Wednesday, March 11, 2009

"A God Who Is Easy To Live With"

Several weeks ago at church, my pastor, Tom Oyler read an excerpt from one of A.W. Tozer's books entitled "A God Who Is Easy To Live With"

I thought this passage so powerful that I asked for a copy and I'd like to post it here for all to read:



“A God Who is Easy to Live With”


By A. W. Tozer



If you feel like you’re failing God, maybe you don’t know Him as well as you think you do.


Satan’s first attack upon the human race was his sly effort to destroy Eve’s confidence in the kindness of God. Unfortunately for her and for us he succeeded too well. From that day, men have had a false conception of God.



Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God. Certain sects, such as the Pharisees, held that God was stern and austere. They managed to maintain a fairly high level of external morality; but their righteousness was only outward. Their wrong conception of God resulted in a wrong idea of worship. To a Pharisee, the service of God was a bondage which he did not love but from he could not escape without a loss too great to bear. The God of the Pharisee was not a God easy to live with, so his religion became grim and hard and loveless. It had to be so, for our notion of God must always determine the quality of our religion.



Much Christianity since the days of Christ has also been grim and severe. And the cause has been the same – an unworthy or an inadequate view of God, and if He is conceived to be stern and exacting, so will we ourselves be.



From a failure properly to understand God comes a world of unhappiness among good Christians even today. The Christian life is thought to be a glum, unrelieved cross-carrying under the eye of a stern Father who expects much and excuses nothing. He is austere, peevish, highly temperamental and extremely hard to please. The kind of life which springs out of such libelous notions must of necessity be but a parody on the true life in Christ.



It is important to our spiritual welfare that we hold in our minds always a right conception of God. If we think of Him as cold and exacting we shall find it impossible to love Him, and our lives will be ridden with servile fear. If, again we hold Him to be kind and understanding our whole inner life will mirror that idea.



The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love. He is just, indeed, and he will not condone sin; but through the blood of the everlasting covenant he is able to act toward us exactly as if we had never sinned. Toward the trusting sons of men His mercy will always triumph over justice.



The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what he has supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds.



Unfortunately, many Christians cannot get free from their perverted notions of God, and these notions poison their hearts and destroy their inward freedom. These friends serve God grimly, as the elder brother did, doing what is right without enthusiasm and without joy, and seem altogether unable to understand the buoyant, spirited celebration when the prodigal comes home. Their idea of God rules out the possibility of His being happy in His people, and they attribute the singing and shouting to sheer fanaticism. Unhappy souls, these, doomed to go heavily on their melancholy way, grimly determined to do right if the heavens fall and to be on the winning side in the day of judgment.



How good it would be if we could learn that God is easy to live with. He remembers our frame and knows that we are dust. He may sometimes chasten us, it is true, but even this He does with a smile, the proud, tender smile of a Father who is bursting with pleasure over an imperfect but promising son who is coming every day to look more and more like the One whose child he is.



Some of us are religiously jumpy and self-conscious because we know that God sees our every thought. We need not be. God is the sum of all patience and the essence of kindly good will. We please Him most, not by frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms with all or imperfections, and believing that He understands everything and loves us still.






*Taken from the Discipleship Journal, Issue Forty-Seven, 1988. Adapted from The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer with permiss

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