The Voice Within

"I will hear what God the Lord will speak for he will speak peace unto his people, and to his saints" (Psalm 85:8)

I once slipped into a noonday service in New York City and I heard something I will never be able to forget.

A minister speaking that day said: "We assume that if a man has heard the Christian gospel he has been enlightened. But that is a false assumption. Just to have heard a man preach truth from the Bible does not necessarily mean that you have been enlightened."

God's voice must speak from within to bring enlightenment. It must be the Spirit of God speaking soundlessly within.

I believe that God has related these somehow: the voice of conviction in the conscience and the Holy Spirit, the point of contact, witnessing within man's being. A person has not been illuminated until that voice begins to sound within him.

Men and women need to be told that it may be fatal to silence the inner voice. It is always perilous to resist the conscience within; but it may be fatal to silence that voice, to continue to ignore that speaking voice within!

When we fail to hear His voice, it is not because He is not speaking so much as that we are not listening.

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Depravity Is No Excuse

"I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart" (Psalm 40:8).

Because of the treachery of the human soul, it is possible to hide behind the fact that all have sinned. There is a kind of universal reaction which becomes an acceptable philosophy; that "if this is what is wrong with everybody, then nobody need worry about it."

Therefore, when I say that man is a moral wanderer, away from God and still hiding, I do not want you to hide behind that and take comfort in it. I want you to know that it is a very personal things and that the Holy Spirit never meant to give anyone a sense of comfort in universal depravity.

Actually, the Holy Spirit is saying throughout the Scriptures: "Thou art the man!"

God is calling us with many, many voices, but there is no doubt that he entreats mankind most perfectly in the revealed Word of God.

May Jesus enter into us and clear out and cast away all hindrances of soul and body, to the end that we may be one with him here upon earth and there in heaven. So help us, God!

~A. W. Tozer~