Beware the File-Card Mentality

"Pure religion and undefiled... is this, To visit the fatherless and widows ... and to keep himself unspotted from the world" (James 1:27)

The essence of true religion is spontaneity, the sovereign movings of the Holy Spirit upon and in the free spirit of redeemed me. This has through the years of human history been the hallmark of spiritual excellency, the evidence of reality in a world of unreality.

When religion loses its sovereign character and becomes mere form, this spontaneity is lost also, and in its place come precedent, propriety, system - and the file-card mentality.

Back of the file-card mentality is the belief that spirituality can be organized. Then is introduced into religion those ideas which never belong there - numbers, statistics, the law of averages, and other such natural human things.

And creeping death always follows.

There are churches so completely out of the hands of God that if the Holy Spirit withdrew from them, they wouldn't find it out for many months.

~A. W. Tozer~

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Here's How It Works

"Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you" (1 Thessalonians 5:17-18)

Here's how the file cared works when it gets into the Christian life and begins to create mental habits: It divides the Bible into sections fitted to the days of the year, and compels the Christian to read according to rule. No matter what the Holy Spirit may be trying to say to a man, still he goes on reading where the card tells him, dutifully checking it off each day.

Inevitably the calendar crowds out the Spirit and the face of the clock hides the face of God. Prayer ceases to be the free breath of a ransomed soul and becomes a duty to be fulfilled. And even if under such circumstances he succeeds in making his prayer amount to something, still he is suffering tragic losses and binding upon his soul a yoke from which Christ died to set him free.

It is the privilege of every Christian to live so fully in God that he never gets out of the experienced Presence for one moment. The whole life becomes a prayer... thoughts become mental prayers, deeds become prayers in action and even sleep may be but unconscious prayer.

~A. W. Tozer~