Our Mental Image of God

"That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him." (Ephesians 1:17)

The gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the mos portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning God.

Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, "What comes into your mind when you think about God?" we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most influential religious leaders think of God today, we might be able with some precision to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow.

Lord, give Your Church and its leaders a spirit of wisdom and revelation, that we might indeed have an adequate appreciation of who You are. Amen

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The Perfections of God

"Praise ye the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. While I live will I praise the Lord. I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being." (Psalm 146:1-2)

My conviction has been growing for years that we must recapture the concept of the perfections of God. We must see again how awful (awe-full) God is, how beautiful and how perfect. And we must begin to preach it, sing it, write about it, promote it, talk it, tell and pray it until we have recaptured the concept of majesty, until the awareness of the divine is back in our religion again, until we have regained the ability and desire to retire within our own hearts and worship God in the silence of our own spirits.

 If we continue as we are, spreading our impaired religion, our weakened Christianity, over a wider area until the Lord comes, the Lord will break through the clouds and will show Himself majestic and wonderful in heaven above and earth beneath and under the sea, and everywhere they shall bow and own Him as Lord and King. But I'd like to see it brought back to the Church before that dramatic hour comes. I'd like to see us know it now.

Lord, I too long to see Your Church recapture a sense of Your majesty. I commit to spreading the knowledge of Your perfection to those in my own life. Amen

~A. W. Tozer~