The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His Presence. The instant cure of most of our religious ills would be to enter the Presence in spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that we are in God and that God is in us. This would lift us out of our pitiful narrowness and cause our hearts to be enlarged. This would burn away the impurities from our lives as the bugs and fungi were burned away by the fire that dwelt in the bush. A. W. Tozer

Dear Fellowship of the Burning Heart:

We are taught in seminary and are reinforced in our study of the Bible and Christian theology to believe, not only in the omnipresence of God – that He is everywhere all the time, but that His special presence is in His people – we who believe and in whom His Spirit dwells (Romans 8:9). This is a blessed truth in Scripture but only an intellectual exercise for many. It MUST become a burning reality in the life of every true believer. The acquisition of this aspiration alone would transform our dull services and listless lives into spiritual powerhouses.

The God who walked with the first couple and communed with them in the Garden in the cool of the evening has become a stranger to us. The same one who instructed Noah in ark-building, met with Abraham under the trees at Mamre, who wrestled with Jacob all night at Peniel, who spoke to Moses from the burning bush and on the smoke-filled mountain, who met with Joshua before he faced Jericho as Commander of the Lord’s army, who encouraged Gideon before he faced the forces of Midean and filled Samson with powerful strength, who filled King Saul so that he prophesied as one of the prophets, who filled King David’s heart with sweet music, who revealed Himself to and through Elijah and Elisha, who opened heaven and allowed Isaiah a glimpse of His glory (need I offer more examples, because I can) is no longer expected to make contact with His people.

The sad reality is that we expect only to affirm the existence of God intellectually and to accept the gospel intellectually. We seem to be content with this level of spirituality and seek only to bolster it with information, facts, and study. Our religious experience is cerebral, and we glory in the fact. There may be those emotional believers who only want a religious high, a religious fix, to make it through another problem, difficulty, disaster, or challenge (or to escape them), but we are better than that. We hold to a rational faith. We want to be moved, but we want our experience to be grounded in a reasonable faith. Now, I am not arguing that this is completely bad. Of course, we need a faith that intellectually satisfying. But to stop there is to limit the depth of that faith.

I plan to explore this topic in greater detail in upcoming posts, but at this point I am wondering……….

Is anyone out there, besides me, longing for more – needing, wanting, and expecting to connect with God on a deeper level?