Food for thought

A generation of Followers 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 the Father. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gathering or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.

The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow philosophies, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-fellowship, 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.

To put it differently, we have accepted one another’s notions, copied one another’s lives and made one another’s experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst of all, we have made the word of truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed.

Taken from A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God