Christian Living

Reprinted with permission from Spiritual Reflections.

In The Knowledge of the Holy, A. W. Tozer made the following assertion in an insightful chapter entitled, “Why We Must Think Rightly About God”: “The most portentous [weighty] fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God” (p. 9).

Tozer does not mean that one’s words or actions are of little consequence. Rather, he means that one’s view of God serves as the control center for one’s words and actions (Luke 6:43-45, James 4:1). False views about God will naturally and inevitably issue forth in a lifestyle that, despite all pretensions to the contrary, dishonors God (Matthew 23:1-36). Conversely, right beliefs about God have the potential to fuel genuinely righteous deeds.

A proper view of God certainly does not guarantee godliness—Satan himself holds many orthodox views about God (James 2:19). Nonetheless, Tozer is right to suggest that evil behavior is always rooted in false beliefs about God.

Christians often make mistakes in the way that they think about temptation. On the one hand, they sometimes see any temptation as an evil in itself, as if to be tempted were already to commit the sin. On the other hand, they can think that temptation is merely the initial inducement to sin (or to sin again), which terminates with the sinning. In reality, initial temptations are less insidious than some suppose, while the later stages of temptation are far more sinister than many realize. Temptation occurs in a series of stages, each of which involves a growing element of implicatedness in the sin toward which one is being tempted. In the following paragraphs, I will summarize the stages of temptation, explaining how each stage brings one more deeply under the domination of the object of temptation.

The first stage of temptation is inclination. At this stage, an individual encounters the object of temptation and is somehow attracted toward it. Neither the object nor the attraction necessarily involves sin in itself. A person simply experiences a desire that cannot rightly be fulfilled under the circumstances. This most rudimentary form of temptation can even be glimpsed in the first temptation of Jesus: He was hungry, and He was tempted to create bread. The desire for food was not wrong, but it could not be fulfilled legitimately under the circumstances. When temptation is dealt with at this stage, no sin is committed.

Republished, with permission, from Voice magazine, Jan./Feb. 2013.

“Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?” That profound question was posed by one author thirty years ago.¹ Do you think such an assessment could still be made three decades later?

We live in an entertainment saturated society. And the danger of living in such a society is to prefer a more fun-filled deity, trivializing the one true God and minimizing His holy standards, happily entertaining ourselves with illusions of Christianity. No sense of awe, little reverence, lots of laughs. The problem is that all of this is so corrupt and unbiblical, soon (and quite predictably) the punch lines start to grow old, smiles are replaced by yawns, and yawns lead to carelessness, heresy and moral defection.

The New Testament warns us to “offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (ESV, Hebrews 12:28-29). It seems all too often that talk of the consuming fire of the Lord God Almighty gets extinguished by entertaining, happy god-talk.

Gimmicks, fads, and feel-good faith is replacing the real thing in the lives of all too many Christians. Knowing Christ and His Word has been replaced by the notion that ministries must be based on philosophies that are entertaining or therapeutic. The solid foundation of truth has been obscured by the bright lights of the stage and overlooked for style, image and hype. The end result is that we have fallen prey to the insights and mindset of the world of entertainment, swallowing powerful myths such as the desperate need for fun and relevance-at-any-cost.

We need a clear understanding of who we are and where we live and where we’re headed.