It happened again! It’s happened many times before, but it happened again! It’s probably happened to you also! You’re reading something and without warning the words jump off the page and arrest your attention. It may be a paragraph, it may even be just a line, but it catches your attention and changes the way you think about something.
That’s what happened as I was reading “Rut, Rot or Revival” by A. W. Tozer. A paragraph caught my attention. It wasn’t a new idea. I had heard it before. But this time it caught me. It may have been the way Tozer wrote it. It may have been the Holy Spirit, who knew I needed to hear it. Probably it was both. But it caught me.
What was it? It was a paragraph that showed the potential for every Christian to live a life that isn’t mundane or routine. A life that lives with the expectancy that God’s Spirit is active and will effect change in us. Tozer quotes Ephesians 4v26 - 5v2. He then goes on to say…
Remember, we are compared with what we could be, not just what we should be. God being who He is, and Jesus Christ being His risen and all-powerful Son, anything we ought to be we can be. Anything that God has declared that we should be we can be. (Tozer, A. W.. Rut, Rot, or Revival . Moody Publishers. Kindle Edition.)
So often we read the commands of scripture as just that. Commands. Commands that must be obeyed. But what if those commands are actually a description of the life that God is working in us? What if they are describing the kind of people, “we could be, not just what we should be?” What if we read the commands of God, not just as commands, but as a description of what God wants to do in us, through the work of his Spirit?
Surely that would change the way we read them. Rather than being crushed by the commands, and despondent that we aren’t living up to them, we would read those same commands with hope and expectancy. Hope that God can do in us, and others, what he commands. Expectancy that he will do in us, and others, what he commands. We would read them prayerfully, asking God to make us like the people he commands us to be.
It may just be that if we do that, God will lift us out of the rut of our Christian lives, and into a revival of our Christian lives. That’s my prayer for myself, my family and you, my church family, as we enter 2022.
With much love,
Pastor Tim
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