From The Best of A. W. Tozer

Satan’s first attack on 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, and it is exactly this that has cut from under them the ground of righteousness and driven them to reckless and destructive living…

…The God of the Pharisee was not a God easy to live with, so his religion became grim and hard and loveless…

…The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service on of unspeakable pleausre…

…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…

from the The Best of Tozer, Baker 1978 edition, pp. 120-122

Names of the Holy Spirit: Andrew Murray

I’m slowly working my way through a classic; Andrew Murray’s With Christ in the School of Prayer. For the last two chapters, he has been looking at the passage that begins, “If his son asks for bread will he give him a stone?”   This is paralleled in Matthew and Luke; and says that if corrupted and sinful parents like ourselves still give good things to their children, how much more will God give…to those who ask.

The Matthew section ends, “How much more will your Father give good things…”   But in Luke the ending is different; “How much more will you Father give the Holy Spirit.”   Murray feels that the highest of the “good things” is “the Holy Spirit.”

He then has a paragraph where he lists the various gifts of the Holy Spirit.   He was writing in an era before bullet points — lapsing into point form or numbered lists wasn’t done in prose back then — but I want to spell these out for us today.   There aren’t cross-references, but you’ll recognize many of these:

• The Spirit of grace — to reveal and impart all of grace there is in Jesus
• The Spirit of faith — teaching us to begin and go on and increase in continiously believing
• The Spirit of adoption and assurance — who witnesses that we are God’s children and inspires us to confidently say, ‘Abba, Father.’
• The Spirit of truth — to lead into all truth, to make each word of God ours in both principle and action
• The Spirit of prayer — through whom we speak with the Father; prayer that must be heard
• The Spirit of judgment and refining — to search the heart and convict of sin
• The Spirit of holiness — manifesting and communicating the Father’s holy presence within us
• The Spirit of power — through whom we are strong enough to speak boldly and work effectively in the Father’s service
• The Spirit of glory — the promise of our inheritance, the preparation and foretaste of the glory to come.

Murray states, “In the variety of gifts which the Spirit has to give out, He meets every need of the believer.  …The child of God needs only one thing to really live as a child:  To be filled with this Spirit.”

With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray (various publishers); taken from lessons 6 and 7; some sentences mildly paraphrased to reflect modern grammar and vocabulary.

With Christ in the School of Prayer: Paraphrased

Your Father knows what things you need before you ask Him

At first, this might seem to make prayer less necessary:  God knows far better about what we need than we do.   But as we get deeper into understanding what prayer really is, this truth will strengthen our faith.

It will teach us that we do not need, as in other religions, a multitude of words or urgency, to try to compel an unwilling God to listen.

It will lead us to a holy thoughtfulness and quietness in prayer as it begs the question: Does my Father really know that I need this?

It will, once we have been led by the Spirit to the certainty that our request is indeed something that, we do need for God’s glory, give us wonderful confidence to say, “My Father knows I need it and must have it.”

And then, should there be a delay in getting the answer, it will teach us in quiet perseverance to hold on…

Oh, the blessed freedom and simplicity of a child that Christ our teacher would desire to cultivate in us, as we draw near to God; we should look up to the Father until His Spirit works that freedom and simplicity in us.

We should, at times when we’re praying, when we’re in danger of being preoccupied with our fervent, urgent requests — so much that we forget that the Father knows and hears — we should hold still and just quietly say:  My Father sees, My father hears, my father knows.   It will help our faith to accept the answer and to say that we know that we have the requests we have asked of Him.

from Lesson 3 of With Christ in The School of Prayer by Andrew Murray

Andrew Murray on Psalm 51

In our family prayer time, we’ve started reading Confession and Forgiveness which Andrew Murray wrote in 1896.   He takes 33 chapters to go through Psalm 51 phrase-by-phrase.

If you’re not familiar with this Psalm, take a moment to read it now…

… This is from the second chapter:

The reason then why I would have you learn to understand and take this psalm to your heart is that I think its lessons are so necessary and, indeed, indispensable.  We are taught in our [Heidelberg] Catechism that there are three elements in the spiritual life that we must know if we would live and die as saved  souls.   These three elements are:

• how great our sin and misery are
• how we can be delivered from them, and
• how we should live in thankfulness to God for this deliverance.

And nowhere do we find these great lessons concerning mercy, deliverance, and thankfulness more clearly explained than in this psalm…