| Good morning everyone, Our theme for this month: “Knowing God” Our Bible verse for today: “O Lord my God, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty.” Psalm 104:1 (NIV) Our thought for today: “We must recapture a sense of His majesty.” Yesterday I introduced you to A.W. Tozer’s very important little book, “The Knowledge of the Holy”. This morning I want to share some additional thoughts from it regarding the damage being done in our churches (and therefore in the Christian community at-large), by the diluted and distorted image of God that’s being embraced by so many Christians. “With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience life in the Spirit.” Now read these next words with our modern-day mega-churches in mind (and smaller churches which feel they have to mimic what takes place in mega-churches): “This loss of the concept of majesty has come just when the forces of religion are making dramatic gains and the churches are more prosperous than at any time within the past several years. But the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly internal; and since it is the quality of our religion that is affected by internal conditions, it may be that our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field.” Ouch. Tozer was referring to churches that seem impressive simply because they are large, or because they offer many programs, or they are hipster and have the reputation of being cool. How many church facilities do we have in our country that are so big they look like “Six Flags over Jesus”? They have rock bands and lights and smoke; they have a menu of programs and activities that is pages long; they have a fleet of buses and vans; (and in at least one case, an indoor heated swimming pool). And how many smaller churches stress themselves out trying to mimic that? Is this what God really wants from us? Nice church facilities and lots of activities are not necessarily bad things unless … unless they distract us from the most important thing – from the most important One. What was true in Tozer’s day is even truer in ours. Too much of what takes place in our churches today is little more than Christian entertainment and therefore we have lost the sense of God’s majesty. We must take steps to recover it and one way to accomplish that is by making an effort to come to know God as He really is. Tomorrow I want to offer you a sneak-peak at the Christmas sermon I will preach in our church on Sunday. It pertains directly to this subject of coming to know God as He really is. God bless, Pastor Jim |
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