The Need for Power from On High -Tozer

sermonindex Jan 31, 2006

The Need for Power from On HighChrist told His disciples to tarry in Jerusalem until they had been endued with power from on high. This can only mean that He will not entrust His work to the unready and the unqualified. It is infinitely more important that we should be prepared for service than that we should win someone else to our subnormal spiritual condition. Soul-winning by persons who have not met the test of obedience to the Word of Christ must inevitably produce other professing Christians of the same spiritual stripe. Missions carried on by persons not spiritually endued can but transplant an effete Christianity on a foreign shore, for be sure that no church founded in a heathen land will be any better than the spiritual lives of those who founded it. Real repentance will result in purified hearts and sanctified lives. A hard and determined return to the pattern shown us in the mount will bring the smile of God upon our efforts. Then we shall experience not less soul-winning, but more. Then we shall have not fewer missionary activities, but more. Then whatever we do shall prosper (Psalm 1:3), and God shall be glorified in everything at home and abroad.

C

crsschk Feb 4, 2006

I suppose my suggestion will not receive much serious attention, but I should like to suggest that we Bible-believing Christians announce a moratorium on religious activity and set our house in order preparatory to the coming of an afflatus from above. So carnal is the body of Christians which composes the conservative wing of the Church, so shockingly irreverent are our public services in some quarters, so degraded are our religious tastes in still others that the need for power could scarcely have been greater at any time in history. I believe we should profit immensely were we to declare a period of silence and self-examination during which each one of us searched his own heart and sought to meet every condition for a real baptism of power from on high.\tWe may be sure of one thing, that for our deep trouble there is no cure apart from a visitation, yes, an invasion of power from above. Only the Spirit Himself can show us what is wrong with us and only the Spirit can prescribe the cure. Only the Spirit can save us from the numbing unreality of Spiritless Christianity. Only the Spirit can show us the Father and the Son. Only the inworking of the Spirit’s power can discover to us the solemn majesty and the heart ravishing mystery of the Triune God.The Spirit as PowerA.W. Tozer

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Compton Feb 4, 2006

...Spiritless Christianity.I've not read a better diagnoses for the condition that has weakened much of the American church....only the Spirit can prescribe the cure.

J

jdaw Feb 4, 2006

I also, could not agree more on the state of Christians today (including myself). The Spirit is calling to all of us, I just read in one of the seromns posted on this site, that said it is up to us to allow the Holy Spirit to work in us. It really is a shame when most christians are NOT like a tree planted beside sreams of water. Where our roots would be able to drink so much more, and grow, into the men God has created us to be.