Prodigal: The heavens that God created are amazing!
Me: I will agree with that!
This is from the book How to Be Filled with the Holy Spirit by A.W. Tozer
There is another kind of evidence. It is the immediate evidence of the inner life. That is the evidence by which you know you are alive. If I were to prove that you weren’t alive, you would chuckle and go home just as alive as you are now and not be a bit worried about it, because you have the instant, unmediated evidence of internal life.
Jesus Christ wanted to take religion out of the external and make it internal and put it on the same level as life itself, so that a man knows he knows God the same as he knows he is himself and not somebody else. He knows he knows God the same as he knows he is alive and not dead. Only the Holy Ghost can do that. The Holy Spirit came to carry the evidence of Christianity from the books of apologetics into the human heart, and that is exactly what He does.
You can take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathen in Borneo, or Africa, people who could never conceive the first premise of your logical arguments,so that it would be totally impossible for them to decided on logical grounds whether Christianity was of God or not. Preach Christ to them and they will believe and be transformed and put away their wickedness and change from evil to righteousness and get happy about it all, learn to read and write and study their Bibles and become leaders and pillars in their own church, transformed and made over. How? By the instant witness of the Holy Ghost to their hearts. This is the new thing that came, sir! God took religion from the realm of the external and make it internal.
Our trouble is that we are trying to confirm the truth of Christianity by an appeal to external evidence. We are saying, “Well look at this fellow. He can throw a baseball farther than anybody else and he is a Christian, therefore Christianity must be true.”
“Here is a great statesman who believes the Bible. Therefore, the Bible must be true.”
We quote Daniel Webster or Roger Bacon. We write books to show that some scientist believed in Christianity: therefore, Christianity must be true.
We are all the way out on the wrong track, brother! That is not New Testament Christianity at all. That is a pitiful, whimpering, drooling appeal to the flesh. That never was the testimony of the New Testament, never the way God did things–never!
And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.
11 Kings 2:11
Jennifer Van Allen
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
