But we are often disappointed. Today, news headlines about the Christian church are mostly about abuse scandals and decline. Listen to what Tozer wrote years ago, which seems especially prescient today:
"Our mistake is that we want God to send revival on our terms. We want to get the power of God into our hands, to call it to us that it may work for us in promoting and furthering our kind of Christianity. We want still to be in charge, guiding the chariot through the religious sky in the direction we want it to go, shouting "Glory to God," it is true, but modestly accepting a share of the glory for ourselves in a nice inoffensive sort of way.
"We are calling on God to send fire on our altars, completely ignoring the fact that they are our altars and not God's. And like the prophets of Baal we are working ourselves into a frenzy as if we could by violence command the arm of the Almighty.
"The whole error results from a confused notion of revival and a failure to recognize the moral laws that underlie the kingdom of God. God never moves whimsically; His ways are never impulsive or erratic. He never sends judgment unless there has been a violation of His laws, nor does He send blessing apart from obedience to those laws. ...
"Of this we may be certain: We cannot continue to ignore God's will as expressed in the Scriptures and expect to secure the aid of God's Spirit. God has given us a complete blueprint for the Church and He requires that we adhere to it 100 percent. Message, morals and methods are there, and we are under strict obligation to be faithful to all three.
"Today we have the strange phenomenon of a company of Christians solemnly protesting to heaven and earth the purity of their Bible creed, and at the same time following the unregenerate world in their methods and managing only with difficulty to keep their moral standards from sinking out of sight. Coldness, worldliness, pride, boasting, lying, misrepresenting, love of money, exhibitionism — all these things are practiced by professedly orthodox Christians, not in secret but in plain
sight and often as a necessary part of the whole religious show."
We are disappointed because we expect God to work in the world, and in our lives, on our terms. This pretty much never works.
But even worse, in Tozer's view, is that we try to do this work with methods that are antithetical to God's ways. When Tozer and others talk about doing God's work using "worldly methods," I'm not sure the problem is so much things like employing marketing and management wisdom in the work. I think the problems he's pointing out are relying on marketing and management wisdom, apart from dependance on God. But more than that, I
think he's pointing to things like pride, dishonesty, boasting, love of money, exhibitionism -- things that might seem "normal" in the world, but have no place in the church.
Tozer wrote these words in the 1950s. I wonder what he would say if he was around today, looking at the American Christian landscape? I wonder if he would be saddened to conclude that the decline we see in church attendance and Christian influence in society is a logical consequence of the things he warned us about nearly 60 years ago?
