And a little more Tozer!

Lost in today’s religious world is the radical antithesis between the redeemed and the unregenerate. “Coming to church” has become the test of faith, rather than joyful belief in and submission to the pure, unadulterated message of the Gospel. But “coming to church” is a duty attended to by all the world’s religions, and no more makes one a Christian than a visit to a clinic makes one a medical doctor.

Christianity is first and last a relationship with a real, living Person—Jesus Christ, a relationship possible only when one has been regenerated, brought from a state of spiritual death to life. It is not wrapped up in the confession of a concept, the reciting of a creed, the joining of a church, or warm religious feelings. Jesus Christ is the Living God—which means He actually exists as a real person, a thinking, choosing, volitional, emotional Being. He exists wholly independently from creation, from people, from human consciousness. He was before all things, and by Him all things exist.

Any religious sensibility that names Jesus and confesses to love and admire Him yet falls short of a genuine redemptive relationship with Him as a real, living Person is in no way Christian. Tozer’s comments on this sort of “Christianity”—which is essentially unchanged by an encounter with Christ and feels equally comfortable with the world and the Church—are helpful.

It is no more than a religious platitude to say that the trouble with us today is that we have tried to bridge the gulf between two opposites, the world and the Church, and have performed an illicit marriage for which there is no biblical authority. Actually no real union between the world and the Church is possible. When the Church joins up with the world it is the true Church no longer but only a pitiful hybrid thing, an object of smiling contempt to the world and an abomination to the Lord.

The twilight in which many (or should we say most?) believers walk today is not caused by any vagueness on the part of the Bible. Nothing could be clearer than the pronouncements of the Scriptures on the Christian’s relation to the world. The confusion which gathers around this matter results from the unwillingness of professing Christians to take the Word of the Lord seriously. 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, and those same believers are everlastingly seeking to gain acceptance with the world. By mutual concessions men who call themselves Christians manage to get on with men who have for the things of God nothing but quiet contempt.

This whole thing is spiritual in its essence. A Christian is what he is not by ecclesiastical manipulation but by the new birth. He is a Christian because of a Spirit which dwells in him. Only that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. The flesh can never be converted into spirit, no matter how many church dignitaries work on it. Confirmation, baptism, holy communion, confession of faith—none of these nor all of them together can turn flesh into spirit nor make a son of Adam a son of God [Tozer, ThePursuit of Man, pp 115-7].