WWTT? What Would Tozer Think?

“Christianity is so entangled with the world that millions never guess how radically they have missed the New Testament pattern. Compromise is everywhere. The world is whitewashed just enough to pass inspection by blind men posing as believers” (A.W. Tozer in The Divine Conquest).

Every time I think of the above quote, I feel concerned. And when I consider the fact that Tozer wrote those words in 1950 (!), I feel even more concerned, because the Church was far less worldly in 1950 than it is today.

WWTT? What Would Tozer Think? What would he think if he could see the compromise and corruption and moral filth and rot that festers in many American churches today? More importantly, WDYT? What Does Yeshua Think? What does Yeshua think of the worldliness that has spread and continues to spread among so many people who claim to follow Him?

If you are a Sabbath-keeping Messianic, do not make the mistake of thinking that worldliness exists only in Sunday churches. I have seen worldliness among Messianic believers too. The Devil uses this fallen world system to pressure all believers, including Sabbath keepers, to conform to the world. That pressure must be steadfastly and continually re-sisted, because the pressure never stops.

For as long as we live in these mortal bodies, we will be pressured by the world to conform to the world. We are like fish swimming upstream. As long as we keep moving forward in the right direction, toward the Lord and against the flow of this world’s stream, we will be okay. But if we quit resisting the flow, we will be carried downstream and away from the Lord’s blessings. Any dead fish can float downstream. It takes a determined, faith-filled fish to swim upstream.

“Be not conformed to this world,” Paul wrote, and then he told us the alternative to world conformity: “but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:2).

The way to resist the world’s pressure to conform is to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The transformation has to start inside, not outside. We are not transformed by the external changes we make. As Messianic disciples, we do undergo some significant external changes. We start following the Biblical calendar. We keep the Sabbath and appointed times of the LORD. We follow the Biblical dietary laws. We dress modestly and in conformity to Biblical standards of dress and appearance. All these external changes are very important and not to be minimized, but these external changes do not transform us inwardly and renew our minds.

Renewing the mind involves changing the way we think - the way we think about God, about the world around us, about other people, about ourselves. In a word, it is learning (slowly and gradually, by degrees) to think the way God thinks. It involves getting our mind in agreement with the Word of God and in tune with the Spirit of God, so that we will see things the way God sees things.

Our minds get renewed by a process similar to the process that people utilized to renew old leather wineskins in Biblical times. Dried-up, brittle wineskins were renewed by first soaking them in water and then rubbing them with oil. This is a wonderful picture of how our minds get renewed. When we first come to the Lord, our mind is rigid and opinionated, like an old dried-up wineskin. If the Lord were to pour in the new wine of the revelation of His thoughts and ways into such a mind, it would burst. New wine must be poured into renewed wineskins. Just as wineskins were soaked in water, we soak our minds in “the washing of water by the word” (Eph. 5:26). We immerse our mind in the Scriptures. We saturate our mind with Scripture to begin getting our thinking in agreement with the Word of God. And just as wineskins were rubbed with oil, we ask the Lord to rub in the anointing of the oil of His Spirit as we spend time with Him in prayer, to begin getting our mind in tune with the Spirit of God.

Through Scripture and prayer our mind is renewed. Our mind becomes pliable and flexible, and can conform to the shape of whatever revelations the Lord wants to pour in like new wine. Instead of conforming to the world, we are transformed to become the person God intends us to become.

These two things - immersing your mind in the Scriptures and spending time alone in prayer to get the anointing - these are the two things that will transform you by the renewing of your mind. These are the two things that will bring your mind into agreement with the Word of God and in tune with the Spirit of God. It’s not rocket science. It’s not hard to figure out, but it has a high cost: your time. I opened this article with a quote from Tozer. Now let me close with another Tozer quote from 1950 from the same book:

“God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. The man who would know God must give time to Him.”

| DB