Willard Wednesdays

The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter 3 What Jesus Knew: Our God-bathed World (pp. 64-66)

 “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” -A.W. Tozer

Willard agrees with Tozer:

"Frankly, our daily experience, under pressure from many quarters, constantly keeps us from thoughtful living and 'dumbs us down,' in many ways- especially theologically.  But the resulting lack of adequate ideas and terminology does great harm to our faith.  It insulates our real life from what we say we believe.  We cannot, even by miracle, believe a blank or a blur, much less act on it.  There is no 'what' for our minds and lives to lay hold of in such a case- or it is the wrong 'what'.

"To trust in God, we need a rich and accurate way of thinking and speaking about Him to guide and support our life vision and our will."

"Still today the Old Testament book of Psalms gives great power for faith and life.  This is simply because it preserves a conceptually rich language about God and our relationships to him.  If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life...We learn from the psalms how to think and act in reference to God.  We drink in God and God's world from them.  They provide a vocabulary for living Godward, one inspired by God himself.  They show us who God is, and that expands and lifts and directs our minds and hearts."  

"But because of ideas arising out of the eighteenth century-the richly informative language needed to nourish thoughtful faith in God is no longer functional in our cultural setting.  The ideas of Modernity now dominate the academic centers of the world, even where they are not consciously identified or understood, and even where they are explicitly rejected."

"We are all products of this modern thought system, and you yourself can test its power by observing your response to a representative statement about God from a century or so ago.  In the grand and carefully phrased old words of Adam Clarke, God is

the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfet; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself.  In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just and right, and kind.  

"It would be surprising if you found this easy reading.  However, it is a lot like Shakespeare- not just old, but incredibly rich.  Possibly you even began to think the words are just meaningless.  Nevertheless, with some earnest thought we can all appreciate what a vast difference it would make in anyone's life to actually believe in such a God as these words portray.  Think of someone whose every action, whose slightest thought or inclination, automatically assumes the reality of the God Adam Clarke describes."

Praying today that your faith and mine might be in this infinite good God who can do nothing but what is eternally just and right and good..  And that our thoughts and actions will demonstrate this belief.