Caught in the Coil

How easy it is for us to be satisfied with the quick fix. Got a problem we can't solve on our own? We send up a quickie prayer, hope for the best, and when a solution comes, that's the end of the matter. Do we take the time to build on the relationship with the One who has helped us? Sadly, we very rarely can be bothered.

Those who claim Christ as savior are truly blessed, and yet we often live in a perpetual state of ingratitude. Oh, we may sing a hymn of praise and worship now and then, but the desire to truly seek an active relationship with the God we confess so freely on Sunday mornings seems to disappear once we step out the front door of the church.

Caught in the coil of complacency in your faith? True freedom and purpose in life comes when we embrace Jesus as Savior AND Lord through actively seeking a stronger relationship with Him.

Hymnody is sweet with the longing after God, the God whom, while the singer seeks, he knows he has already found. "His track I see and I'll pursue," sang our fathers only a short generation ago, but that song is heard no more in the great congregation. How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. Everything is made to center upon the initial act of "accepting" Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek Him. This is set before us as the last word in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever believed otherwise. Thus the whole testimony of the worshiping, seeking, singing Church on that subject is crisply set aside. The experiential heart-theology of a grand army of fragrant saints is rejected in favor of a smug interpretation of Scripture which would certainly have sounded strange to an Augustine, a Rutherford or a Brainerd.

--from The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer