The Dangers of a Shallow Faith: Awakening from Spiritual Lethargy

by A.W. Tozer

Somebody is going to control your mind. Who is it going to be? Is it going to be the advertiser? Is it going to be the public school? Is it going to be the media? Or is it going to be God? You have to make up your mind on that, my friend.

The warfare is between the counsel of the ungodly and the counsel of God.

The Christian receives another mind. It is the redeemed mind, a re-created mind committed to Christ. You say, “Is not that another kind of slavery?” Yes. It is the slavery of love. It is the slavery of worship. It is the slavery of extreme joy. It is the slavery of the highest ecstasy.

The right kind of slavary

But there is the freedom. Love never feels slavery, and love never knows bondage. That obedience to Jesus Christ, which Paul called slavery, is not the slavery that imposes itself from the outside by laws, nor by the introduction of alien ideas into the mind.

You must be sober and prayerfully beware the world’s propagandas. Do not sell yourself, and do not allow yourself to be slowly reasoned into wrong by the counsel of the ungodly. Better to be a radical on the right side than weak on the wrong side. Better go too far than not far enough.

When the world says, “Oh, you’re narrow,” you say, “Maybe I am narrow, but the way is narrow, and the path to heaven isn’t as broad as a 16-lane highway. You know why I am too narrow? I’m walking with my God.”

I wish I could get the adult males in this country to give as much consideration to their own souls as they give to the standings of their particular sports teams.

If you blame it on your parents and the way you were treated at home, I have no sympathy or message for you.

Moody Publishers brought out, under the editorship of Wilbur Smith, what they call the Wycliffe Series.

God patiently waits, and sometimes it seems endlessly; and then one day God says, “I accept that”; that is His response. He is saying, in effect, “They have heard the gospel and they have finally made their choice. They have settled it. They do not know it, but they have said, ‘Not tonight, not now, I’ve got too many things to do.’ ” God says, “That’s his response, and it’s settled.” There is nothing anybody can do after that.

The great deception of victorious Christian living