This is from the Craig T. Owens blog:
“Those Christians who belong to the evangelical wing of the church (which I firmly believe is the only one that even approximates New Testament Christianity) have over the last half-century shown an increasing impatience with things invisible and eternal and have demanded and got a host of things visible and temporal to satisfy their fleshly appetites. Without Biblical authority, or any other right under the sun, carnal religious leaders have introduced a host of attractions that serve no purpose except to provide entertainment for the retarded saints.
“It is now common practice in most evangelical churches to offer the people, especially the young people, a maximum of entertainment and a minimum of serious instruction. It is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend a meeting where the only attraction is God. One can only conclude that God’s professed children are bored with Him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games and refreshments. …
“Any objection to the carryings on of our present golden-calf Christianity is met with the triumphant reply, ‘But we are winning them!’ And winning them to what? To true discipleship? To cross-carrying? To self-denial? To separation from the world? To crucifixion of the flesh? To holy living? To nobility of character? To a despising of the world’s treasures? To hard self-discipline? To love for God? To total committal to Christ? Of course the answer to all these questions is no.
“We are paying a frightful price for our religious boredom. And that at the moment of the world’s mortal peril.”
—A.W. Tozer, in Man—The Dwelling Place Of God
Amen. I’ve been pondering a similar theme. We people need risk, adversity, danger, in order to a have some fun, to not be bored. Not too much of those things of course, but some challenges. Then in the Western world we try to build our faith around comfort, entertainment, and prosperity? No wonder we’re bored.
The Lord is fun! Not boring at all. Quite terrifying actually. Or as CS Lewis once said, “Aslan is not a tame lion.”
Right on. There is nothing boring about the Holy Ghost Fire. Nothing boring about anointed preaching and teaching. If people don’t have the Presence of God in their lives, then they have to have all kinds of fun, games and entertainment. When you live by faith, revelation and obedience to the Lord, your life will NOT be boring. Here is an example:
A Christian Cult
https://hitchhikeamerica.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/a-christian-cult/
It’s a message Yeshua has been emphasising to me for many months now – the lack of serious instruction is causing the enemy to gain huge swaths of spiritual territory from which he’s pressing his agenda. Thus deception and complacent apathy are holding many in their grip. I keep telling those I know who keep espousing political / secular solutions that they aren’t such. The only real solution to changing this world is the the same one that the early believers / apostles turned their world upside down and inside out with.
Another who has been hearing the same message I’ve heard is speaking here a word of admonition https://youtu.be/q9JXC4JMMZ8
and she has one about the battle of the bulge currently being waged in the spirit that incorporates some of the same methods the Nazis used in the Battle of the Bulge in WW2
Complacency and being entangled in the ways of the world can really kill the life of a spiritual warrior. Someone who is conformed to the world cannot have the fire of the Holy Ghost in them. The anointing breaks the yoke of sin and destroys satanic strongholds.
II Timothy 2: 4: “No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.”
Amen
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Very timely: This problem may be even worse than it was when Tozer was alive. It seems like the church spent so much time “winning” people to a comfortable brand of Christianity, and now we’re not winning them at all.
Isn’t it amazing how, whenever you read something by Tozer, it sounds like it was written last week, instead of 50 or so years ago?
When someone lives in the Presence of God, their words are always timely. People will be reading Tozer for many years to come.
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