Christ Is the Pattern - A Birth From Above

Christ Is the Pattern

"And we all who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into His image with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

The message of Christ lays hold upon a man with the intention to alter him, to mold him again and again after another image, and make of him something altogether different from what he had been before. "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2) is the injunction laid upon believing men by the apostle.

Now, granted that men may be changed and that the power of God in the gospel can change them, the important questions naturally are, "Into what image are they to be changed? Who or what is to be the model for them?"

To these questions there have been many answers given. The quasi-Christian religious philosophy so popular today answers that there is a "norm" somewhere in human nature from which we have departed to a greater or lesser degree and to which we must be restored. So religion is brought in to aid in the restoration. It operates by "adjusting" the inquiring soul,first to himself and then to society. Everything depends upon this work of adjustment. Human nature so runs the theory, is basically right and good, but it has been put out of focus by the world stresses in which it is compelled to live. It has been warped by environment, by bad teaching,and by various harmful influences, beginning at the time of its birth or before.

The whole burden of this type of religious thinking is to restore the man to an image of himself. All he needs is to be made into his own likeness again, to become a "real person," free from the warping influences of prejudice, fear, and superstition. He was all right to begin with, as were his ancestors before him, and his highest present goal is to be restored, like a damaged painting, so that the hand of the Master may again be discovered under the soil of grime of life.

All this sounds just cozy, but the trouble is that the underlying idea is completely false, and all the religious hopes and dreams arising from it are and must be without foundation.

The message of the New Testament is bluntly opposed to this. People are not all right except for minor maladjustments. They are lost, inwardly lost, morally and spiritually lost. That has been the persistent Christian testimony from the first, and human history has shown how correct it is. There is nothing in us  that can serve as a model for the new man. Conformity to ourselves, even our better selves, can lead only to ultimate tragedy. "The [human] heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" (Jeremiah 17:9). It must have help from outside itself, from above itself, if it is to escape the gravitational pull of its own sinful nature. And this help the gospel furnishes in full and sufficient measure.

The gospel not only furnishes transforming power to remold the human heart; it provides also a model after which the new life is to be fashioned, and that model is Christ Himself. Christ is God acting like God in the lowly raiments of human flesh. Yet He is also man; so He becomes the perfect model after which redeemed human nature is to be fashioned.

The beginnings of that transformation, which is to change the believing man's nature from the image of sin to the image of God, are found in conversion when the man is made a partaker of the divine nature. By regeneration and sanctification, by faith and prayer, by suffering and discipline, by the Word and the Spirit, the work goes on till the dream of God has been realized in the Christian heart. Everything that God does in His ransomed children has as its long-range purpose the final restoration of the divine image in human nature. Everything looks forward to the consummation.

In the meantime the Christian himself can work along with God in bringing about the great change. Paul tells us how: "But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

~A. W. Tozer~
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A Birth From Above

This may sound like heresy in some quarters, but I have come to this conclusion - that there are far too many among us who have thought they accepted Christ, but nothing has come of it within their own lives and desires and habits! This kind of philosophy in soul-winning - the idea that it is "the easiest thing in the world to accept Jesus" - permits the man or woman to accept Christ by an impulse of the mind or of the emotions. It allows us to gulp twice and sense an emotional feeling that has come over us, and then say, "I have accepted Christ." There are spiritual matters about which we must be legitimately honest and in which we must seek the discernment of the Holy Spirit. These are things about which we cannot afford to be wrong; to be wrong is still to be lost and far from God. Let us never forget that the Word of God stresses the importance of conviction and concern and repentance when it comes to conversion, spiritual regeneration, being born from above by the Spirit of God!

~A. W. Tozer~
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Praying Till We Pray

Dr. Moody Stuart, a great praying man of a past generation, once drew up a set of rules to guide him in his prayers. Among these rules is this one: "Pray till you pray." The difference between praying till you quit and praying till you pray is illustrated by the American evangelist John Wesley Lee. He often likened a season of prayer to a church service, and insisted that many of us close the meeting before the service is over. He confessed that once he arose too soon from a prayer session and started down the street to take care of some pressing business. He had only gone a short distance when an inner voice reproached him. "Son," the voice seemed to say, "did you not pronounce the benediction before the meeting was ended?" He understood, and at once hurried back to the place of prayer where he tarried till the burden lifted and the blessing came down.

The habit of breaking off our prayers before we have truly prayed is as common as it is unfortunate. Often the last ten minutes may mean more to us than the first half hour, because we must spend a long time getting into the proper mood to pray effectively. We may need to struggle with our thoughts to draw them in from where they have been scattered through the multitude of distractions that result from the task of living in a disordered world.

Here, as elsewhere in spiritual matters, we must be sure to distinguish the ideal from the real. Ideally we should be living moment-by-moment in a state of such perfect union with God that no special preparation is necessary. But actually there are few who can honestly say that this is their experience. Candor will compel most of us to admit that we often experience a struggle before we can escape from the emotional alienation and sense of unreality that sometimes settle over us as a sort of prevailing mood.

Whatever a dreamy idealism may say, we are forced to deal with things down on the level of practical reality. If when we come to prayer our hearts feel dull and unspiritual, we should not try to argue ourselves out of it. Rather, we should admit it frankly and pray our way through. Some Christians smile at the thought of "praying through," but something of the same idea is found in the writings of practically every great praying saint from Daniel to the present day. We cannot afford to stop praying till we have actually prayed.

~A. W. Tozer~