by A. W. Tozer
There are few things as frustrating as to work without knowing what we are trying to accomplish; that is, to be lost in the means and ignorant of the end.
Examples of this are found in "parts" factories where men spend years making small articles that have no significance in themselves and can have satisfying meaning only when related to hundreds of other and dissimilar articles and to the completed object of which each one is a small part.
Since the human mind is designed to deal with ends and wholes, this enforced preoccupation with parts and means is particularly disconcerting. The urge to plan and to create according to plan is strong in us, and we feel fenced in and defeated when we are compelled to spend our days in toil that attains no visible objective. It is this rather than the work itself that makes so many jobs dull and boresome.
I have wondered whether the flat tedium found in most churches cannot be explained at least in part as the psychological consequence of numbers of persons meeting together at stated times without quite knowing why they have met. Most people simply do not like to go to church and will not go if they can escape the ordeal decently; and millions can and do.
It would be too easy to dismiss this dislike for church as only another symptom of original sin and love of moral darkness, but I believe that explanation is too pat to be wholly true. It doesn't explain enough. Some persons, for instance, find church intolerable because there is no objective toward which pastor and people are moving, aside possibly from the limited one of trying to enlist eight more women and 10 more men to chaperon the annual youth cookout or reaching the building fund quota for the month. And believe me, that can get mighty wearisome after a while, so wearisome indeed that alert, forward-looking persons often forsake the churches in droves and leave the spiritless, the dull and those afflicted with permanent insouciance to carry on, if a phrase so active dare be used to describe what they do.
To Paul there was nothing dull or tiresome in the religion of Christ. God had a plan which was being carried forward to completion, and Paul and "all the faithful in Christ Jesus" were part of that plan. It included predestination, redemption, adoption and the obtaining of an eternal inheritance in the heavenly places. God's purpose has now been openly revealed (Ephesians 3:10, 11).
It was the knowledge that they were part of an eternal plan that imparted unquenchable enthusiasm to the early Christians. They burned with holy zeal for Christ and felt that they were part of an army which the Lord was leading to ultimate conquest over all the powers of darkness. That was enough to fill them with perpetual enthusiasm.
It is one of the anomalies of religion in our day that the orthodox churches appear to have lost their crusading spirit (obviously for want of a crusade), and the enthusiasm they once had and lost has gone over to a false religion and an evil political system. I refer of course to Russellism and Communism.
Communism is an evil, but it drives on toward world domination for the very reason that its devotees are convinced that it is destined to dominate. It is this conviction that makes Communists all but invincible. Any act one of them may perform for the cause carries an emotional warhead: it is the fixed belief that his act is part of a high plan that more than justifies it.
Russellism (now traveling under the alias of Jehovah's Witnesses) is also motivated by a clear purpose. Its followers talk with starry-eyed fervor about the "Kingdom" and, however far they may have strayed from the truth, they are nevertheless convinced that they are sons of a new world order soon to emerge. To them this new order is completely real and in their enthusiasm they care little how many persons they offend or how many enemies they make. In the light of their glorious future nothing else matters. So they believe and their belief, though false, furnishes all the drive they need.
The evangelical Christian need make no apology for his beliefs. They are in direct lineal descent from those of the apostles. He can check the tenets of his total creed against the life-giving, transforming beliefs of church fathers both East and West, reformers, mystics, missionaries, saints and evangelists, and they will check out one by one. Then let him check them all with the Holy Scriptures and again they will prove to be sound.
What then is the trouble? Why the inertia, the torpor that lies over the church?
The answer is that we are too comfortable, too rich, too contented. We hold the faith of our fathers, but it does not hold us. We are suffering from judicial blindness visited upon us because of our sins. To us has been committed the most precious of all treasures, but we are not committed to it. We insist upon making our religion a form of amusement and will have fun whether or not. We are afflicted with religious myopia and see only things near at hand.
God has set eternity in our hearts and we have chosen time instead. He is trying to interest us in a glorious tomorrow and we are settling for an inglorious today. We are bogged down in local interests and have lost sight of eternal purposes. We improvise and muddle along, hoping for heaven at last but showing no eagerness to get there, correct in doctrine but weary of prayer and bored with God.
( Article taken from The Set of the Sail, Chapter 26 )
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