Saturday Musings - July 25, 2020

I’m told it only takes a few inches of water to drown a person. Shallow water can lead to death. Shallow thinking can lead to the death of a society, and also, in a manner of speaking, of a church. Trees with shallow root systems can more easily be toppled than those whose roots go deep. Houses built on superficial foundations can be knocked off those foundations. The wise builder of the Gospel is the one who both hears and obeys. When the sacrificial Way is our Way, when obedience is our Way of Life, then we obey Christ whether we are in familiar or unfamiliar territory; we obey Christ whether the waters are placid or treacherous.

 

Who is thinking deeply these days? Have we all become reactionaries? Where are those Christians who are looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of their faith?

 

Noah and his family may not have known what the world would look like when the waters subsided – but they knew they were in the Ark.

 

A.W. Tozer wrote the following decades ago:

 

            “One trouble with us today is that we know too many things. The whole trend of the moment is toward the accumulation of a multitude of unrelated facts without a unifying philosophy to give them meaning.

 

            “The neat little digest magazines tend to encourage faith in the idea – hoping type of study. This produces an informed superficiality worse in many ways than ignorance itself.”

 

What would Tozer think today with Google and Alexa and the like? What would he think of the game show Jeopardy? Our pursuit of trivia has trivialized our lives and thinking. Toddlers accumulate experience and data and we expect them to form the data and experience into a functioning “whole” – when that doesn’t happen we realize there is a developmental problem. Can we not look in the mirror and see that there is a problem – individually and collectively?

 

Babies eat baby food, our society imbibes sound bites. And the church?

More from Tozer:

 

            “The prophets and reformers of the past were men of few but mighty convictions. Their very narrowness secured high compression and gave added power to their lives.”

 

I think I’d probably say that the people Tozer refers to kept “the main thing the main thing” and the main thing, to use human language, was Jesus Christ and the Gospel – the entire Biblical counsel of God – from eternity past to eternity future. Christ was all and in all – therein was the “high compression” found and exhibited.

 

Where are the mighty convictions in our society? In our churches? We are masters of short-term thinking, and thus have been subdued and mastered by this very thinking. We are sheep; grazing here one day, there another day, and yet over there another day. We think each change of pasture is progress, we don’t know that we are fattened for the kill, or at the very least to be fleeced. This is in the finest tradition of the false prophets and priests and national leaders of both the Bible and general history.

 

Christ is our Ark, who can we bring into the Ark? We need not understand the meteorological dynamics surrounding us – but it is imperative that we abide in the Ark, testify to the Ark, and bring others into the Ark. In these uncertain times we can trust in our certain Lord Jesus – the One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.