Not A Self-Help Religion

"He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting" (Galatians 6:8)

Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God. The power is to come upon powerless men as a gentle but resistless invasion from another world, bringing a moral potency infinitely beyond anything that might be stirred up from within. This power is sufficient for it is the Holy Spirit of God come where the weakness lay to supply power and grace to meet the moral need.

Set over against such a mighty provision as this ethical Christianity (if I may be allowed the term) is an infinitile copying of Christ's "ideals," a pitiable effort to carry out the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount! All this is but religious child's play and is not the faith of Christ and the New Testament.

You cannot know whether your self-denial is genuine or whether it is spurious, without knowing whether it is founded upon a supreme attachment to the glory of God. To deny yourself from a supreme regard to a higher interest than your own, is to possess the spirit of the gospel.

~A. W. Tozer~

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God's Kind of Power

"I am the vine, ye are the branches ... without me ye can do nothing" (John 15:5)

"Ye shall receive power." This was and is a unique afflatus, an enduement of supernatural energy affecting every department of the believer's life and remaining with him forever. It is not physical power nor even mental power though it may touch everything both mental and physical in its benign outworking.

It is, too, another kind of power than that seen in nature, in the lunar attraction that creates the tides or the angry flash that splits the great oak during a storm.

This power from God operates on another level and affects another department of His wide creation. It is spiritual power. It is the kind of power that God is.

It is the ability to achieve spiritual and moral ends. Its long-range result is to produce Godlike character in men and women who were once wholly evil by nature and by choice.

The renovation of character and conduct is only in and through Christ Himself. The cleansed temple must be possessed and occupied by the Lord of the temple.

~A. W. Tozer~