A Defective Perception Of God
Our Father in heaven liberates me from myself and makes me aware of the gulf between Thee and me. Lead me down the path to right that which is wrong and lead me into the way of reformation. I need a great move in my heart of the blessed Holy Spirit. Restore the fragrance of Thy presence. Amen.
In spite of the amazing advances that we have seen in the church, one great overwhelming loss troubles me greatly. The gains are wonderful, but they do not offset the one devastating loss, and that is the loss of a proper perception of God.
If we are going to offset the losses in the evangelical church over the last generation, something drastic needs to take place. I am hesitant to use the word revival because it is used rather carelessly. Perhaps the word reformation is more in order here.
Read and Learn More Things That Delight The Heart Of God
Everything seems to be a revival. I saw a sign that said, “Revival Tonight at 7 p.m.” What I want to know is, how do they know a revival is going to take place at that particular time?
Perhaps it is because we have changed the meaning of the word revival, and we need to upgrade our vocabulary. Revival is not just getting together for some religious hootenanny. If you study the history of revival, you will come away with a deep sense of reverence for this concept.
In history, the revival was indeed a move of God among His people to bring them back. It seems strange to me that the average gospel church wants to go forward, but forward in the wrong direction. When revival takes place, God brings us back, back to where we left God, where we left our first love. That is the key element.
Revival is to breathe new life, but not just any life; it is the breath of God upon an assembly of believers. Revival can take place only among God’s people and can be done only by the Holy Spirit.
One of the churches in Revelation was deemed luke¬warm. They were neither cold nor hot. They started out right, had good intentions, and were on a good path, but somewhere along the way, their love for God went flat.
When the great Welsh revival came to the little country of Wales in 1904 under the leadership of Evan Roberts, God had something to work on. This is a problem today. There is not much for the Holy Spirit to work on when it comes to a move of God in our midst. Back then, the Holy Spirit had something to work on.
At times, the pastor on a Sunday morning never preached a sermon because God was working in such a way that he never got around to it. The Holy Spirit was moving in such a wondrous, overwhelming way that nobody could interject themselves. All they could do was sit in the awesome silence of God’s presence.
They sang hymns from The Psalter, the Holy Spirit moved in the congregation, and nobody could preach. As a result of this spiritual discipline, the people’s perception of God was high and lofty, enabling the people who truly believed in God.
My contention is that we have lost this lofty perception of God, and the church today, the evangelical church, is thin, anemic, frivolous, worldly, and cheap. I do not know how else to describe it.
In those revival services of days gone by, the people lost all track of time and were conscious only of the presence of God at work in their lives. Now the only thing people are conscious of in our churches is a spirit of entertainment and fun and frivolity, and “How soon will this be over so I can get back to the real world?”
One of my biggest concerns is in the area of preaching. We no longer have the kind of preaching that stirred congregations of the past. I am not one to be constantly looking back, but I think we can look back and see how far we have come.
I do not believe we can go back. However, I think we need to understand that the preaching from the times of the early apostles up through men like John Wesley and then Charles Finney is quite different from today.
I realize the times have changed and the great temptation is to try to keep up with the times, whatever that may mean. The preaching that has stirred the church the most has been hard preaching of the Word of God, irrespective of the feelings or trends in the culture.
This preaching was not to entertain, but rather to stir the hearts in worship of God. The focus of the preaching was God.
Read the famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The sermon so stirred New England that it gave birth to what was later called the Great Awakening.
Moreover, that sermon and sermons like it brought congregations to a sense of holy fear and dread of God. We do not fear God anymore. We do not dread Him anymore. He is our buddy and wants only to help us be the best kind of people we can possibly be.
Today preaching focuses on entertaining. If we can entertain the people, we can keep them. If we cannot keep the people, the church cannot grow. Therefore, whatever gets the people in and keeps them, that is what preachers are committed to. And that one word, entertainment, is in my mind a blasphemous word in the Christian culture.
The kind of preaching that stirred the church in the past is the preaching we need in the church today.
I almost hate to mention reading material. I think of the great classics that have blessed the Christian church for centuries and how God has used that literature. Today the literature—if you want to call it that—has been so dumbed down so as to not stir up anybody to holy passion. Today literature is cheap junk that I believe should be shoveled out and thrown where it belongs.
From a rather personal perspective, I would like to be the pope for about twenty-four hours, just long enough to get a bull going—a papal bull. My first papal bull would read something like this: “I hereby prescribe all religious junk published in the last year to be thrown out.” Just as soon as they got rid of it all, I would give back the pope position and retire.
Then listen to the songs being sung in so many places. Ah, the roster of the sweet singers. There is Isaac Watts, the little man that nobody would marry because he was so homely, but he T wrote hymns, and what hymns he did write. Meditating on an Isaac Watts hymn will take you further into the presence of God than any song sung today.
Also, there was Nicolaus Zinzendorf, an accountant and wealthy businessman, who was marvelously converted to the Moravian church. He became the leader of the church, and under his ministry came a great revival.
Some of his hymns were “Jesus, the Lord, Our Righteousness”; “O Come, Thou Stricken Lamb of God”; “Jesus, Thy Blood and Righteousness”; and “Jesus, Still Lead On.” Ah, and what hymns?
Then there were men like Charles Wesley, Isaac Newton, William Cowper (“There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”), James Montgomery, Bernard of Cluny, and Bernard of Clairvaux. Then there was Paul Gerhardt, Tersteegen, Kelly, Anderson, and Toplady. The list goes on and on of the sweet singers of God.
Some of the junk sung today should not be tolerated in our churches. The reason it is tolerated is that our church leaders do not know any better. Sad, but true, we have the blind leading the blind today.
Our singing is too frivolous and meaningless and does not give God His rightful due. This tragic and frightening decline in the spiritual state of the church has come about as a result of our forgetting what kind of God our God is.
Unless we get to know what God is like, we know God, and we will accept all the superficial nonsense that passes for Christianity today. Our perception of God determines our perception of worship.
What is it that the church has lost?
When I say lost, please do not think everybody has lost it, because God always has His seven thousand who have not kissed Baal or bowed down to his image.
If we are going to make any kind of progress, we need to understand what we have really lost.
At the very foundation of our loss, today is what I call the “vision of the majesty on high.”
Today we are democratic in distinction from autocratic; we slap our kings and leaders on the back and call them “Bud” these days. The concept of majesty is gone from the world, and in particular, it is gone from the church.
Majesty is a word nobody uses today. But we just do not know what the word means anymore. We have become the generation of the common man and have managed to beat down every uncommon man until he is a common man.
And if anybody by sheer hard study, prayer, and work sticks up his head a little above the rest, we beat him down and call him “Bob” just to prove to him that we are somebody and he is nobody. We have lost the concept of majesty.
I mourn this loss of majesty that I see permeating the church. I believe it would do every Christian good to read through the book of Ezekiel, preferably on their knees. In this book of that old prophet, there is that terrible, frightful, awful passage where the Shekinah, the shining presence of God, flies out from between the wings of the cherubim and goes to the altar.
From that altar it rises and goes to the door and, with the sound of whirring wings, to the outer courts and to the mountain, and finally into glory.
The Shekinah glory that followed Israel disappeared. Perhaps God could take it no longer, so He pulled out His majesty and the Shekinah went with Him. I wonder in how many churches this would be true. I wonder how many churches really have experienced the overwhelming majesty of Gods presence in their worship.
I feel too many are experiencing the silence of God. God has no welcoming invitation into the worship services today. Everything is programmed. Everything is developed from the mindset of mankind to please mankind. Once again, we need to see the terrible, majestic, awesome presence of God, the holy Shekinah, in our worship times today.
One hour in the presence of the majesty of God is worth more to you now and in eternity than all the preachers, including me, who have ever stood up to open their Bibles.
To study the history of the Christian church down through the ages, it is easy to see that she lived on the character of God alone.
Unlike religions that have come and gone throughout the centuries, Christianity surpasses them all, especially in this one area: magnifying the character of God.
Religion is all about work and gaining God’s approval. History shows us that this is impossible.
Christianity is all about worshiping God, celebrating and delighting in the amazing character of God. No other religion has risen as high as Christianity in its relationship to God. Everything about Christianity is focused on God.
The church has preached God, prayed to God, declared God among the nations, honored God, and elevated God in every generation. When the church is acting like the church, God is being exalted among the nations.
For some reason, the church has grown bored with this. It is hard to explain why, but we have succumbed to the lowly concept of God expressed in religion. Where once we had a high and lofty perception of God, we have allowed, for some reason, the world to redefine our God for us. Instead of taking our God to the world, the world is bringing a god to us that is acceptable to them.
The world wants a pal, a partner, and even, as someone has said, “The man upstairs who likes me.”
Even Hollywood has injected itself into this act. An actress from California happened to be in New York City, crawling around among the saloons, blowing smoke and soaking up liquor. She got into a religious conversation with somebody who happened to ask if she was a religious person.
“Yes,” she said, “I am a religious woman. The fact is I know God. Do you know God?”
The man looked at her, smiled, and said he did not know God.
“Well,” she said, “you better get to know God. You will find if you get to know Him, He is a living doll.”
So, we have God as a “living doll.”
No religion in the world that I know of would treat its God the way we Christians treat our God. We have the true God, yet we do not treat Him with the respect and dignity that the heathen treat their gods.
I must confess there are times when I am tempted to turn my back on a lot that passes for Christianity in our day. In my opinion, it is not Christianity, and something needs to be done to rattle the cage to get people to see how despicable their concept of Christianity has become.
We have taken all the carnal expressions of the world and put them on God. Prayer is “going into a huddle” with God. I have heard this expression, and I only can conclude that it comes from people who do not have a proper perception of God.
To know God and then disrespect Him is the epitome of hypocrisy. For many people, prayer is simply a way to convince God to give you something you want. That kind of prayer never gets above the ceiling.
For many today, God is only the top celebrity—that is all. If God were to come to earth now, they would sign Him up for some television show immediately. They would have a story called This Is Your Life, and then tell God how He got the way He is. God is only the top celebrity, and in the meantime, Christianity has lost its dignity when it comes to the things of God.
I do not believe we need more religion; we need a better kind of religion. My great burden these days and for many years has not been for an extension of the kind of religion we have now.
It has to be an improvement of the kind we have and then an extension of that. The one great loss we have suffered in the evangelical world, the one great overwhelming, calamitous loss that has been the cause of all these other losses is one: a loss of God.
The highest God, maker of heaven and earth—that awesome God before whom our fathers fell—that God has left us, and in His place has come that God of the half-saved, who want to get chummy with God and treat Him like the chairman of some committee.
Religious Fear
We also have lost from our gospel Christianity—almost together—what used to be called “religious fear.” We have practically no religious fear in our time, and along with our loss of religious fear has come a corresponding flippancy and familiarity toward God that our fathers never knew.
The God of our fathers has been replaced by many other gods who are in no way able to actually replace our God. The problem with that is this god is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but a god of thought—a god of our empty heads— and the result is that he can never surprise anybody, he can never transcend anything, he can never beat anybody down, he can never crush anybody, he can never lift up anybody.
He is just a nice, comfortable god to have around, halfway between Plato and John Wesley.
The Art Of Worship
With the loss of the concept of majesty comes the loss of the art of worship. We no longer worship. I am not sure what we do, but it does not contain the reverence and the awesome wonder about God that our forefathers cherished.
The only worship that is acceptable is that which is in complete harmony with the holy character and nature of God. After all, it is God whom we are worshiping, not ourselves.
The Loss of Our Inwardness
If Christianity is anything, it is an inward religion. Jesus said that we are to worship in spirit and in truth. We have such a tough outer shell that it is almost impossible for us to have those inward moments basking in the presence of God.
The Loss Of An Awareness Of The Invisible And The Eternal
The world is too much with us, and we have it with us all the time and all around us so that the invisible and the eternal seem to be quite forgotten. At least we are not aware of it. We are only briefly aware of it when someone dies. We are people of the “now generation.”
The Loss Of The Consciousness Of The Divine Presence
Our churches today have lost consciousness of God’s divine presence because we have lost the perception of the deity that makes it possible. Come to church on Sunday and you may feel a sense of God and His presence, but when you leave, you leave that behind.
Never should we leave the sense of God behind us. However, we have lost awe, wonder, holy fear, and spiritual delight. We have lost the high and lofty perception of God that God honors.
If we have lost that which is inward and gained only that which is outward, I wonder if we have gained anything at all. I wonder if we might not be in a bad state, spiritually speaking. I believe that we are and desperately need a fresh manifestation of God’s power.
I Sing The Mighty Power Of God
I sing the mighty power of God,
That made the mountains rise,
That spread the flowing seas abroad,
And built the lofty skies.
I sing the wisdom that ordained
The sun to rule the day;
The moon shines full at His command’
And all the stars obey.
I sing the goodness of the Lord,
Who filled the earth with food,
Who formed the creatures through the Word,
And then pronounced them good.
Lord, how Thy wonders are displayed,
Where’er L turn my eye,
LfL survey the ground L tread,
Or gaze upon the sky.
There’s not a plant or flower below,
But makes Thy glories known,
And clouds arise, and tempests blowy
By order from Thy throne;
While all that borrows life from Thee
Is ever in Thy care;
And everywhere that we can be,
Thouy Gody art present there. –Issac Watts(1664-1748)