Morning Chapel Prayer Playlist
Morning Chapel Prayer Today
Pastor Heather…
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to morning prayer. My name’s Heather Sibinski. I’m one of the pastors here at Living Word. Thank you for joining us online and in person.
Excerpt from book, “The Pursuit of God” by A.W. Tozer…
I felt led to start out with this book that I love and I read once in a while to kind of re-energize myself. It’s called “The Pursuit of God” by A.W. Tozer. And I just wanted to read a little bit out of chapter five here before we go into prayer. And the title of the chapter is “The Universal Presence.” Now, this is one that I have highlighted with hearts and arrows and all those things. Of course, the Bible is our first and foremost scripture and thing that we read. But then there’s these believers that have walked it out, that have proved it, that can teach us things. And so A.W. Tozer is one of those for me.
And it starts out with Psalm 139:7…
“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” In all Christian teachings, certain basic truths are found, hidden at times and rather assumed than asserted, but necessary to all truth as the primary colors are found in and necessary to the finished painting. Such a truth is in divine immanence. God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all His works. This is boldly taught by the prophet and apostle and is accepted by Christian theology generally. That is, it appears in the books, but for some reason it has not sunk into the average Christian’s heart so to become a part of his believing self. Christian teachers shy away from its full implications and if they mention it at all, mute it down till it has little meaning. I would guess the reason for this to be is the fear of being charged with pantheism, but the doctrine of the divine presence is divinely not pantheism.
“Pantheism’s error is too palpable to deceive anyone. It is that God is the sum of all created things. Nature and God are one, so whoever touches a leaf or a stone touches God. That, of course, is to degrade the glory of the incorruptible deity and in effort to make all things divine banished all divinity from the world entirely.
“The truth is that while God dwells in His world, He is separated from it by a gulf of forever impassable. However closely He may be identified with the works of His hands, they are and must eternally be other than He. And He is and must be antecedent to and independent of them. He is transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.
“What now does the divine immanence mean in the direct Christian experience? It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here. There can be no place where He is not. Ten million intelligences standing at as many points in space and separated by incomprehensible distances can each one say with equal truth, ‘God is here.’ No point is nearer to God than any other point. It is exactly as near to God as any place as it is from any other place. No one is in mere distance any further from or nearer to God than any other person is. These truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within us. In the beginning, God.
“Not matter, for matter is not self-causing. It requires an anticipant cause, and God is that cause.
“Not law, for law is but a name for the course which is all creation flows. That course had to be planned, and the planner is God.
“Not mind, for mind is also a created thing and must have a creator back of it.
“In the beginning, God. The uncaused cause of matter, mind, and law. There we must begin. Adam sinned, and in his panic, frantically tried to do the impossible. He tried to hide from the presence of God. David also must have had wild thoughts of trying to escape from the presence of God, for he wrote, ‘Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?’ Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to celebrate the glory of the divine eminence. ‘If I ascend up to heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, thy right hand shall hold me.’ Psalm 139:8–10.
“And he knew that God’s being and God’s seeing are the same, that the seeing presence had been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery of unfolding life. Solomon explained, ‘But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven and the heavens of the heavens cannot contain thee. How much less this house which I have built?’ (First Kings 8:27)
“Paul assured the Athenians that God is not far away from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being. If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not that presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world? The patriarch Jacob said, ‘In the waste howling wilderness.’ Deuteronomy 32:10 gave the answer to that question. He saw a vision of God and he cried out in wonder, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not.’ (Genesis 28:6)
“Jacob had never been for one small division of a moment outside of the circle of that all-pervading presence, but he knew it not. That was his trouble and it is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew. The presence and the manifestation of the presence are not the same. There can be one without the other. God is here when we are wholly unaware of it. He is manifest only when and as we are aware of His presence. On our part, there must be surrender to the Spirit of God. For His work, it is to show us the Father and the Son. If we cooperate with Him in loving obedience, God will manifest Himself to us and that manifestation will be the difference between a normal Christian life and a life radiant with the life of the light of His face.
“Always, everywhere, God is present and always He seeks to discover Himself. To each one, He would reveal not only that He is, but what He is as well. He did not have to be persuaded to discover Himself to Moses. And the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with them there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. (Exodus 34:5)
“He not only made a verbal proclamation of His nature, but He revealed His very self to Moses so that the skin of Moses’ face shone with supernatural light. It will be a great moment for some of us when we can begin to believe that God’s promise of self-revelation is literally true, that He promised much but promised no more than He intends to fulfill. Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us.
“The revelation of God to any man is not God coming from a distance upon a time to pay a brief and momentous visit to the man’s soul. Thus, to think of us it is to misunderstand it all. The approach of God to the soul or of the soul to God is not to be thought of in spatial terms at all. There is no idea of physical distance involved in the concept. It is not a matter of miles, but of experience. To speak of being near or far from God is to use language in a sense always understood when applied to our ordinary human relationships. A man may say, ‘I feel that my son is coming nearer to me as he gets older.’ And yet that son has lived by his Father’s side since he was born and has never been away from him more than one day or so in his entire life.
“What then can that Father mean? Obviously, he’s speaking of experience. He means that the boy is coming to know him more intimately and with deeper understanding, that the barriers of thought and feeling between the two are disappearing, that father and son are becoming more closely united in mind and heart.
“So when we sing, Draw Me Nearer, Blessed Lord, we are not thinking of nearness of place, but nearness of relationship. It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine presence. We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts.
“Why do some persons find God in a way that others do not? Why does God manifest His presence to some and then let multitudes of others struggle along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience? Of course, the will of God is the same for all. He has no favorites within his household. All he has ever done for any of His children, He will do for all of His children. The difference lies not with God, but with us.
“Pick at random a score of great saints whose lives and testimonies are widely known. Let them be Bible characters or well-known Christians of post-biblical times. You will be struck instantly by the fact that the saints were not alike. Sometimes the unlikenesses were so great as to be positively glaring.
“How different, for example, was Moses from Isaiah? How different was Elijah from David? How unlike each other were John and Paul, St. Francis and Luther, Finney and Thomas? The differences were as wide as human life itself. Differences of race, nationality, education, temperament, habit, and personal qualities. Yet, they all walked, each in his day, upon a high road of spiritual living far above the common way. Their differences must have been incidental in the eyes of God and of no significance.
“In some vital quality, they must have been alike. What was it? I venture to suggest that the one vital quality which they had in common was spiritual receptivity. Something in them was open to heaven, something which urged them Godward. Without attempting anything like a profound analysis, I shall say simply that they had spiritual awareness and that they went on to cultivate it until it became the biggest thing in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing, they did something about it. They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response. They were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. As David put it nearly, ‘When thou saidst, Seek ye my face, my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek. (Psalm 27)
“As with everything good in human life, back of this receptivity is God. The sovereignty of God is here and is felt even by those who have not placed particular stress upon it theologically. The pious Michelangelo confessed this in a sonnet. It says, ‘To the supreme being, my unassisted heart is barren clay. That of its native self can nothing feed. Of good and pious works thou art the seed, which quickens only where thou sayest it may. Unless thou show to us thine own true way, no man can find it, Father. Thou must lead.’
“These words will repay study as the deep and serious testimony of a great Christian. Important it is that we recognize God working in us. I would yet warn against a too great preoccupation with the thought. It is a sure road to sterile passivity. God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination, and divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God in the deepest reverence, say, ‘O Lord, thou knowest.’
“Those things belong to the deep and mysterious profound of God’s omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints. Receptivity is not a single thing. It’s a compound rather, a blending of several elements within the soul. It is affinity for, a bent toward, a sympathetic response to, a desire to have. From this, it may be gathered that it can be present in degrees, that we may have little or more or less, depending upon the individual. It may be the increased by exercise or destroyed by neglect. It is not a sovereign and irresistible force which comes upon us as a seizure from above. It is a gift of God indeed, but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other gift it is to realize the purpose for which it was given. Failure to see this clause is the very serious breakdown in modern evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise so dear to the saints of old has now no place within our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast-flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We’ve been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God.
[We could say digital age methods now, right? We want everything quick, and we want it now, and we don’t want to wait for it.]
“We read our chapter, have our short devotions, and rush away hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another Gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar. The tragic results of the Spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in the Gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, and mistaking a dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit.
“These and such are these, the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul. For this great sickness that is upon us, no one person is responsible, and no Christian is wholly free to blame. We have all contributed, directly or indirectly, to this sad state of affairs. We have been too blind to see or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another’s notions, copied one another’s lives, and made one another’s experience the model for our own. And for a generation, the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass. And worst of all, we have made the word of truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed. It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to biblical ways. But it can be done.
“Every now and then in the past, Christians have had to do it. History has recorded several large-scale returns led by such men as Saint Francis, Martin Luther, and George Fox. Unfortunately, there seems to be no Luther or Fox on the horizon at present. Whether or not another such return may be expected before the coming of Christ is a question upon which Christians are not fully agreed, but that it is not too great of importance to us now. What God in His sovereignty may yet do on a world scale, I do not claim to know. But what He will do for the plain man or woman who seeks His face, I believe I do know and can tell others. Let any man turn to God in earnest. Let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness. Let him seek to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days. Any man who by repentance and a sincere return to God will break himself out of the mold in which he has been held and will go to the Bible itself for his spiritual standards will be delighted with what he finds there.
“Let us say it again. The universal presence is a fact. God is here. The whole universe is alive with His life, and He is no strange or foreign God, but the familiar Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose love for these thousands of years enfolded the sinful race of man. And always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate with us. We have within us the ability to know Him if we will but respond to His overtures, and this we call pursuing God. We will know Him in increasing degrees as our receptivity becomes more perfect by the faith and love and practice.
“Oh God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here, and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me, for Christ’s sake. Amen.”
