In the midst of this great chill there are some, I rejoice
to acknowledge, who will not be content with shallow logic. They will admit the force of the argument, and
then turn away with tears to hunt some lonely place and pray, “O God,
show me thy glory.” They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to
see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God.
I
want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present
low estate. The stiff and wooden quality
about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual
growth. Acute desire must be present or
there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people.
He waits to be wanted. Too
bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.
Every
age has its own characteristics. Right now
we are in an age of religious complexity. The
simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us.
In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a
world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can
never satisfy the longing of the heart. The
shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and
the servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods
all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the
peace of God scarcely at all.
If we would find God amid all the religious externals we
must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of
simplicity. Now as always God discovers
Himself to ‘babes’ and hides Himself in thick darkness from the wise
and the prudent. We must simplify our
approach to Him. We must strip down to
essentials (and they will be found to be blessedly few).
We must put away all effort to impress, and come with the
guileless candor of childhood. If we do
this, without doubt God will quickly respond.
When
religion has said its last word, there is little that we need other
than God Himself. The evil habit of
seeking God-and effectively prevents us from finding God in full
revelation. In the ‘and’ lies our great
woe. If we omit the ‘and’, we shall soon
find God, and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives
been secretly longing.
We
need not fear that in seeking God only we may narrow our lives or
restrict the motions of our expanding hearts. The
opposite is true. We can well afford to make God our All, to
concentrate, to sacrifice the many for the One.
The
author of the quaint old English classic, The Cloud of Unknowing,
teaches us how to do this. “Lift up thine
heart unto God with a meek stirring of love; and mean Himself, and none
of His goods. And thereto, look thee loath
to think on aught but God Himself. So that
nought work in thy wit, nor in thy will, but only God Himself. This is the work of the soul that most
pleaseth God.”
Again, he recommends that in prayer we practice a further
stripping down of everything, even of our theology.
“For it sufficeth enough, a naked intent direct unto God
without any other cause than Himself.” Yet
underneath all his thinking lay the broad foundation of New Testament
truth, for he explains that by “Himself” he means “God that made thee,
and bought thee, and that graciously called thee to thy degree.” And he is all for simplicity: If we would have
religion “lapped and folden in one word, for that thou shouldst have
better hold thereupon, take thee but a little word of one syllable: for
so it is better than of two, for even the shorter it is the better it
accordeth with the work of the Spirit. And such a word is this word God
or this word love.”
