But first — If a Gospel tract led you to this site, and you would like to talk (or correspond) about what it means to become a Christian . . .

Or . . . if you see yourself as a Christian, but you’re not doing anything for the Lord, or your church experience is too passive or lacks substance, etc., send me an email:

drdave@truthreallymatters.com

I’ll try to be helpful, offer some suggestions and, at least, be an encouragement to you.

Carshalton Also — Check out our website featuring our new tract designs . . . ThinkTracts.com

What?!?  You’re a Christian and you don’t pass out Gospel tracts?  Check out our tracts essay to change your mind.

This month’s essay (November, 2024) follows below . . .

 

 

 

buy Neurontin The Purpose of Man

 

“God wants man to worship Him, and only redeemed man can worship Him acceptably.  We are not unwanted children; God greatly desires our fellowship.” – A. W. Tozer

Aiden Wilson Tozer served as a pastor for 44 years in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, 31 of them at the Southside Alliance Church in Chicago.  His primary emphasis was the subject of worship.  James Snyder, who edits The Essential Tozer Collection (2017) writes, “According to Tozer, whatever did not flow naturally, if not spontaneously, out of our worship was not authentic and was at best contrived.”

In this essay, we’ll pull some nuggets out of The Purpose of Man (1951), one of the three books in Snyder’s Collection.

The key element in the first quote above is that only the redeemed, only the forgiven born again sinner has access to worship his Creator.  We must come God’s way, via the Cross, by humility, repentance, and faith to offer acceptable worship – as Abel did; otherwise, we follow the legacy of Cain who chose his own method that he deemed should be good enough for God.

The problem of all problems, of course is sin, “a foreign substance defiling man’s heart and life, repelling God’s gaze.”  Thus, says  Tozer:  “Sin is natural, worship is unnatural; and so few people really do it.” In treating worship as an event, it becomes a caricature of God’s intent.  Once-a-week doesn’t cut it; scheduling and scripting means we just don’t understand it, and so Tozer urges worship as a lifestyle.

Because man is created in God’s image, he responds to God’s existence and to His presence like nothing else in creation.  God intended for our relationship to be pleasing to both Him and to us.  The “dreadful cosmic rupture” of sin was a tragedy in that Adam and Eve lost their purpose.  They wandered out into a fallen world.  “Humanity still wanders in this moral and spiritual wilderness.”

Tozer relates a typical conversation with a young man, a recent university graduate.

“Bob, why are you here?”

“I want to get married; I’d like to make money; and I’d like to travel.”

“But listen, Bob, those are shortsighted things.  You will do them and then you will get old and die.  What is the big overriding purpose of your life?”

“I don’t know whether I have any purpose in life.”

Tozer explains that Satan, “the enemy of man’s soul,” and the world system that Satan orchestrates, offer an infinitude of distractions and misinformation to keep us from finding the answers.  In this current generation, especially, there are more addicting ways to avoid finding salvation than ever before in world history.  The biblically defined purpose of one’s life is “that we might worship God and enjoy Him forever.”  We can anticipate an infinitely rich fellowship, with our Creator and with each other, in a New Heaven and New Earth and a restored and revitalized cosmos that we can barely imagine while in this frail flesh within a fallen world.

Tozer criticizes the emphasis on ‘revival’ found in so many fundamentalist and conservative evangelical churches, because the concept has been so distorted in modern times.  Revival isn’t about a scheduled week of meetings, and the evidence of revival is not a mere high-energy display of emotionalism.  Tozer insists that true revival changes the course of history, at least in a local region.  “Throughout church history, every revival resulted in a sudden intensification of the presence of God, resulting in the spontaneous worship of God.  Anything less is superficial, artificial, and even detrimental to true spiritual health.”

I would add that the fruit of genuine revival includes noticeable holiness among the believers, an enthusiasm to reach out to the lost with the Gospel, and evidence of true conversions resulting from that outreach.  Sadly, I’ve never seen such fruit from any of the many scheduled revival meetings I’ve been part of or heard of throughout my life.  Over the last two hundred years, however, even in the West(!) there have been many notable revivals exhibiting the above fruits.  The subject is well worth studying.  The biography of evangelist James Stewart is a good place to start, if you are looking to be encouraged.

Tozer viewed life from a presuppositional perspective, namely, that every rational observation starts with God.  For example, the believer says that God created the flowers to bloom and the birds to sing for man’s pleasure.  The unbelieving scientist drily speaks of biological necessity, missing the point of it all.  God made the trees to bear fruit for our pleasure; the atheistic scientist just sees the scattering of seeds.  So why do apples, pears, and watermelons taste so good?  ‘Just luck,’ says the evolutionist.

The believer sees not just the biology, but also experiences thankfulness to God, personally, while also understanding the biology, and worshiping the Master Designer who invented the biology.

It is evident that many intelligent, high performing people find purpose in work, especially in America over the last two centuries.  Tozer asks us to consider what work actually is:  “Work is moving things and rearranging them . . . Something is in the pail and we put it on the side of the house, which we call painting.”  Work invariably has only a short-term focus, never a long-range purpose.

After retirement, many high performers die because they have lost purpose.  “The end result of work is utter futility.”  Similarly, some find identity and purpose through education, degrees, postgraduate degrees, academic achievements.  Yet all that education, culture, and love of knowledge ends in the grave.  Others seek pleasure or thrills through sensuality or sports or physical prowess.  But we all grow old and frail and die.  Such futility, always ending in death, has only one recourse – the Gospel.

Jesus, God’s only begotten son, came to walk among us, came to redeem us – buy us back after we sold ourselves to sin – came to establish for us an assured hope of our own resurrection, if we simply humble ourselves, repent, and trust Him.  The greatest achievements and accomplishments and experiences in this fallen world are less than dung in comparison to the promises of eternity in resurrected bodies in a New Heaven and New Earth.  This isn’t just a narrative, it’s reality!  And no earthly narrative is even in the ballpark for consideration.

Idolatry, Tozer points out, is worship directed in any direction other than God.  Directly, or indirectly, idolatry is worship of devils, who are behind the systems of religions and distractions that misdirect souls (1 Corinthians 10:20-21).  In India there is a god for everyone – choices abound.  Man was created to admire, to adore.  When man rejects God, he will find a false religion or a celebrity, or himself, or ‘man’ in general (humanism).  Pitiful, isn’t it?  Consider the excitement, the worship offered to corrupt politicians, to immoral professional athletes, to ungodly musicians, to actors who pretend to be other people in fictional stories.

We don’t have to search far and wide to find the One worthy of worship.  As Jesus explained in John 4 to the woman at the well, “God is a spirit.”  He is not confined to a particular hill or city or temple.  Worship connects our spirit to God’s spirit.  Place and time don’t matter.  A pilgrimage to a ‘holy place’ is nonsense.

I believe Tozer goes too far when he writes, “God is infinitely more concerned that He has worshipers than that He has workers . . . as far as His plans are concerned, God does not need us.”  This is not entirely true, as evidenced in the Great Commission, Matthew 28:18-20, Mark 16:15-16, Acts 1:8, for example.  God’s  plan is to work with us and through us.  He has given us real responsibility.  Accordingly, we cannot separate worship from obedience, and obedience includes work in the Great Commission.

Imagine an extreme case, wherein a believer spends all his time in ‘worship’ but lets everyone around him go to Hell without a warning because he’s too busy loving God.  Well, we’re supposed to love our neighbors, too, and if my neighbor is headed for a cliff, I’ve got to love him enough to warn him.  I’m sure Tozer would agree.

What does worship look or feel like?  Tozer suggests that “Worship is to feel in the heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe.”  Egotism and arrogance are barriers to worship.  Humility is clearly essential.  Worship includes mystery, since we cannot fathom God or the depths of His love, holiness, justice, mercy, and grace.

Tozer lists four key ingredients for worship:

• Confidence – We must have confidence, faith, that God is as represented in the Bible, that God is good, that He cannot do wrong, and that we can trust Him completely.
• Admiration – This goes beyond love and gratitude. It is an appreciation of God’s excellence.  We admire God for who He is, for the infinite quality of His love, His plan of redemption, His righteousness, His mercy.  We want God to be like He is.
• Fascination – We are struck with wonder at what God is and what He does. Tozer mentions that it is not a church or a religious group, “where each person is merely a cog in the wheel:  the pastor turns the crank” and the program does its thing – that is not what is fascinating about the Christian life.  Our relationship with God is what is wondrous.
• Adoration – This cannot be “conjured up by the manipulation of some worship leader.” Rather, this is the white hot love stirred up by the indwelling Holy Spirit.  “David Brainerd (18^th century missionary to the Native Americans) would kneel in the snow and be so lost in worship, prayer, and intercession that when he was through the snow would be melted in a wide circle.”

Tozer observes that unless we can love God truly and deeply, we will never be able to love others properly.  As a young Christian, Tozer worked in a factory manufacturing tires, but worshiped God as he worked, often with tears in his eyes.  He saw no difference in God’s presence between church and work.  “The total life, the whole man and woman, must worship God.”

Tozer discusses the principle of praying in the name of Jesus.  It’s not about reciting His name, but rather conforming to His nature.  Chanting has no power, but acting and asking in accordance with His word.

Tozer exhorts us to find quiet places, quiet times.  The modern world is exceptionally noisy!  Worship begins with the Bible.  On occasion, I’ve tried to do my daily Bible reading while watching a tennis tournament on TV.  Doesn’t work.  Stupid.  I’ve got to respect God and His word enough to devote my full attention to it.

In reading the Bible, we should find fellowship with the Author.  Tozer encourages memorizing Scripture.  Psalm 119:11, for example, gives us reason.  And in prayer we should go beyond just asking for what we want, but rather seek a dialogue as between friends.  This is tough, I confess, because I’m not going to hear God’s literal voice when I pause.  Yet Scripture gives us His mind on everything under the sun.

Tozer loved hymns, often grabbing a hymnal to read and meditate.  I recall taking a hymnal along on business trips early in my career, to sing (silently) on the airplane or in the hotel room (not so silently).  Memorizing hymns is easy as you sing them.  On hymnals, Tozer writes:  “But do not get one that is less than a hundred years old!”

If we are going to add more worship to our lives, something needs to go.  Tozer recommends trying to find one thing per month to eliminate from your schedule.  If worship is important, it won’t be the item that falls off your to-do list.

There is much more to say on the subject; indeed Tozer has much detail I haven’t touched.  I recommend the book.  It will provoke thought and, hopefully, a depth to explore in an oft-neglected, oft-misunderstood, yet vital aspect of the Christian life.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com