Another Tozer quote which I made me think!!
“[Divine Presence] is a gift of God, indeed, but one which must be recognised and cultivated as any other gift … Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chaopter, have our short devotrions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.”
This really got me: We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. Particularly it is easy to treat prayer mechanically - put the prayer in the top, get the answer out the bottom. If the answer doesn’t come then the ‘input’ must have been ‘wrong’ and needs to be adjusted [or the God-machine is broken!]. This is the problem with talk about ‘how prayers get answered’ - it misses the fact that prayer is about relationship with the person that is God.
Are there other ways we think of God as a machine?
