Sunday, May 17

A Remedy for Boredom with God

AW Tozer, speaking to students of Wheaton College, in 1954:

"The great doctrines of the Bible are not timely. When a man comes up to me and says, “Mr. Tozer, that was a timely sermon,” I take it as a doubtful compliment, for the truths of God are not timely (that is, geared into time). The truths of God are eternal. They rise above time, and they were as true when Adam was in the garden as they will be true in the millennium or in the ages that follow.

There are certain great truths: God, God’s creating us, our response and relation to God, human sin, human redemption, the incarnation, the indwelling Christ, the union of the soul with the Triune God. All these are great, eternal truths, true under all kinds of conditions, among all people everywhere and in every age in the world, no less true and no more true because they are absolutely true. Indeed, we will never be where we should be until these become to us the source of thrill. The entertainment of great spiritual concepts will lift us like a song until, brooding upon the great ideas of the Triune God and all He means to us, will thrill us like a stimulant from within.

We will never be where we ought to be until we go back to those old paths and learn to find God. We will cease to be bored with God. We will cease to make His redemptive plan merely an escape from hell and put the thought of hell and all that way behind us in the dim disappearing past. Instead, we will center our affections upon God and Christ, where Christ sits at the right hand of God, and become specialists and experts in the realm of the spiritual life.

It is amazing how little outside stimulus we need if we have that inward stimulus. It is amazing how much God will meet our needs. It will not be God and something else. It will be God everything. And then, wisely, we will gear into our times, and we will gear into the gadgets around us, and we will gear into the needs of others, and in a moment we will become as practical as overshoes and as alert to the needs of the world around us as the most keen sociologist. Nevertheless, at the same time our great anchor will be God above. And if at any moment we should be cut off from our environment so that we did not have the stimulation and comfort of what the world provides, we would still be perfectly restful, for God would be enough."
"Is God Enough", Tozer Speaks to Students, in Quick Verse 6.0, Works of AW Tozer (CDROM)

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