Ouch.
I hate how reading a small statement can cause conviction and pain to one’s soul.
In this case, I was scanning a statement by Leonard Ravenhill who made this passing comment that stopped me in my tracks …
I believe I could line the altar, indeed I’ve seen the altar lined with hundreds, night after night in mass meetings, and yet I believe, at the end of the day, Jesus Christ could say to me, “Thou gavest Me no kiss.” Why? Because I was so busy serving Him, I forgot to worship Him. The priority that God wants in our life is that we worship Him in spirit.
Ouch.
One of the things I’ve had to guard myself against in the last twenty years of ministry is being so busy doing things for God that I don’t spend time with Him.
What about you?
When was the last time you just got away and enjoyed Jesus?
No schedule. No agenda. No clocks.
Just you and Him.
As A.W. Tozer is well-known for saying …
I have often wished that there were some way to bring modern Christians into a deeper spiritual life painlessly by short easy lessons, but such wishes are vain. No shortcut exists! God has not bowed to our nervous haste nor embraced the methods of our machine age. It is well that we accept the hard truth now: the man who would know God must give time to Him! He must count no time wasted, which is spent in the cultivation of His acquaintance. He must give himself to meditation and prayer hours on end. So did the saints of old, the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the prophets and the believing members of the holy Church in all generations. And so must we if we would follow in their train! … May not the inadequacy of much of our spiritual experience be traced back to our habit of skipping through the corridors of the Kingdom like little children through the marketplace, chattering about everything but pausing to learn the true value of nothing? (1)
May I encourage you to exchange busyness for relationship? Again, if you want to know God, you must give time to Him.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Aiden Wilson Tozer, God’s Pursuit of Man (formerly titled: Divine Conquest) (Camp Hill, PA: WingSpread, 2007), 5.
Photo Credit: Jenny Hill (Unsplash)
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