Deep inside every man there is a private sanctum where dwells the mysterious essence of his being. This far-in reality is that in the man which is what it is of itself, without reference to any other part of the man’s complex nature. It is the man’s “I am,” a gift from the I AM who created him.
The deep-in
human entity of which we speak is called in the Scriptures the spirit of man,
(1 Cor. 2:11). As God’s self-knowledge lies in the eternal Spirit, so man’s
self-knowledge is by his own spirit, and his knowledge of God is by the direct
impression of the Spirit of God upon the spirit of man. The importance of all
this cannot be overestimated as we think and study and pray.
From man’s
standpoint the most tragic loss suffered in the Fall was the vacating of this
inner sanctum by the Spirit of God. There God planned to rest and glow with
moral and spiritual fire. Man by his sin forfeited this indescribably wonderful
privilege and must now dwell there alone.
By the
mysterious operation of the Spirit in the new birth, that which is called by
Peter “the divine nature” enters the deep-in core of the believer’s heart and
establishes residence there. Such a one is a true Christian, and only such.
An infinite
God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute
Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as
fully as if there were no others.
One cause of
the decline in the quality of religious experience among Christians these days
is the neglect of the doctrine of the inward witness.
One
distinguishing mark of those first Christians was a supernatural radiance that
shined out from within them. The sun had come up in their hearts and its warmth
and light made unnecessary any secondary sources of assurance. They had the inner
witness. It is obvious that the average evangelical Christian today is without
this radiance. Instead of the inner witness we now substitute logical
conclusions drawn from texts.
The world’s
own prophets, the unbelieving psychologists (those eyeless seekers who seek for
a light which is not God’s light) have been forced to recognize at the bottom
of religious experience this sense of something there. But better far is the
sense of Someone there. It was this that filled with abiding wonder the first members
of the Church of Christ. The solemn delight which those early disciples knew
sprang straight from the conviction that there was One in the midst of them.
How wonderful is this sense of Someone there. It makes religion invulnerable to
critical attack. It secures the mind against collapse under the battering of
the enemy. They who worship the God who is present may ignore the objections of
unbelieving men. What they see and hear overwhelms their doubts and confirms
their assurance beyond the power of argument to destroy. Nothing can take the
place of the touch of God in the soul and the sense of Someone there. Where
true faith is, the knowledge of God will be given as a fact of consciousness
altogether apart from the conclusions of logic. The spiritual giants of old
experienced God.
We are only
now emerging from a long ice age during which an undue emphasis was laid upon
objective truth at the expense of subjective experience.
Wise leaders
should have known that the human heart cannot exist in a vacuum. If Christians
are forbidden to enjoy the wine of the Spirit they will turn to the wine of the
flesh for enjoyment. Our teachers took away our right to be happy in God and
the human heart wreaked its terrible vengeance by going on a fleshly binge from
which the evangelical Church will not soon recover, if indeed it ever does.
Christ died for our hearts and the Holy Spirit wants to come and satisfy them.
One quality
belonging to the Holy Spirit, of great interest and importance to every seeking
heart, is penetrability. He can penetrate matter, such as the human body; He
can penetrate mind; He can penetrate another spirit such as the human spirit.
He can achieve complete penetration of and actual inter-mingling with the human
spirit. He can invade the human heart and make room for Himself without
expelling anything essentially human. The integrity of the human personality
remains unimpaired. Only moral evil is forced to withdraw.
A man by his
sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which on earth is most like God.
This is man’s greatest tragedy, God’s heaviest grief.
Sin has many
sides and many ramifications. It is like a disease with numberless
complications, any one of which can kill the patient. It is lawlessness, it is
a missing of the mark, it is rebellion, it is perversion, it is transgression;
but it is also waste—a frightful, tragic waste of the most precious of all
treasures. The man who dies out of Christ is said to be lost, and hardly a word
in the English tongue expresses his condition with greater accuracy. He has
squandered a rare fortune and at the last he stands for a fleeting moment and
looks around, a moral fool, a wastrel who has lost in one overwhelming and
irrecoverable loss, his soul, his life, his peace, his total, mysterious personality,
his dear and everlasting all.
When God
infuses eternal life into the spirit of a man, the man becomes a member of a
new and higher order of being.
We who live
in this nervous age would be wise to meditate on our lives and our days long
and often before the face of God and on the edge of eternity. For we are made
for eternity as certainly as we are made for time. To be made for eternity and
forced to dwell in time is for mankind a tragedy of huge proportions. All
within us cries for life and permanence, and everything around us reminds us of
mortality and change. Yet that God has made us of the stuff of eternity is both
a glory and a prophecy.
Just here
the sweet relevancy of the Christian message appears. “Jesus Christ … hath
abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the
gospel.” For every man it must be Christ or eternal tragedy. Out of eternity
our Lord came into time to rescue his human brethren whose moral folly had made
them not only fools of the passing world but slaves of sin and death as well.
What is the
supreme benefaction, the gift and treasure above all others which even God can
give? He gives Christ to be in our nature forever. This is God’s supreme and
final gift. Not the pearly gates, not the golden streets, not heaven, not even
the forgiveness of sins, although these are God’s gifts too. Not a dozen, or
two dozen, or a thousand, but countless hundreds of thousands of gifts God lays
before His happy people, and then bestows this supreme gift. He makes us the
repository of the nature and person of the Lord Jesus. “Christ in you, the hope
of glory.” (Col. 1:19–29.)
Tozer, A. W.
Gems from Tozer. Camp Hill, PA: WingSpread, 1979. Print.
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