Articles
The Eternal Continuum
by A.W.Tozer on May 28, 2019
The Eternal Continuum
by A.W.Tozer
Some insist upon"naked" faith as the only way to know spiritual things. By this they mean a conviction of the trustworthiness of the Word of God (a conviction, it may be noted, which the devils share with them). But the man who has been taught even slightly by the Spirit of Truth will rebel at this perversion. His language will be ,"I have heard Him and observed Him. What have I to do anymore with idols?" For he cannot love a God who is no more than a deduction from a text. He will crave to know God with a vital awareness that goes beyond words and to live in the intimacy of personal communion. To seek our divinty merely in books and writings is to seek the living among the dead........
Nothing can take the place of the touch of God in the soul, and the sense of Someone there. Real faith, indeed, brings such realization, for real faith is never the operation of reason upon texts. Where true faith is , the knowledge of God will be given as a fact of consciousness, altogether apart from the conclusions of logic.....
Whatever else it embraces, true Christian experience must always include a genuine encounter with God. Without this, religion is but a shadow, a reflection of reality, a cheap copy of the original once enjoyed by someone else of whom we have heard. It cannot but be a major tragedy in the life of any man to live in a church from chilhood to old age and know nothing more real than some synthetic god compounded of theology and logic, but having no eyes to see, no ears to hear and no heart to love.
The spiritual giants of old were men who at some time became acutley conscious of the Presence of God......
(From The Pusuit of man by A.W.Tozer)