"We Must have True Faith" -- By A. W. Tozer

I checked out the book The Price of Neglect by A. W. Tozer from the library at church yesterday, and read the following selection. It was very revealing and convicting, and, as you probably already guessed, I just had to share it with you! :) Please read it!

"To many Christians Christ is little more than an iea, or at best an ideal;
He is not a fact. Millions of professed believers talk as if He were real
and act as if He were not. And always our actual position is to be
discovered by the way we act, not by the way we talk.

"We can prove our faith by our committal to it, and in no other way.
Any belief that does not command the one who has it is not a real belief; it is a
pseudo-belief only. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were
brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the
fires of practical living.

"Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging out
lives so as to admit the truth of Chirstianity without being embarrassed by its
implications. We fix things so that we can get on well enough without
divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it. We boast in the
Lord but watch carefully that we never get caught depending on Him. " 'The
heart is deceiful above all things/ and beyond cure./ Who can understand it'
(Jeremiah 17:9)?

"Pseudo-faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God fails
it. Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped
of any second ways or makeshift substitutes. For true faith, it is either
God or total collapse. And not since Adam first stood up on the earth has
God failed a single man or woman who trusted Him.

"The man of pseudo-faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly
to allow himself to get into a predictament where his future must depend upon
that creed being true. He always provides himself with secondary ways of
escape so he will have a way out if the roof cares in.

"What we need very badly these days is a company of Christians who
are prepared to trust God as completely now as they know they must do at the
last day. For each of us the time is surely coming when we shall have
nothing but God. Health and wealth and friends and hiding places will all
be swept away and we shall have only God. To the man of pseudo-faith that
is a terrifying thought, but to real faith it is one of the most comforting
thoughts the heart can entertain.

"It would be a tragedy indeed to come to the place wehre we have no other
but God and find that we had not been trusting God at all during the days of our
earthly sojourn. It would be better to invite God now to remove
every false trust, to disengage our hearts from all secret hiding places and to
bring us out into the open where we can discover for ourselves whether or not we
really trust Him. That is a harsh cure for our troubles, but it is a sure
one. Gentler cures may be too weak to do the work. And time is
running out on us."

(from pages 12-14 of The Price of Neglect by
A. W. Tozer)