Religion, Yes - Holy Spirit, No

"I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve ... so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ" (2 Corinthians 11:3)

Evangelical Christianity is gasping for breath. We happen to have entered a period when it is popular to sing about tears and prayers and believing. You can get a religious phrase kicked round almost anywhere - even right in the middle of a worldly program dedicated to the flesh and the devil.

Old Mannon, with two silver dollars for eyes, sits at the top of it, lying about the quality of the products. In the middle of it, someone trained in a studio to sound religious will say with an unctuous voice, "Now, our hymn for the week!" So they break in, and the band goes twinkle, twankle, twinkle, twankle, twankle, and they sing something that the devil must blush to hear.

They call that religion, and I will concede that religion it is. It is not Christianity, and it is not the Holy Spirit. It is not New Testament and it is not redemption. It is simply making capital out of religion.

For any man to presume to represent the Son of God without the anointing of the Holy Spirit, is the most daring presumption.

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On His Terms

"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name" (John 1:12)

I believe that if someone should come along who could make himself heard to thousands instead of to a few hundred, someone with as much oil as intellect and as much power as penetration, we could yet save evangelical Christianity from the dead-end street where it finds itself. I warn you: do not for one second let the crowds, the bustle of religious activity, the surge of religious thinking fool you into supposing that there is a vast amount of spirituality. It is not so.

That is why the meaning of the word "received" is so important here. "As many as received him" - actively and aggressively took Him. This means a determined exercise of the will. It means to not deny any condition that the Lord lays down. That is something quite different from what we are hearing. They did not come to the Lord and try to make terms, but they came to the Lord and actively took Him on His terms.

A sanctified life is a life conformed to the Scriptures in every particular. It commences with our hearts; it next reaches to our ears, and then it is accomplished in our feet.

~A. W. Tozer~