Book 1, Chapter 2
-Part 5-
A.W. Tozer, begins in his book, Knowledge of the Holy, by making this crucial point: What we believe about God will influence every other aspect of our spiritual life. More to the point, the Psalms point out that Man becomes like that which he worships:
“They who make idols are like them; so are all who trust in and lean on them.” (Psalm 115:4)
Because it is humanly impossible to see, hear and pay attention to everything that God is doing, saying and thinking, and because what little we can comprehend does not occupy us very much, it seems that we project our limitedness onto God. We are prone to believe that God is only the sum total of all that we believe about him. We tend to see him as creaky, stiff, slow to act and unwilling to speak – maybe even grumpy or bored.
Good heavens! That’s not him! That’s me!
But because we can’t perceive all his movements in our moments we perilously conclude that he is not as active, is not as involved, not as interested, and has stood off for some reason. The psalmist – always honest to his frailty – sometimes feels this way; asking God where he is, or how long he will stand aside (e.g. Psalm 6:3, 13:1, 35:17). We impose this perceived remoteness upon our theology and it sullies our view of God and our willingness to pray.
This is why it is so important to align our beliefs with truth. Anything that affects our view of God and our willingness to pray affects the very core of our spiritual bearing. We must be careful NOT to let these sleeping misgivings lie.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the parable of the persistent friend (11:5-8). At first glance Jesus seems to be characterizing God as a man who cannot be inconvenienced late at night to give his friend some loaves in order to provide for the friend’s surprise guests. This presentation is a little difficult.
Do we indeed have to pry goodness from God? Is it not in the very nature of God to express and lavish goodness upon the beloved?
Jesus immediately speaks to this story by saying, “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” (Luke 11:9)
Jesus further goes on to evoke the image of a father giving a fish or an egg to his son who asks, and says, “how much more will the heavenly Father give” to his sons what they need – namely, the Holy Spirit (v. 10-13).
Although Christ’s story about the man in bed at night seems to say the opposite (he has said his parables would blind those who hear without faith), the thrust of the story is that God is indeed the one who is always divinely acting. If we misunderstand this and think that God is somehow inconvenienced by our asking, we are not to allow this misperception to become a tenet of our faith. Rather, pray on … ask away always with the expectation of receiving, search always with the hope of finding, knock always with the assurance that somehow the solid door will be pulled open.
These words are a continuation of the picture of the friend seeking loaves from his friend in bed late at night, so we can know that Jesus did not in fact say one thing and then the opposite. The searching, knocking and asking was all done by the parable’s friend in need. Far from giving credence to our frail belief and mistrust in God’s interest in us, Jesus proposes that we press on shamelessly. God’s plenty is there, but only faith will open the door.
In fact, the word Luke used for “persistent” in the story literally does mean “shameless,” which even further colors the extent to which God will welcome and honor those who ask, seek and knock to gain what they need from his willing, gracious hand.
We are free to persist because God is willing to bestow what is good to his people. Love is like that.
God’s continuous work in his disciples is the work of the Holy Spirit. Caussade is going to speak of this in two ways: First, that the risen Christ continues to live his goodness and life through the stream of his followers, and, second, that the Holy Spirit produces a kind of living gospel in each of us as we walk moment by moment in the life of God.
While both of these ideas can be horribly and wickedly twisted to mean some very unchristian things, they are put forth and advocated with no threat to Christian thought, and no wandering into heretical teachings or fields devoid of any trace of orthodox Christian theology.
The idea that Christ lives in us, and that the life we live is an extension of his life in ours through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit has been believed since Jesus first mentioned that he would send “another Helper” (John 14:15-17) to ignite the soul of each member of his flock. In this passage, Jesus goes so far as to say the Spirit “abides with you and will be in you.”
The Apostle Paul stated this indwelling in several ways, always with the emphasis that his (or the believer’s) life belongs to Jesus:
“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” (Galatians 2:20)
“If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.” (Romans 8:10-11)
“…so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith …” (Ephesians 3:17)
“… to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27)
“For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)
“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (I Corinthians 6:19)
In these passages simply take note of the location of Christ or the Holy Spirit. He is “in me,” “in your hearts,” “in you,” and he “dwells in you.”
All of this is another way of saying that Christ continues his work through his people. Christ told the Twelve that they would do more numerous works than he had done (John 14:12). The plan in the heart of God was always to multiply the works of the Son of God through the believing followers, and to do this through the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit within them.
This continuation of the work of Christ through us, then, involves continual divine action on the part of God. Since our guide makes the significant point that “all the aeons of time are, properly speaking, but the history of the divine action,” (Page 27), then, in as much as we are bound to Christ, we are part of that history.
Caussade is suggesting that if such a history could exist in the form of a book, it would enumerate all divine action through each and every believer over the course of all time. He calls this book, beautifully, the “gospel of the Holy Spirit.”
As it is, pages and pages are being written upon us as a living gospel, with the Spirit as the author:
“While [the Holy spirit] assists the church in the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, he writes his own gospel, and he writes it in the hearts of the faithful. All the actions, all the moments of the saints make up the gospel of the holy spirit.” (Page 27)
Returning to the initial thought in the this section then, God is not only acting in our lives, he is doing more than we can see, and much more than we can imagine. The Gospel of the Holy Spirit grows by pages every day, recording in our hearts the known and unknown divine perfections bestowed upon us or through us:
“ … for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13)
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