The Dangers of a Shallow Faith: Awakening from Spiritual Lethargy

by A.W. Tozer

Work is not a result of the Fall, but sin did bring sorrow, thorns, thistles and sweat. Those four words did not occur in the first and second chapters of Genesis. There was no “sorrow,” “thorns,” “thistle” and “sweat.” But the word “work” or its equivalent occurred: “Dress” and “keep” and “subdue” and “care” were used in Genesis 1 and 2.

Work is not a result of man’s sin; working in sorrow is a result of man’s sin.

A wise Christian realizes that he is not to be extreme on anything, but he is to know the time and the season.

It is possible that we are so busy in our secular work or even in the Lord’s work that we have no time to pray—no time to wait on God, or get still and knit up the raveled sleeve of care, or orient our souls toward God in heaven. When that happens, there is danger.

You will find that God looked for His men in the silence. Men who cannot be silent will not say anything when they talk. It is only out of the silence that the Word speaks.

secular business can ruin men, unless they take time to cultivate God.

Excessive religious work can do the same, unless we take time to cultivate God.

If you are too busy in the Lord’s work to spend time in the Lord’s presence, you are too busy in the Lord’s work.

is a solemn thought that the history of humanity and of nations and of churches shows that we trust in God, as a rule, when there is nothing else in which to trust.

We tend to trust in God when we have nothing else in which to trust.

This pitiful condition of the rich Church in the latter days—increased with goods and beautiful buildings, yet with the Savior standing outside trying to get in.

“Be honest, holy, hardworking, frugal, saving, get all you can, then give it all away, and that way you’ll never backslide. Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can.”

Prosperity is dangerous for a Christian.

It is God’s will that His people should prosper but know what to do with prosperity.

1. Thank God reverently.

2. Share it generously.

3. Walk circumspectly.

“The cares of this life” means that the poorer a man is, the fewer cares he has; and the more he gets, the more cares he has. If he allows his heart to be overcharged, overwhelmed with these earthly things, the day of Christ shall come upon him unawares.

“If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small” (Prov. 24:10).

we need help from the lions of prosperity and adversity. The fat lion is prosperity, and the scrawny, hungry lion is adversity; they are both lions, and they are both sources of danger.

Get Thoroughly Detached from Earthly Possessions

Break the Grip of the World’s Philosophies

If you will get free from the world’s philosophies and dare to be a Christian, standing on your own feet, thanking God for what you have and being an independent Christian, neither one of them will harm you.

If God gave you possessions, thank God for them. But break with the grip of the world’s philosophies and make God everything. If God is everything to you, you can have anything else and it will not hurt you. If God is little or nothing to you, anything will hurt you.

He justifies before the Father those who believe in Him, and He also delivers from sin those who repent of their sins and believe in Him.

you have not done anything about truth until you have acted on it.

you read a book of daily devotions predigested for you by somebody else, and that is your Bible for the day.

If there is ever a time when we need to be honest, it is when we are alone in the presence of God.

if you want to drink deep of the fountains of God, you are going to have to spend some time in prayer, and you cannot put that off until tomorrow or the next day or the next day; you’re going to have to start now.

Nothing keeps us away from work, but almost anything will keep us away from prayer meeting for the simple reason that we are looking for a dodge, a place to hide.

At the judgment seat of Christ, we are all going to have to tell Him why we postponed what we knew we should be doing.

If you want to be holy—if you want to serve God—you have to give time to God. Grace and holiness take time, and the cultivation of the Spirit takes time. Do you want to be holy? Do you want a deep faith? Then you have to give God time, and not just intend to.

we carefully watch lest we fall into the snare of propagandism—the battle for our minds.

conditioning the mind creates a slave who doesn’t know it. We are constantly being fed harmful ideas that we adopt and learn to believe in, thinking they are all right, and so we ignorantly follow. This is done without our knowing that a keen, sharp, unscrupulous mind is seeking to control us.

The greatest war is still being waged today by every effective technique created to get us to stop thinking for ourselves. It is being waged by the media, in all its various forms, from hard news reporting to “entertainment.” If you could suddenly stand off objectively and look at your mind and see how much the media has fed into it and how you have come to be more or less a creature influenced by the media, you would be shocked and spend days in fasting and prayer to get free from it.

Whoever controls this media is controlling the ideas and the thinking of the American people today.

One of the most successful techniques ever devised by the mind of man for the control of mass thinking is advertising. Advertisers are the best educators in the world, and by expensive and carefully thought-out means, they are busy controlling our thinking.

The strategy is to control our conduct by disseminating ideas and to gain acceptance for the counsel of the ungodly. The Bible talks about the counsel of the ungodly and pronounces a blessing upon the man who walks not in it.

Whatever originates in organized society, with thoughts from fallen minds and fallen hearts, is godless.

It is from this Book, interpreted by the Holy Spirit, that I gain the right ideas about love and marriage and life and money and pleasures and values, and God and my relation to God, and the future life and my status in that life.

The warfare is between the counsel of the ungodly and the counsel of God. Which shall control your mind? You are a pawn and a puppet caught in between, and if you are not awakened to it, you will learn the ways of Babylon and Egypt.

The devil is too much of a strategist to treat us like that. He is busy brainwashing us and conditioning us, little by little, and feeding his ideas into the Church. As the ideas of the ungodly enter the Church, the counsel of God goes out. My crusade is to wake the Church from its spiritual lethargy, rousing it to the fact that it is being brainwashed and propagandized into accepting that which it would never accept if it were a law in Washington.

The only way to help the world is to stay free from its brainwashing. The man who has adopted its ways can never help it.

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.

better to have a strong testimony in the right direction, even if it goes too far, than to have all this weak compromise that is cursing us today.

The only slavery I recommend is the sweet slavery of Jesus’ yoke, which is easy, and His burden is light (see Matt. 11:30). The yoke of Jesus is a love yoke—the yoke that binds us to the essence and center and sum of all that is desirable and loving and wonderful and good. When you put His yoke upon you, the yoke of the world will drop away.

I have given you something to consider. It makes no difference who won that baseball game; it makes no difference whether he sunk that putt or not. Think on something eternal. Think about something that matters. Give a little time to something that matters.

Because we feed Christians with an eyedropper, we have weaklings instead of great souls and great saints.

To overcome the dangers facing a spiritually lethargic church is to discover true spiritual power. The power does not rest in outward form but rather in the dynamic of God’s Word.

He received the revelation directly from God.