09 July, 2008

It's OK to Question the Teachers


Many tender-minded Christians fear to sin against love by daring to inquire into anything that comes wearing the cloak of Christianity and breathing the name of Jesus. They dare not examine the credentials of the latest prophet to hit their town lest they be guilty of rejecting something which may be of God. They timidly remember how the Pharisees refused to accept Christ when He came, and they do not want to be caught in the same snare, so they either reserve judgment or shut their eyes and accept everything without question. This is supposed to indicate a high degree of spirituality. But in sober fact it indicates no such thing. It may indeed be evidence of the absence of the Holy Spirit.


Gullibility is not synonymous with spirituality. Faith is not a mental habit leading its possessor to open his mouth and swallow everything that has about it the color of the supernatural. Faith keeps its heart open to whatever is of God, and rejects everything that is not of God, however wonderful it may be. Try the spirits is a command of the Holy Spirit to the Church. We may sin as certainly by approving the spurious as by rejecting the genuine. And the current habit of refusing to take sides is not the way to avoid the question. To appraise things with a heart of love and then to act on the results is an obligation resting upon every Christian in the world. And the more as we see the day approaching.”

A.W Tozer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lin,

Sent this quote to bunch of my friends and one wrote back this... I hope it stirs some conversation.

Lovingly,
Mark

We must live in the tension, as Jesus did:

“Test the spirits.” on one side. ∞ “Love believes all things, endures all things...” on the other. Living in only one of these polarities makes you a hardened and divisive legalist in the former, and a baseless enabler in the latter.

Anonymous said...

GOOD quote.