As a young Bible College student during the late seventies I picked up a copy of A. W. Tozer’s classic, Man: The Dwelling Place of God, at a Christian bookstore on Arch Street in Philadelphia. That book, together with two other books by Tozer, The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of The Holy, were foundational in my early days as a young Christian. I still have my original copies of those three books and like to revisit them every few years. This morning I decided to pick up my copy of Man: The Dwelling Place of God and reread the first chapter, which has the same title as the book. In this chapter Tozer speaks about the “inner sanctum”, the deepest place in what we might today call the human psyche, where the Spirit of God was intended to commune with the spirit of man in intimate union. Christian theology teaches that this intimate union was broken as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve, resulting in the Fall of humankind. God no longer resides in the inner sanctum. The intimate union between God and the human being has been broken. Humanity is thereby fragmented. In losing our connection with God, we also lost our inner wholeness and our connection with each other. Humanity is broken. Broken individuals create broken societies. Our lack of wholeness as individuals, our interpersonal conflicts and our fragmentation as a society and as a global community are symptoms of this tragic Fall. Tozer, using allusions to the biblical “Holy of Holies” and to the biblical story of Moses and the burning bush, describes it as follows:
From man’s standpoint the most tragic loss suffered in the Fall was the vacating of this inner sanctum by the Spirit of God. At the far-in center of man’s being is a bush fitted to be the dwelling place of the Triune God. There God planned to rest and glow with moral and spiritual fire. Man by his sin forfeited this indescribably wonderful privilege and must now dwell there alone. For so intimately private is this place that no creature can intrude; no one can enter but Christ, and He will enter only by the invitation of faith…. By the mysterious operation of the Spirit in the new birth, that which is called by Peter “the Divine nature” enters the deep-in core of believer’s heart and establishes residence there. SOURCE: A. W. Tozer, Man: The Dwelling Place of God, Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 1966, pp. 10-11. When the God who created us in His image reoccupies His rightful place at the core of our inner sanctum, we are back on the road to wholeness. Individuals who are moving toward inner wholeness can begin to move toward healthy interpersonal relationships, which will enable us to become “light” and “salt” in our society, as Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. This was all accomplished through Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins so that we might be forgiven, reconciled to God, and restored to a right relationship with Him. The problem with much of modern-day Christianity, at least here in the U.S., is that this experience of being reconciled to God has been reduced to a formula. We “ask Jesus into our heart” and then proclaim ourselves “saved”, sometimes in a way that is so quick and trivial that the real work of the Spirit of God in our lives is bypassed or circumvented. There is minimal acknowledgement of our sin and inner brokenness, minimal repentance, perhaps no genuine reconciliation with God (only God knows what is going on in a person’s heart), no real joyful celebration of sins forgiven, only a shallow surrendering, at best, of ourselves to Jesus as the Lord of our lives. What was intended as a spiritual awakening is reduced to something like a business or legal transaction. The result is that we have churches filled with shallow Christians living superficial Christian lives. This is exactly the sort of thing Tozer spent his whole life warning us against. Tragically, much of Christianity in America did not take Tozer seriously, hence our present dilemma of being an insipid Church that is neither an inspiration nor a threat but that simply is no longer taken seriously. When God no longer has a place to “rest and glow with moral and spiritual fire” in the heart of the believer, the Church begins to look old, tired, and irrelevant. Jesus warned us of this: “You are the salt of the earth. But what good is salt if it has lost its flavor? Can you make it salty again? It will be thrown out and trampled underfoot as worthless” (Matthew 5:13 NLT). So, the Church has two options:
It is a spiritually bankrupt Church that will try to align itself uncritically with the Left or the Right. When God is removed from the inner sanctum, a self-righteous and polarized political activism will rush in to take its place. A solemn and intimate relationship with the Creator of our souls becomes replaced by the cheap substitute of the frenetic, overcompensatory swings of the Left and the Right that are motivated more by fear and anger than by love, respect, compassion, and a genuine seeking after righteousness and justice. Just look at your Facebook feed. If our inner sanctum becomes a place where God is welcomed to “rest and glow with moral and spiritual fire” then we will learn to cultivate a heart for the oppressed, for the marginalized, for the immigrants, for those who have no voice in society. While we recognize that there are no simple solutions to the complex problems of our society, our first impulse will be to respond with the compassion of Christ, not to react with partisan fervor. We will use our voice to speak up for those who have no voice, not to clamor for our own rights or our own standing in society, and we will stop giving our uncritical support to any political leader who promises to give us power in exchange for votes and who tries to frighten us into thinking that something very bad will happen to us if we lose our position in society. We will recognize racism and white nationalism for what they are, as gross sins, and we will renounce these sins unequivocally, even in their most subtle forms, but we will do so by examining our own hearts first, asking God to remove any traces of racism or white nationalism from our own hearts before seeking to condemn these sins in others. Only those who have been brave enough to face their own subtle tendencies toward racism and who are being set free from their own racism can help others to be free of racism, for they are the only ones who can do so in a compassionate and non-judgmental manner. As Jesus said, “And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye” (Matthew 7:3-5, NLT). If God dwells in our inner sanctum, then we will understand that all life is sacred, that recreational sex is sacrilege, and that abortion is a tragic and murderous extinguishing of God’s sacred gift of life just as it is beginning, but we will do so by asking God to examine our own hearts first, and to purge us from our own lack of inner purity and lack for reverence for humanity and for its God-ordained expression of sexuality. If we are natural-born rules followers then we will ask God to purge us from any traces of the “holier-than-thou” mentality and we will ask God to break our hearts for those who need to make difficult and painful decisions and who struggle to do what is right, even as we ourselves also struggle to do what is right. We will not become angry conservatives who hate liberals and we will not become angry liberals who hate conservatives. We will become very aware of the sin within our own hearts, we will ask God to forgive and purge and transform us, we will respond with joyful gratitude, and we will invite others to join us in the journey toward reconciliation and wholeness. This is neither conservatism nor liberalism. This is the Christian Gospel that Jesus lived for and died for. A life of joyful gratitude in response to the miraculous work that God has done by forgiving our sins and moving us onto the path of wholeness will motivate us to become lovers, not haters. It is only then that we can understand the words of the Apostle Paul: “This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17-21 NLT). Those of us who claim to be Christians need to examine ourselves to be sure that God really dwells in the inner sanctum, and that we have not settled for a cheapened and trivialized expression of Christianity that has inoculated us against the real deal. It all begins by welcoming God, not a trivialized God but the God who is Holy, to reoccupy His rightful place in the inner sanctum of our lives, where He can burn brightly, transforming us into those who live and who love as Christ lived and loved. When God lives in the inner sanctum, the character of Christ will become evident in the life of the believer and in the corporate life of the Church, and the watching world will not be able to escape the fact that God is real, that He forgives and transforms, and that the Gospel of His Son is the most valuable and relevant message that the world could ever hear.
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