How Artistic and Musical God Is!

"...teaching and admonishing one another in psalm and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord" (Colossians 3:16)

I remember as a young Christian when I got my first awful, wonderful, entrancing vision of God. I was in West Virginia in the woods sitting on a log reading the Scriptures.

I got up and wandered away to have prayer by myself. I had been reading one of the driest passages imaginable from the Scriptures where Israel came out of Egypt and God arranged them into a diamond-shaped moving city with a flame of fire in the middle giving light.

Suddenly it broke over me; God is a geometrician, He's an artist! When He laid out that city He laid it out skillfully and it suddenly swept over me like a wave of the sea: how beautiful God is and how artistic and how poetic and how musical, and I worshiped God there under that tree all by myself. You know after that I began to love the old hymns and I have been a lover of the great hymns ever since.

Holy Father, Holy Son, Holy Spirit -
Three we name Thee;
Though in essence only one,
Undivided God we claim Thee,
And adoring bend the knee
While we sing our praise to Thee.

~A. W. Tozer~

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Am I Really Converted?

"As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also" (James 2:26)

I believe in the deeper Christian life and experience - oh yes! But I believe we are mistaken when we try to add the deeper life to an imperfect salvation, obtained imperfectly by an imperfect concept of the whole thing.

Under the working of the Spirit of God through such men as Finney and Wesley, no one would dare to rise in a meeting and say, "I am a Christian" if he had not surrendered his whole being to God and had taken Jesus Christ as His Lord.

Today, we let them say they are saved no matter how imperfect and incomplete the transaction, with the proviso that the deeper Christian life can be tacked on at some time in the future.

Can it be that we really think that we do not owe Jesus Christ our obedience?

We have owed Him obedience ever since the second we cried out to Him for salvation, and if we do not give Him obedience, I have reason to wonder if we are really converted!

I am satisfied that when a man believes on Jesus Christ he must believe on the whole Lord Jesus Christ - not making any reservation!

~A. W. Tozer~