of the Living God, the power that Peter spoke with after Pentecost. No longer hiding, no longer denying, no longer trembling, no, He has encountered the Risen Christ, He has been overwhelmed by the The Spirit of the Living God and He now stands boldly and speaks words that penetrate the hardest of hearts, he is now speaking with 'Katanusso,' power ..."stabbed in the heart." And the people cry out "what must we do?" Yet beware , for those who seek this kind of relationship, that same crowd could just as easliy turn on you and stone you. You see, there is no lukewarm reaction to one who speaks by the power of the Holy Spirit. Can we truly say to God "We love not our lives unto death." This is the testimony of the Apostles. By the Blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony and they loved not their lives unto death. As it was 2000 years ago, so it is today...............brother Frank
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| 2010/3/11 22:59 | | Galations220 Member
Joined: 2010/2/12 Posts: 22
| Re: | | Oh there's no lukewarmness here, I am seeking, and I am finding, and I will continue seeking, and continue finding. Great post though! |
| 2010/3/11 23:05 | Profile |
| Re: | | Galations220 writes..........
"Oh there's no lukewarmness here, I am seeking, and I am finding, and I will continue seeking, and continue finding."
I never thought for a second that there was brother :) I was speaking in general , to whosoever..........Frank |
| 2010/3/11 23:15 | |
| Re: The Heart of Revival. "A broken and contrite heart I will not despise.". | |
Thanks for the post, Greg. I think that this very teaching will be at the heart of the revivals we so long for. Possibly all of us have had our moments, but to remain in such a place! It is at the heart of brokenness, and therefore Dependence.
We must depend upon God's mercy through the blood of Jesus, and at our very, very best, we are still unprofitable servants. We are yet stained by Adam's rebellion, and that sin is embedded and founded at the core of our will and spirit. When we realize that our holiness is imputed, and partial in the sense that only in the eternal setting is it complete, we are prostate and humbled to cry for mercy.
John the Apostle's testimony. Revelation 1:12 "Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands, 13 and in the midst of the seven lampstands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band. 14 His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes like a flame of fire;
15 His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters; 16 He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength.
17. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as dead."
And Isaiah's experience: Isaiah 6
5 "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."
6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."
Tozer is right. In the full Presence of His fiery holiness, we are , at our best and most holy....undone and ruined....if it is real. This to me is the gauge if true revival has come, or not, and the sweet repented fruit will not be faked, but lasting.
Tozer also said, that "dependence is faith."
If our meetings ever came to this, and spilled into the streets and marketplace, the land would be shaken, and glory would descend. This is what we long for. "Come Lord Jesus!"
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| 2010/3/12 4:06 | | DesertRose Member
Joined: 2007/8/8 Posts: 123 Boston.MA
| Re: | | "Take Time to Be Holy" Time With God -
A.W. Tozer Moses was dead, but the God of Moses still lived. Nothing had changed and nothing had been lost. Nothing of God dies when a man of God dies.
Here we acknowledge (and there is fear and wonder in the thought) the essential unity of God's nature, the timeless persistence of His changeless Being through out eternity and time. Here we begin to see and feel the Eternal Continuum. Begin where we will, God is there first. He is Alpha and Omega.
. . . . I am often caused to wish that there were some way to bring modern Christians into a deeper spiritual life painlessly by short easy lessons; but such wishes are vain. No short cut exists. God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. It is well that we accept the hard truth now: the man who would know God must give time to Him. He must count no time wasted which is spent in the cultivation of His acquaintance.
We talk of Him much and loudly, but we secretly think of Him as being absent, and we think of ourselves as inhabiting a parenthetic interval between the God who was and the God who will be. And we are lonely with an ancient and cosmic loneliness. We are each like a little child lost in a crowded market, who has strayed but a few feet from its mother, yet because she cannot be seen the child is inconsolable. So we try by every method devised . . . to relieve our fears and heal our hidden sadness; but with all our efforts we remain unhappy still, with the settled despair of men alone in a vast and deserted universe. (A. W. Tozer, The Divine Conquest, pp. 21-23).
And this is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. . . . And I am no more in the world; and yet they themselves are in the world, and I come to Thee. Holy Father, keep them in Thy name, the name which Thou hast given Me, that they may be one, even as We are (John 17:3, 11).
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| 2010/3/27 9:52 | Profile | Areadymind Member
Joined: 2009/5/15 Posts: 1042 Pacific Ocean
| Re: | | Quote:
One of the tragedies of modern evangelicalism is the notion that you get saved and thats it.
Amen Frank.
I think I say this or something like it every day...and I pray the Lord would open this generations eyes to this truth. _________________ Jeremiah Dusenberry
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| 2010/3/27 11:12 | Profile |
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