Serious Malady of the Soul

I just started my next audio book from Christian Audio. This one is The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. I read this book several years ago, I think that I even posted about it a few times on this blog.

Well, I was listening to it on the way home from school today and hear this wonderful tidbit:

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 machineage 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 lately 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.

Now, he said this several years ago, and I think that it is even worse now. I see it at work in me, but God is changing me in this area. After a year of increasingly less TV and increasingly more Bible study and prayer, I am beginning to see its value. Especially as I study those men of old, those men who have promoted and lived for the gospel. I am reminded more and more that God made me for Himself, and to live a life cultivating and exercising myself in this deep relationship with God brings me closer and closer to my purpose in life and closer and closer to Him.

Update: Just found the entire book online for free here.

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