Odd Man Out

I mentioned last week that, about 20 years ago, I was involved in a ministry here in St. Louis called Salt & Light Fellowship. It was led by Jerram Barrs, director of the Francis Schaeffer Institute at Covenant Seminary (Francis Schaeffer had a strong St. Louis connection and had actually pastured a church here.).

The fellowship met weekly at local churches, and it included both a group discussion and lecture time. The idea was reclaiming the culture, and our studies and discussions focused on both the Christian impact on culture historically as well as reclaiming the culture. We spent several weeks talking about work, and Dr. Barrs surprised than a few of us when he said that all work is seen as holy by God (likely with a few exceptions – some work is nothing short of evil).

His point was the church had divided life into the sacred and secular – and “sacred” work was more important to God that “secular work.” That simply wasn’t true, he said.

The two years I spent in the fellowship transformed my ideas about work. While the world would always disagree, I came to understand that the janitor was just as valuable in God’s eyes as was the CEO, and the reason was that both were made in God’s image. Both deserved respect. Both were ultimately about doing God’s work.

And so was I.

This isn’t how most workplaces function. This isn’t how many Christians function in the workplace. Dividing the world in secular and sacred allows us to leave the sacred at the workplace door. We can be different at church because, well, you have to do what you have to do to succeed in the workplace.

This doesn’t mean you pester your colleagues with sermons and leave tracts in the bathroom. What it means more than anything else is to see your work, and perform your work, as if it were an offering to God. How would God react if you dropped your work, and how you performed it, in the offering plate on Sunday?

That understanding changed my life – and my work life. It didn’t mean I became a workplace angel. I still screwed up, made mistakes, got angry when I shouldn’t and otherwise behaved like the usual sinner (I should phrase that in the present tense). But the understanding had an impact, and it slowly changed my behavior and my thinking. It’s still changing my behavior and thinking.

There’s a cost for this, of course. Jesus talked about it. It’s not surprise when, at best, we’re considered the odd man out. The conscientious objector. The “spiritual one.”

But it make a difference. A significant difference. And that’s the point.

“Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration,” says A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God. “Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. Today’s discussion concludes chapter 10, “The Sacrament of Living,” and concludes the book. To see other posts, please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact.

A special thanks to Jason and Sarah for their faithfulness in posting the links and leading the discussion for the last 20 weeks. 

A Riot in Sunday School

I once nearly caused a riot in Sunday School.

Well, my wife would say that’s an exaggeration. And it is. No one threw anything, No one got hurt or arrested. But people were upset.

For a few years, I had been part of a group called Salt & Light Fellowship, hosted by the Francis Schaeffer Institute at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. It was (and still is) led by a man named Jerram Barrs, a native Brit who studied under and was disciple by Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri in Switzerland.

The core focus of the fellowship was simple: God owns all parts of life, all parts of reality. He’s not confined to the church. He owns the culture, government, the economic system, everything.

We all nod and say that’s true. It’s easy to say. How it plays out in our day-today reality is another thing altogether.

One of our church pastors asked me to teach a summary of the Salt & Light for an adult Sunday School class. It wasn’t easy – consolidating two or three years of study and understanding into a fall Sunday School class. But I agreed.

Things went fine for a while. And then we came to the subject of work.

All work is holy and important to God, I said, repeating what I thought would be easily accepted. The work that each of us do is important and matters to God, I said.

And then I said this: Because it all matters, because all work is important, in God’s eyes no one kind of work is superior to another. No one kind is “holier” than another. What I did in my public relations job – and how I did it – mattered just as much to God as what a missionary or pastor did.

That was what caused the riot. No, it wasn’t a riot. I am exaggerating, at least a bit. I wasn’t lynched. But it did offend several people in the class. One man, a young doctor, never returned to class. And the evaluations at the end of the session showed that a lot of people thought I might be harboring heretical thoughts. Well, that’s an exaggeration, too.

A.W. Tozer explains it this way in The Pursuit of God: “This is the old sacred-secular antithesis. Most Christians are caught in its trap. They cannot get a satisfactory adjustment of the two worlds (sacred and secular). They try to walk the tightrope between two kingdoms and they find no peace in either. Their strength is reduced, their outlook confused and their joy taken from them.”

We compartmentalize. We see our “church life” as something radically different than our “day-to-day life.” I’ve seen Christians in the workplace behave as badly as non-Christians, and be major figures in church life. I’ve heard the “you have to do what it takes to succeed in business” argument and it’s just as wrong as the first time I heard it.

If God is indeed sovereign, then he’s sovereign over everything. Including what we do outside the church. Including the kind of work we do. It’s not only the missionaries and pastors who have “spiritual” jobs. The fact is, we all do.

Saying that out loud might cause a riot, though.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. Chapter 10, “The Sacrament of Living,” is the subject for today and next Wednesday. To see more posts, please visit Sarah’s site, LivingBetween the Lines.

Finding Rest – in Meekness?

At dinner the other night, my wife and I were discussing the changes that will likely be coming from Congress and our federal government on taxes and a lot of other things.

“Why had the stock market jumped in the past two days” she asked.

“The market is assuming a deal on taxes and the fiscal cliff is going to be reached,” I said.

“But taxes will be going up on everyone, business included. Why would that be good news?”

“Because there’s one thing the market hates more than costs, and that one thing is uncertainty.”

We spend considerable time and effort to control our lives and what happens to us. We hate uncertainty. We hate not knowing what’s going to happen next. We create elaborate structures in our personal lives and our work lives to minimize uncertainty. Uncertainty means we are not in control, and if there’s one thing we absolutely hate, it’s not being in control.

We consider uncertainty a burden, and we will go to great extremes to reduce or eliminate that burden. The stock market will accept (for now) higher taxes and costs because, well, at least uncertainty will be reduced. We will create new burdens to ease the burden we think is too heavy, because all we think about is a respite, or rest.

“The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing,” says A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God. “The word Jesus used (for burden) means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not something we do, it is what come to us when we cease to do. His own meekness, that is the rest”

Tozer is paraphrasing what Jesus said as recorded in the gospel of St. Matthew. He described himself as meek and lowly in heart, and said it is there we will find rest.

In today’s culture, seeking rest in meekness seems tantamount to becoming a doormat to be walked upon – not a way to find rest. Yet, like so much else that Jesus taught, meekness is counterintuitive. It does not mean to become a doormat; instead, it means to become more like Jesus.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. This week concludes our discussion of chapter 9, “Meekness and Rest.” To see more posts, please visit Jason’s site – Connecting to Impact.

Striving for Meekness

Years ago, there was a consistent refrain in my performance reviews. It didn’t matter who the boss was who did the review; there was always one comment that managed to fall into “development needs” (even then we were too politically correct to call them “weaknesses”).

“You need to be more aggressive.”

We like A-type personalities. We see them as natural leaders. It’s been my experience that the main leadership ability of A-type personalities is being able to talk louder than everyone else (that’s a joke, but not entirely). But the fact is that organizations, and especially corporations, like A-types. A-types suggest confidence and skill. They manage to snag a lot of attention.

I’ve seen a few A-types do things like loiter at funerals and memorial services for work colleagues, waiting for the senior executives to show up. That’s a bit more aggressive than I can stomach.

But the fact was – is – I’m quiet. I don’t do things that draw attention to myself in a crowded room. I don’t look for every opportunity to tell senior executives what I’ve done for them lately.

And I don’t loiter at funerals.

I’m quiet not so much as a deliberate effort to be meek and one day inherit the earth. I’m quiet because that’s my personality. Quiet until I get to know people, that is.

But I think about meekness, and I think about it a lot. It doesn’t mean being timid or afraid or unsure. It means something very different.

“The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority,” says A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God. “Rather, he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life.”

I do not think of myself as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson in my moral life. My moral failings (and that’s “moral” in the “macro” sense) are not something I would characterize as lion-like. But I do know what God’s estimate of me is. I am sinner, and I am loved more than I can possibly imagine.

I may not be an A-type personality, and I may not be CEO one day, but I know my calling is to strive for meekness – meekness as defined by God.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. This week and next week we’re reading chapter 9, “Meekness and Rest.” To see more posts, please visit Sarah’s site – Living Between the Lines.

“There’s Not a Thing You Can Do About It”

Last Thursday, I flew to San Antonio to meet up with the editorial staff of The High Calling. We gathered in Kerrville (about an hour west) and then had dinner in the town of Hunt, Texas, before going on to Laity Lodge.

We had meetings (more on that tomorrow), and then joined with a group from Westlake Presbyterian Church in Austin for a series of devotions, messages, music and a Eucharist service. The speaker for the weekend was Robert Mulholland, a retired professor from Asbury Theological Seminary in Maine. Through a series of four messages, he spoke quietly and forcefully about “the false self.”

I paid close attention to what he had to say, because I was livetweeting it for The High Calling. (If you want to see the stream of tweets, search for the #THCretreat hashtag on Twitter.) At several points, I was both tweeting and taking notes, and once I simply stopped to listen and concentrate.

And this is what I wrote:

“God loves you,” Mulholland said, “and there’s not a thing you can do about it.” The issue is always, always God’s steadfast love, he said; God maintains relationship even when we break it.

I wrote that statement, and then wrote this short poem next to it:

I carried a stone, rubbing

its rough edges smooth,

chipping away all points

of sharpness until it fit

in my palm with no abrasion,

no roughness,

heart-shaped.

In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer says this: “God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode.”

Listening to Mulholland in a place like Laity Lodge evokes a sense of “coming home,” of finding that home again.

I think I am that stone in my poem.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. Today we finish our discussion of chapter 8, “Restoring the Creator-creature relation.” To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

It is with us, this world

Many years ago, I worked with an individual who was the proverbial shark in the workplace.

Political, eyes open for every opportunity, shaving corners (and sometimes more than corners), no sense of ethics, wouldn’t think twice about  someone else – lie about someone else – in the ongoing cause to promote the self.

The amazing thing was how the individual kept convincing senior managers of his (or her – I’m disguising the gender here) – competence, when all of the rest of us saw right through it.

The individual represented the perfect marriage of a colossal ability to bluster through anything with an almost legendary reputation for incompetence. Behind it all, of course, was a terrible self-image and an absolute fear of being kicked out of the company.

That eventually happened. And it happened again, at two other companies.

We can do a lot of damage, but we are frail creatures, we humans.

We like to think we command our own destinies, that we control all around us. We go to extraordinary lengths to maintain that illusion. The idea of submission is repugnant.

This is the way of the world, and we Christians are not immune to it. It is with us, this world. We are in it and too often we are of it.

In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer points to a different way, but my human mind (not to mention my human heart heart) naturally rebels against it.

Exalting God.

“The moment we make up our minds that we are going on this determination to exalt God over all,” he says, “we step out of the world’s parade. We shall find ourselves out of adjustment to the ways of the world, and increasingly so as we make progress in the holy way. We shall acquire a new viewpoint; a new and different psychology will be formed within us; a new power will begin to surprise us by its upsurgings and its outgoings.”

It’s one of those great contradictions of the Christian life, the great inversion of the model of the way of the world.

We give up, to receive.

We lose, to gain.

We exalt, and are ourselves exalted.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. This week’s discussion is focused on Chapter VIII – “Restoring the Creator-Creature Relation.” We’ll conclude the chapter discussion next week. To see what others are saying about the chapter, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

The Easiness of Faith

I’ve never thought of faith as easy. My path to it was rather torturous; lots of boulders blocked the way. It stretched for seven years, from high school to my senior year in college. And then it became a rather more focused and purposeful activity, as I learned what it meant to “grow in faith.”

“Grow in faith” is a rather interesting phrase. We usually mean that it is our faith that’s growing. But it could also mean that it is in faith that we grow spiritually.

But is faith easy?

In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer says yes.

“Now if faith is the gaze of the heart at God,” he writes, “and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest things possible to do. It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the range of possibility by the weakest and poorest of us.”

He cites three reasons why he believes faith is easy.

First, faith is simple. It’s the utter simplicity of turning our gaze from ourselves to God.

Second, it can be done at any time. Faith is not bounded by the hour of the day, time of the year, or period of a person’s life.

Third, faith can be done anywhere. It’s not limited by place. You don’t have to be in a church, or a stadium filled for a revival meeting, or in the mountains or some other physically breathtaking beauty. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Corrie ten-Boom found faith in the most of awful of circumstances, places where abandoning hope was the rational thing to do—Stalin’s labor camps and Hitler’s concentration camps.

Faith is simple. You don’t have to be a theologian or an expert. You simply have to “gaze upon a saving God.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Gaze of the Soul,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact. Next week, we’ll be discussing chapter 8, “Restoring the Creator-Creature Relation.”

My Roman Chess Set

When I was in junior high (what’s now usually called middle school), I had told my parents what I wanted for Christmas – a chess set. And not just any chess set, mind you, but a very specific chess set: A chess set whose pieces represented various figures of the classical Roman Empire. The king was Augustus Caesar, the queen was his wife Livia, the bishop was Cicero, and so on. Chess was all the rage that year in school and in the neighborhood; five of us on our block asked for chess sets for Christmas and my school actually had a chess club.

Okay, so I was sort of a nerd.

I was fairly sure I would get what I asked for; at least, I hoped I would. Nothing was ever certain, though, and I worried that my mother might (a) place the order too late and it would be sold out or (2) pick another chess set since it was all the same game, right?

Wrong.

About a week before Christmas, I was home alone, and I sneaked a look into the hall closet where she “hid” Christmas presents. I found the dark blue box. It was marked “Roman Chess Set.” I should have happily placed it back in its hiding place but I couldn’t resist a peek. I opened the top of the box, and gazed upon plastic beauty. I was ecstatic. On Christmas Day, I faked enough surprise to hide my sneakiness, but I was truly delighted.

My sneakiness had nothing to do with faith that my mother would get the right chess set; but it had everything to do with a 13-year-old’s hope. Once I saw it, I was certain.

In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer makes a rather startling statement about faith. One can find a definition of it in only one verse of the Bible, and it’s a rather “operational” definition. The verse is Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

As he points out, there’s not much there of what the essence of faith is. And so he offers a definition of the essence of faith: “Faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God.” Faith is not about the one having it, he notes; it’s about the one whom it gazes upon. We think faith is about us, when actually it’s not; it’s about God. He’s where our faith is focused.

I still have my Roman chess set all these years later. It was a hope, but it was first based upon something I could see (an advertisement), then something I beheld, and finally something I could hold in my hand.

Not so with faith.

The gaze of a soul,

the gaze of a heart,

upon a saving God.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Gaze of the Soul,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. We’ll conclude out discussion of chapter 7 next week.

Where Does Art Come From?

For some months, I’ve been working on a novella that has a small handful of characters caught up in an unlikely relationship, and it all spins around a theory of art. Yes, I know, this doesn’t exactly sound like the latest thrilled or anything that will land anywhere near success. But a writer has to write, and this idea caught hold of me and wouldn’t let go. The New York Times Bestsellers List will just have to wait.

The idea is about where art comes from, where beauty comes from. It’s not as an in-depth approach as Athol Dickson took in his novel The Opposite of Art, but instead seeks to explore the subject within a story about an unlikely romantic relationship.

Reading A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God, I was surprised to stumble across what is a concise summary of this idea in my novella. “It is my own belief (and here I shall not feel bad if no one follows me),” Tozer says, “that every good and beautiful thing which man has produced in the world has been the result of his faulty and sin-blocked response to the creative Voice sounding over the earth.”

The idea in my novella is this: if we are indeed created in God’s image, then everything we do in some way will reflect that image, consciously or unconsciously. It doesn’t matter if it’s an Andy Warhol painting of a Campbell’s soup can and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or Handel’s Messiah and the latest song by Lady Gaga. We can’t help it, because we can’t escape being made in God’s image.

And part of that image is creative – it is our nature to create things, to fashion something, or something new, from nothing, or almost nothing. Tozer suggests this comes from our response to God, that creative “Voice” extending across the earth and beyond. The response is our impulse to create, to establish something that reflects the Creator.

It is the image of God in us.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. This week we conclude the discussion of chapter 6, “The Speaking Voice.” To see other posts on the chapter, please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact, for his post and the links to those by others.

The Speaking Voice

I loved the Gospel of St. John. It was the first Bible text I was directed to read after becoming a Christian, and I have returned to it over and over again in the intervening years.

It was quite a few years after that first reading when I learned something I found fascinating about the “Word” of the first verse of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I knew the “Word” meant Jesus; what I didn’t know was the Greek word for “Word” literally means “spoken word.”

Before the written word was the spoken word. And the written word did not replace the spoken word. The spoken word still is. As A.W. Tozer writes in The Pursuit of God, “His world-filling Voice…antedates the Bible by uncounted centuries, that Voice which has not been silent since the dawn of creation, but is sounding still throughout the far reaches of the universe.”

When I learned that “Word” was literally “spoken word,” I was just starting what became my speechwriting career. The understanding has a profound impact. My small, pale, tiny, faint echoes of the spoken voice of creation was indeed small, pale, tiny and faint, but it was also an echo. What I was doing in my day-to-day work was my human imitation of speaking something from nothing, because every speech begins in chaos, and it begins with a blank page.

Simply learning that literal meaning of “Word” transformed how I considered, developed and judged my work. What I was doing mattered, if for no other reason than it pointed to the original Creator. And I had a compass for looking at the speeches of others. I could transcend political and policy differences and look at what was being said and how it was being said, and learn to write better.

Granted, this career epiphany happened at likely the last possible moment it could have happened. This was before PowerPoint destroyed speech texts, replacing them with bullet points, and before media training had burned “stick to your three key message points, and only your three key message points” into speakers’ brains. This was also before everything in society and culture was viewed through the lens of extreme polarization, at least within the last 100 years.

The Word of God is still “sounding through the far reaches of the universe.” All we have to do is listen.

Led by Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. This week and next week we’re covering chapter 6, “The Speaking Voice.” To see other posts on the chapter, please visit Sarah’s site, Living Between the Lines, for her own post and the links to those by others.

What the Man Knew

As part of an online book discussion group, I’ve been reading The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. As a teenager, Tozer (1897-1963) heard a street preacher speak the gospel, went home and prayed to become a Christian. Without a theology degree or any formal theological training, he accepted his first church pastorate – at 24. He spent more than three decades as a pastor within the Christian & Missionary Alliance denomination, and ended up the author of several books still widely read today and with two honorary degrees (one from Wheaton College).

Tozer published The Pursuit of God in 1948. The date’s important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is a discussion he has in chapter 5, “The Universal Presence.”

He is talking about the idea of “spiritual receptivity,” a combination of characteristics and factors that lead us to be open and understanding of God in our midst. He calls this receptivity a gift of God, “but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other gift if it is to realize the purpose for which it was given.”

Then he says this (and I’m to quote at length, because I believe it’s critically important):

“Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown on modern evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer returned from afar.

“The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul.”

This was written a few years before television became a major cultural force, more than 30 years before computers, 35 years before the internet, 40 years before the rise of personality-driven mega-churches, almost 60 years before social media.

I feel the heaping of burning coals upon my head.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Tozer’s The Pursuit of God.  To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason’s blog, Connecting to Impact. Next week we’ll begin a discussion of chapter 6, “The Speaking Voice.”

The Mind-Boggler

A decade ago, I went to Eastern Europe on a short-term missions trip. On our first Sunday, we went to a church service in what had been a movie theater and conference complex in Budapest. The place of worship was the theater, and the service was in Hungarian with English translation. I can remember sitting there before the worship service started, convinced beyond any doubt that I could sense God’s presence, even in this rather shabby, badly constructed theater.

Everywhere we went on that trip – Dresden, Erfurt, Prague, Brno – I could sense God’s presence, and even more than I could in my hometown back in the United States. God was there.

In Christian families, we grow up hearing our parents, relatives, church teachers and pastors talk with us about “having Jesus in our hearts.” We did the same with our own children. We teach, and we learn, that life on this earth is about knowing God, serving Him and wanting to please Him. Our bodies are “temples” of the Holy Spirit, and nothing is more important that having Jesus in our hearts.

In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer goes a step further. This “dwelling within us” is all true, and all critically important. But there’s more.

“God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all His works,” says Tozer.

No, this isn’t pantheism, Tozer notes. Pantheism describes God as the sum of all created things. What Tozer is describing is God’s immanence – God is here. “There is no place, there can be no place, where He is not.” He transcends creation, but He is here in and among His creation.

The mind boggles. It’s not the only characteristic of God that boggles the mind. But it boggles.

I say I believe that, but if I truly did believe that, would I live my life any differently? It’s one thing to have Jesus in my heart – but to moving through a creation where God is?

This takes me in an unexpected direction. I understand why Ann Voskamp calls her blog blog about her life and faith “A Holy Experience.” It is because that’s what our lives here on earth actually is – a holy experience. And it’s holy because God is here.

Would we live our lives differently if we really believed that? How? What would change?

I’m still pondering.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Tozer’s The Pursuit of God.  To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Sarah’s blog, Living Between the Lines. Next week we’ll conclude the discussion of this chapter, “The Universal Presence.”

Confessing the Sin of Envy

I have to confess the sin of envy.

Every day I read a statements by writers who confidently say they have been called by God to write.

I envy their call. And I envy their confidence.

I don’t feel called by God to write.

Writing is something I do, something I have always done. I’ve made a living by words, and in many ways I’ve built a life from words.

I’ve been a reporter, copy editor, newsletter writer, news release writer, speechwriter, report writer, ghostwriter, article writer, speaker, reader, teacher, presenter, blogger, corporate blogger, poet, contributing editor, novelist, Twitter editor (tweeter?) and Facebook page manager. I’m sure I’ve left some things out.

My life has been filled with words, by words, for words. Words shaped by experience, understanding and imagination.

But I have never felt the confidence to say that God called me to write. It’s a skill or gift or ability He gave me, but I can’t say it was a calling in the way we Christians mean “calling.”

What I believe He did call me to was faith – is faith.

A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God says something about this.

“Imagination is not faith,” he writes. “The two are not only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other. Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there…The Object of the Christian’s faith is unseen reality.”

Tozer says it better than I think I could have. My imagination – as wild and exciting and weird and strange as it might be (I write poetry, after all, and there are few things stranger than that) – is not my faith. Imagination creates something out of the mind; faith apprehends a reality that is already there.

But I do wish I could feel some of that confidence, at least sometimes.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading and discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Apprehending God,” please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact. Next week we will begin a discussion of chapter 5.

A Change of Heart

“God can be known in personal experience,” writes A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God. “A loving Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a Living Person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation.”

God can be known in personal experience. It’s a rather shocking thought. It’s a thought alien to every religion of the world – except Christianity.

When I became a Christian during my senior year in college, I have to say that I didn’t hear angels singing. I didn’t hear heavenly music. I didn’t feel some supernatural presence. And nothing seemed different. In fact, if I recall correctly, I prayed, and when I finished, I looked at the man with me and asked, “Is that it? Am I supposed to hear or feel anything?” (If you’d like to read an almost verbatim account of my Christian experience, you can read Part 4 of my novel Dancing Priest. What happens to one of the characters in that section is taken almost exactly from my own experience.)

Change did come, but it came slowly and over time. Statements or events or situations that would have gone over my head before or that I would have blown right by began to be understood in different ways. I began to see things I hadn’t seen before. I had insights that surprised me. And as counterintuitive as this may sound to many people, becoming a Christian made me more discerning, less willing to accept conventional wisdom, more questioning of what others took at face value.

This sounds like something G.K. Chesterton would have said. And he probably did.

The change in my heart enabled a change in my mind. But the heart had to change first.

“Faith enables our spiritual sense to function,” Tozer says.

For me, faith also enabled my intellectual sense to function. And it functioned together with my heart.

Faith created wholeness.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading and discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Apprehending God,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. Next week we’ll conclude the discussion of this chapter.

Where are the Prophets?

For a long time, I believed that a prophet was someone who could predict the future. They had lived way back when in Bible times, and whenever they spoke or prophesied they could be guaranteed to be chased, beaten, imprisoned, sawn in half and other nice things. (Resolution: never predict the future.)

For several years, I took extension classes taught by the pastors at our church in Houston, and it was in one of those classes I learned that my understanding of prophets was in serious error. A prophet might have the ability to see the future, if God allowed him that insight, but the real meaning of prophet was a speaker of strong words, and often words that most people know but hesitate to speak themselves for all kinds of reasons.

I didn’t like this definition. It made me more than nervous. It created anxiety – a lot of anxiety. I didn’t ask for the job. I didn’t go seeking out that gift. Prophets are usually not well liked, because they have a habit of pointing the obvious that’s often missed by others. My wife has something of this gift; she can read people and events with razor-like insight. As for me, I tend to be more clumsy about it.

I’m sitting on an elder board. At a combined meeting, the elders and deacons are about to approve a building expansion desperately desired by the pastor. One person after another speaks in glowing terms of the proposal. And yet for some reason I’m uneasy. I’m less concerned about the financial stretch involved (although it was substantial for the small congregation). I’m more concerned about something more vaporous. There is something wrong; I know there is something wrong. I know that if we embark on this venture, the church may not survive. But I have no evidence, no “proof points,” nothing to back up what I’m sensing.

I speak quietly. I raise questions. It’s clear that I am vexing the pastor, who is my good friend. At the end of the discussion, we vote. The proposal is approved 14 to 2. I didn’t expect a different outcome, although I’m surprised by the man who joined with me. What he said was something like this: “There is something his voice that I think we should heed.”

I was so distraught by my own words at the meeting that I resigned from the board a week later. That caused another uproar, hurt feelings, and misunderstandings.

The proposal depended upon the worship services temporarily being in the gym, the children’s and adult Sunday School classes moved to the old sanctuary building and then construction starting on the new sanctuary. The old building would eventually become the Christian education building. The church was so excited that it wanted to start the new construction immediately,

Because of the change in purpose, and the fact that there would be lots of children in the building, the local municipality sent an inspector to check and approve the old sanctuary. This was usually a formality, but the inspector found structural and foundation problems that no one could have seen behind walls and under carpeting and flooring. The problems were so severe that the inspector ordered the building condemned and closed until major repairs could be made or the building torn down and replaced.

The church couldn’t afford both the repairs and the new construction. And it couldn’t afford two new buildings. Had it unknowingly gone ahead with the construction of the new sanctuary, it would have been facing financial disaster.

I knew nothing about construction or buildings or repairs or financing. But I knew that this is what my reservations had been about. Others knew, too. A few thanked me (which I didn’t really want) but a few stayed angry. Relationships were damaged. I wasn’t sawn in half, but it felt like that sometimes.

“The highest love of God,” writes A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God, “is not intellectual, but spiritual. Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they?”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading and discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Removing the Veil,” please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact. Next week we will begin a discussion of chapter 4.