Abraham (Part 4 of 4 – The Way of Renunciation)
“If we would indeed know God in growing intimacy, we must go this way of renunciation. And if we are set upon the pursuit of God, He will sooner or later bring us to this test. Abraham’s testing was, at the time, not known to him as such, yet if he had taken some course other than the one he did, the whole history of the Old Testament would have been different. God would have found His man, no doubt, but the loss to Abraham would have been tragic beyond the telling. So we will be brought one by one to the testing place, and we may never know when we are there. At that testing place there will be no dozen possible choices for us – just one and an alternative – but our whole future will be conditioned by the choice we make.
Father, I want to know Thee, but my cowardly heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
~A. W. Tozer
Reflection:
“This selection from Tozer is one of my favorite passages in all his writings. Somehow he makes Abraham’s dilemma live for me. I think the key is that he never allows me off the hook. Under Tozer’s watchful eye I cannot read the Abraham story at arm’s length. He refuses to let me say, in effect, ‘I’m certainly glad that I’m not in Abraham’s shoes!’ No, Tozer presses me into the story, declaring, ‘You are in Abraham’s shoes. God is asking you to sacrifice your most prized possession. What will you answer?’ That is how his writing affects me.
…Tozer calls our perennial passion to posses, ‘the self-life.’ In another of his writings he expands on this idea. Here he uses the metaphor of the veil in the Holy of Holies to describe for us ‘the veil in our hearts…the close-woven veil of the self-life.’ His powers of description are so telling that they cannot be improved upon. Listen. ‘It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power.’
‘To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them …Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us …We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Savior passed when He suffered under Pontius Pilate.’ This is Tozer at his best calling us to the obedience of the cross life, which he reminds us is ‘the blessedness of possessing nothing.’”
~Richard Foster
Father, I want to know Thee, but my cowardly heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
~A. W. Tozer
Reflection:
“This selection from Tozer is one of my favorite passages in all his writings. Somehow he makes Abraham’s dilemma live for me. I think the key is that he never allows me off the hook. Under Tozer’s watchful eye I cannot read the Abraham story at arm’s length. He refuses to let me say, in effect, ‘I’m certainly glad that I’m not in Abraham’s shoes!’ No, Tozer presses me into the story, declaring, ‘You are in Abraham’s shoes. God is asking you to sacrifice your most prized possession. What will you answer?’ That is how his writing affects me.
…Tozer calls our perennial passion to posses, ‘the self-life.’ In another of his writings he expands on this idea. Here he uses the metaphor of the veil in the Holy of Holies to describe for us ‘the veil in our hearts…the close-woven veil of the self-life.’ His powers of description are so telling that they cannot be improved upon. Listen. ‘It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power.’
‘To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them …Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us …We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Savior passed when He suffered under Pontius Pilate.’ This is Tozer at his best calling us to the obedience of the cross life, which he reminds us is ‘the blessedness of possessing nothing.’”
~Richard Foster
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