I Need a Larger Bottle!

Recently,  I've been a bit more as some writers call it "inside my own head" rather than writing my thoughts out.  That coupled with some pretty busy days and weeks, I have neglected my writings as of late...I am sad it has been so long but so is life.

 With that said, I believe I am back in the saddle and ready to get back to the constant writing I have become accustomed to.  Yesterday, I was struck by something I considered to be pretty profound.  It may just be me, but for me it has made a world of difference in the way in which I view myself in light of my need for the Holy Spirit.

  I was reading in a book titled The Counselor: Straight Talk About the Holy Spirit by A.W. Tozer, when I came across this awesome bit of writing.

"Dr. AB Simpson used an illustration which was about as good as any I ever heard.  He said, 'Being filled with the fullness of God is like a bottle in the ocean.  You take the cork out of the bottle and sink it in the ocean, and you have the bottle completely full of ocean.  The bottle is in the ocean, and the ocean is in the bottle.  The ocean contains the bottle, but the bottle contains only a little bit of the ocean.  So it is with a Christian'.  We are filled unto the fullness of God, but, of course, we cannot contain all of God because God contains us; but we can have all of God that we can contain.  If we only knew it, we could enlarge our vessel.  The vessel gets bigger as we go on with God" (Page 65).


 This struck me so hard yesterday because I always pictured it kind of like a glass under the faucet, where the overflow of God could happen when the faucet was turned on.  Yet, with this idea, we can spill out some of our Jesus and some of our Spirit power...not so with the ocean!  When seen through our being contained an surrounded by the ocean of the Spirit it changes things!  The overflow is then not limited to God but our ability to receive!

  I realized that all along, I had been praying the wrong thing...rather than praying for His Spirit to overflow in me, I should have been praying for Him to enlarge my bottle, so as I can be able to receive more of Himself.  I don't want to settle for the overflow of a small glass, I desire to be a HUGE basin drowned in the ocean of God!

  It's such a soothing thought that there is so much more to God than we sometimes think.  Our minds try to rationalize God, minimize God but He is a vast ocean containing several millions of Christians and His desire is that we would enlarge our bottles so we can receive even more of Himself!

  WOW!  I hope this hits some of you the way it hit me, because it is a sweet, sweet revelation!

Fearing God

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight." (Proverbes 9:10 ESV)

  Much has been said on fearing God and much has been said wrongly about the "Fear of the Lord". 

  Many who teach it talk about God as a vengeful, wrathful God who desires to burn you up and you need to fear his power or you'll get scorched.

  Does God have this power?  Yes, in deed He does.  Has God done this in the past?  Yes, in fact He has.

 However is the formula (the answer to the riddle) to be afraid of God and do what is right so He doesn't scortch you? No, I believe it is not.

 That formula is neither the answer to the riddle or what is mean behind the idea of "Fearing God."  Does the "fear of the Lord" help us put sins in to perspective and help us along our way to sanctified living?  Yes I believe it does.  The true fear of the Lord does in fact lead us to repentance and does in fact lead us down a journey of jettisoning out sins that take over God's position in our lives...yet it's not due to the fear he will fry us up like an egg on a skillet but rather a right understanding of how little, how miniscule we are in the presence of a mighty God.  A.W. Tozer in his book The Knowledge of the Holy says this:

  "In the olden days men of faith were said to "walk in the fear of God" and to "serve the Lord with fear."  However intimate their communion with God, however bold their prayers, at the base of their religious life was the conception of God as awesome and dreadful.  This idea of God transcendent runs through the whole Bible and gives color and tone to the character og the saints.  This fear of God was more than a natural apprehension of danger; it was a nonrational dread, an accute feeling of personal insufficiency in the presence of God the Almighty." (Tozer, 1961, p. 71)

  It's not a fear of God destroying you rather it's a full on understanding of how insignificant you and I are when we are before God.  Seeing how powerful, transcendent He is makes us feel week and insufficient.  We realize our sheer incapacity to do anything and His omnipotence to do everything.  We understand just how ugly we are and how marvelous He is.

  Fearing God can then be understood as a right understanding of God and ourselves in comparison.  People sin because they are acting as if they know better than God.  We do what we want because we stick up our finger to God and say: "I do what I want because I'm in control"  that is NOT fearing God. That's why Tozer says:  "When men no longer fear God, they transgress His laws without hesitation." (Tozer, 1961, p. 71)

  We we don't properly understand ourselves compared to God we will sin with abandon.  When we don't fear God and see Him rightly, we will begin down a dangerous path to destruction.

  Lastly, in the Proverb quoted twice above the ending says: "...and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight." (Proverbes 9:10 ESV).   If fearing God is the beginning of wisdom, than seeking to know God more rightly is insight, or "understanding" as the NIV puts it.  Our lives should be surrounded around Knowing God and Making Him Known.

  The greatest thing about this calling is that God has left us His Spirit on the earth to indwell our hearts and make the desires come alive inside of us.  We must be willing to yield our hearts over to Him so we can begin the process of seeing Him rightly, ourselves rightly and spreading His Good News whereever we go!

The Omniscience of God

O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high; I cannot attain it. (Psalm 139:1-6 ESV


  God cannot learn. This is an idea of God's omniscience I had never pondered before today. There is no new knowledge to God; nothing can be added to his knowledge, for He is aware of all knowledge.
A.W. Tozer in his book The Knowledge of the Holy puts it this way: "To say that God is omniscient is to say that He possesses perfect knowledge and therefore has no need to learn. But it is more: it is to say that God has never learned and cannot learn." (Tozer, 1961, p. 55)

We as humans have a tough time grasping this truth. We can state it as "God knows all" but when we say it in a negative form like: "God cannot learn," something in us tweaks and has trouble now grasping something we thought easily grasped. We as finite human beings always learn and are always learning. Our brains take in and give off so much information that to say someone can't learn is so foreign we balk at the very thought of it.
Yet God is so knowledgeable that learning is impossible, for God to learn would be for God to admit he didn't know something and that some other being had information He Himself did not possess. It would be to admit flaw and the Bible says that God is perfect and without flaw. (Matthew 5:48)

Tozer, in The Knowledge of the Holy also says: "We have seen that God had no origin, that He had no beginning that He requires no helpers that He suffers no change, and that in His essential being there are no limitations." (Tozer, 1961, p. 56)

Tozer here is going through the list of attributes of God in which he already discussed in the book, but when you look at this list, God is so other than us! He is so close, yet so foreign, so attainable yet so unattainable. He is Holy, set a apart and so hard to conceptualize. These attributes especially that of Omniscience is what I believe causes hang ups for those who don't believe.

How can we be made in God's image, yet Him be so foreign some may ask. My answer may not be the best, but it's simple: we have to have faith that it is true, we all believe in something and having a being who created everything in this world not be unattainable seems awkward at best. I mean think about it: this world has been here for at least 10,000 years and we still have no clue as to how all things work. Why would we expect to know the maker?

God's omniscience freaks me out a bit, but it is also very amazing to think that He knows so much that He can never learn anything!

I love that God is a mystery. I love that I can't box him up and put a bow on Him. I love that He is so very "other" (or Holy) that I can't even scratch the surface of who He is. He graciously gives us glimpses as to His true nature...but even those revelations stump us and make us dig deeper! Oh how I love that about God! Plunging the depths of His ways, plunging headlong into the bosom of who He is, drowning in the wealth of it! It's unparalleled in its amazing-ness!

A.W. Tozer was a man of a great wealth of knowledge and he has even today, some great insights on who God is, was and will forever be.  Tozer discusses how easy, yet hard it is to understand the omniscience of God and says it is easier for us to understand these deep truths by thinking in what God is "not" rather than what "God is."  To illustrate this, he says in The Knowledge of the Holy " And that abrupt statement by God Himself, "I am the Lord, I change not,"[Malachi 3:6] tells us more about the divine omniscience than could be told in a ten-thousand word treatise, were all negatives arbitrarily ruled out." (Tozer, 1961, p. 56)

 I agree, Tozers negative statement: God cannot learn caught my attention and made me better understand God's omniscience!  God is deep, vast and Holy!  We serve a Mighty God!

A Passion for God

 I am part of a denomination with a rich heritage and wonderful Pastors have been born out of this denomination.  A.W. Tozer was one of those wonderful Pastors.  He was a Pastor in the Christian and Missionary Alliance for many years, authored many books, spoke at numerous college chapel services and led many people to the Person of Jesus Christ.

    I recently read a Biography of A.W. Tozer by Lyle Dorsett titled: A Passion for God: The Spiritual Journey of A.W. Tozer.  This recent book on A.W.'s life has deeply impacted me and reminded me not only of who A.W. was, nor simply about my rich heritage in the C&MA but it also deeply impacted me about my own personal yeilding to the Holy Spirit.

  Last week and for several weeks prior I noticed a bit of a short fuse within myself.  I was getting easily angered and was being really grumpy with my wife and 1 year old son.  I'm normally not like this, so I was curous as to what was going on within myself.  It was in the midst of this whirlwind of questions I was reading this book on the life of A.W. Tozer. 

  Seeing Tozer's utter devotion to Christ and his whole-hearted desire to be completely yeiled to the Spirit of the living God convicted me.  I noticed I was doing the work of the ministry without the Holy Spirit's presence.  I was going it alone so to speak and was putting my head down to get the "work done" but I was not fully yielding to the Spirit of God. 

  I desire to be a man filled with the Holy Spirit, having His life feed me, empower me, teach me, illuminate mysteries to me and love me.  I didn't realize how utterly unfilled I was until I saw a man who was so very filled.  A.W. Tozer was not perfect, in fact he neglected his family and wife way too often, but he was a man that was yeilded to the Spirit of God!

  When I was in college I learned numerous things about the Holy Spirit, things I had never been taught before and these new learnings caused me to understand the importance of a yeilded life.  For some reason, the past few months I had forgotten those lessons.

  In the Christian walk, nothing is more important than yeilding ourselves to the power of the Spirit of God.  Christ has accomplished tons on the cross and sending us the Spirit was the best earthly accomplishment.  Having the Spirit of God free to reign in us is incalculable in its value, and huge in its effect on our lives and our worlds.

   The only way to live the Christian the way we were always meant to is by yeilding to the Spirit of God, giving Him the drivers seat in your life and letting Him take you where He wants you.

  I want to live a yeilded life, no more doing it on my own, no more getting grumpy and losing the joy of the Lord!