Thinking is a kind of living.
To think and to be aware that we think is to be conscious; life without consciousness is but a shadow of life, having no meaning and being of no value to the individual.
Our thoughts are the product of our thinking, and since these are of such vast importance to us it is imperative that we learn how to think rightly. I am not concerned here with that kind of profound cerebration known as heavy thinking.
Few of us have the intellectual equipment to enable us, or the will power to compel us, to engage in such heroic mental exercise. I am dealing here with that kind of thinking done by every normal person every waking moment from birth to death. After all, it is not our heavy thinking that shapes our characters, but the quiet attention of the mind to the surrounding world day after day throughout our lives.
Men are influenced more by their common, everyday thinking than by any rare intellectual feat such as writing a great poem or painting a famous picture. Feats of thinking may create reputation, but habits of thinking create character The incredible mental accomplishments of an Einstein, for instance, had almost nothing to do with the kind of human being he was; the constant, undramatic, moment-by-moment interplay of his mind with his environment, on the other hand, had almost everything to do with it.
We all live in two environments, the one being the world around us, the other our thoughts about that world.
The larger world cannot affect us directly; it must be mediated to us by our thoughts, and will be to us at last only what we allow it to be.
verse
Dear friends, this is now my second letter to you. I have written both of them as reminders to stimulate you to wholesome thinking.
— 2 Peter 3:1
thought
We all think. All day long we think. What we think has so much to do with what we are and what we are becoming. It strongly influences our living. Are we disciplining ourselves in wholesome thinking?
prayer
Holy Spirit, guide me in my thinking. How I perceive and interpret the world around me, the words and actions of people. Stimulate me to wholsome thinking. In Jesus' name.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Truth cannot aid us until we become participators in it.
We only possess what we experience. St. Gregory of Sinai, who lived in the fourteenth century, taught that understanding and participation were inseparable in the spiritual life. He who seeks to understand commandments without fulfilling commandments, and to acquire such understanding through learning and reading, is like a man who takes a shadow for truth.
For the understanding of truth is given to those who have become participants in truth (who have tasted it through living).
Those who are not participants in truth and are not initiated therein, when they seek this understanding, draw it from a distorted wisdom. Of such men the apostle says ?the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit, even though they boast of their knowledge of truth.
Here is a simple but neglected doctrine that should be restored to its rightful place in the thinking and teaching of the Church. It would work wonders.
verse
The Lord says: 'These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is made up only of rules taught by men.'
— Isaiah 29:13
thought
Some of us measure our commitment to Christ by the truth we mouth and the rules we keep?rules which may be man-made and not from God. But truth must be tasted through living if we are to be participants in it.
prayer
Lord, teach me what it means to participate in Your truth that through it I may be free.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
We must be willing to obey if we would know the true inner meaning of the teachings of Christ and the apostles.
I believe this view prevailed in every revival that ever came to the Church during her long history.
Indeed a revived Church may be distinguished from a dead one by the attitude of its members toward the truth.
The dead church holds to the shell of truth without surrendering the will to it, while the church that wills to do Gods will is immediately blessed with a visitation of spiritual powers.
Theological facts are like the altar of Elijah on Carmel before the fire came, correct, properly laid out, but altogether cold. When the heart makes the ultimate surrender, the fire falls and true facts are transmuted into spiritual truth that transforms, enlightens, sanctifies.
The church or the individual that is Bible taught without being Spirit taught (and there are many of them) has simply failed to see that truth lies deeper than the theological statement of it.
verse
Teach me your way, O LORD, and I will walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name.
— Psalm 86:11
thought
God does teach us His way. Are we walking in His truth? Unless we do our heart is divided and our faith reduced to intellectual affirmations without full heart commitment.
prayer
Show me, Lord, those areas of Your truth to which I have not yet surrendered. I want to walk in Your truth with an undivided heart.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
In His conflict with the religious textualists of His day our Lord often uttered short statements that serve as keys to unlock vast and precious storehouses of truth.
In the Gospel according to John these may be found in something amounting to profusion.
One such is found in John 7: If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself? (7:17).
A. T. Robertson, in his Word Pictures in the New Testament, explains he shall know as being experimental knowledge from willingness to do Gods will.
Then he quotes Westcott: if there be no sympathy there can be no understanding. Obviously these words of Christ were understood by the great British biblical scholar Westcott and the brilliant American expositor Robertson as teaching that truth can be understood only by the mind that has surrendered to it.
The average evangelical Bible teacher today finds such a radical interpretation too revolutionary to be comfortable and so just ignores it.
verse
I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.
— Ephesians 1:17
thought
How is it that the Great God deigns to allow you and me, out of the billions on earth, to know Him in measure and to know His truth? I dont't know why but He does.
prayer
I want to know You, Lord, experientially know You, know You better than I know You now. Open my eyes!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
The essence of my belief is that there is a difference, a vast difference, between fact and truth.
Truth in the Scriptures is more than a fact.
A fact may be detached, impersonal, cold and totally disassociated from life.
Truth on the other hand, is warm, living and spiritual.
A theological fact may be held in the mind for a lifetime without its having any positive effect upon the moral character; but truth is creative, saving, transforming, and it always changes the one who receives it into a humbler and holier man.
At what point, then, does a theological fact become for the one who holds it a life-giving truth?
At the point where obedience begins.
When faith gains the consent of the will to make an irrevocable committal to Christ as Lord, truth begins its saving, illuminating work; and not one moment before.
verse
To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, 'If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'
— John 8:31-32
thought
Truth sets free! Truth embraced, clung to, integrated into everyday living. Truth changes the heart not just the mind.
prayer
Father, forgive me for sometimes holding Your truth at arm's length ? examining it, analyzing it, exegeting it?but failing to fully live it. Your truth sets free.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
For a long time I have believed that truth, to be understood, must be lived; that Bible doctrine is wholly ineffective until it has been digested and assimilated by the total life.
I have held this to be an important element in the preaching of the Old Testament prophets, and I have felt it to be near to the heart of the moral teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I admit that this belief has made me a little lonely, for not many of my Christian brethren share it with me. While I have not heard anyone deny the truth outright, few have seen fit to teach it with anything approaching emphasis.
And by silence a man will reveal his beliefs as surely as by argument.
This is one of those truths which at first may appear dull and colorless, but far from being tame or weak, this truth is of tremendous importance to all of us.
While not to my knowledge formulated as a tenet in the creed of any church or school of religious thought, it nevertheless stands as a great divide to separate those who think rightly about the faith of Christ from those who think carelessly about it.
verse
'Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?' The expert in the law replied, 'The one who had mercy on him.' Jesus told him, 'Go and do likewise.'
— Luke 10:36-37
thought
If you know the truth, live it. Head knowledge is not enough. Living the truth enhances our understanding of it. Even more, living the truth changes us and opens us to receive more truth.
prayer
Forgive me, Lord, for stowing Your truth away in theological cupboards rather than integrating it into my daily living. Your truth liberates!
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
Always the Church has been tempted to think of God by the use of images and forms, and always when she has so done she has fallen into externalism and spiritual decay. Some of the greatest books apart from the inspired Scriptures have been written to call the Church back to a purer view of God.
Miguel de Molinos, in his Spiritual Guide, insists that prayer is an ascent or elevation of the mind to God. God is above all creatures, he says further, and the soul cannot see Him nor converse with Him if she raise not herself above them all. . . . I think it may be said with a fair degree of accuracy that all the great devotional theologians of the centuries taught the futility of trying to visualize the Godhead.
Molinos warned against every effort of the intellect to image God forth. She ought to go forward with her love, he says of the Christians soul, leaving all her understanding behind. Let her love God as He is and not as her understanding says He is, and pictures Him. The teaching of the New Testament is that God and spiritual things can be known finally only by a direct work of God within the soul.
However theological knowledge may be aided by figures and analogies, the true understanding of God must be by personal spiritual awareness.
The Holy Spirit is indispensable. (See John 1416:33 and I Corinthians 1:18 2:16.)
verse
God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.
— John 4:24
thought
Intellectual concentration on scripture is necessary to understand truth, to apply it and to communicate it to others. There is also necessary the soaring of the spirit beyond intellectual exercise where our spirit communes with God.
prayer
Teach me more of spirit worship, Lord, that in truth and spirit I may worship You.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
It would appear obvious enough once we think of it that the image of natural objects treasured in the mind tends to impede the flight of our souls upward into God.
Illustrations which, by their very definition, should let in light, if used often and objectified by the artist?s brush, become opaque at last and actually shut out the light they were intended to admit. A familiar example may help me to make my point.
The psalmist David, in the most beautiful hymn in the world, teaches us to think of Christ as our Shepherd.
The Lord Jesus carried the idea further and talked tenderly of His sheep and of Himself as the Shepherd who should lay down His life for them. The artists took up the idea and depicted Christ as a real shepherd and their work has become so fixed in the minds of Christians that when our Lord returns many of them will be secretly disappointed if He is not carrying a crook in His hand and a woolly lamb under His arm.
In this instance what is intended to assist our understanding, to lift our imagination, to put poetry and music into our hearts, has by our blindness become instead a positive hindrance to our knowledge of Christ.
Worse, it has given us not only an inadequate but an erroneous picture of Him.
We try to visualize Him and the only image that projects onto the screen is that of an idealized shepherd of the Near East, an image which I am certain Paul and John would never recognize.
Paul declared that he knew Christ after the flesh no more, and the same John who had recorded the words of Christ concerning the sheep and the shepherd, when he saw Him as He now is fell at His feet as dead.
verse
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place . . . that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
— Philippians 2:9-11
thought
He is our shepherd in all the biblical meaning of that metaphor. But He is the risen Christ, King of kings, Lord of lords at whose name one day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord, to the glory of the Father!
prayer
Open my eyes, Lord, to behold You as You are, within human ability to do so.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/
One task of the illuminated Christian teacher is to internalize worship and raise the religious concepts of church people above the figures and allegories that enabled them to grasp those concepts in the first place.
The figure is the box in which the shining jewel is carried; but it is surprisingly easy to mistake the box for the jewel and look for nothing more. Christianity is the religion of the heart. It searches for and finds the man under his wrappings.
The gospel reaches the man under his wrappings.
The gospel reaches the man far in where there is nothing to distinguish him from any other man. Whether he is dark or red or white matters not at all; whether he is a Stone Age aborigine in a grass hut or a civilized white man in an air-conditioned office he is the same man underneath, and it is for that man that the Spirit keeps up His persistent search.
verse
Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker; for he is our God . . .
— Psalm 95:6-7a
thought
Worship. Heart worship. When our spirit is caught up in awesome wonder in the majesty of God's presence. More than emotional uplift more than intellectual loftiness. Rather, recognition that He is God and bowing in spirit before Him. We don't know much o
prayer
Teach me to worship, to worship in heart. And use me to help others to so worship You. You are God.
https://cmalliance.org/devotionals/tozer/