Volume Five, Issue Ten
10/00
Dear All,
Just a reminder that our DITC ONLINE BOOKSTORE is now open for business. We hope to soon have a cart feature that will make picking up discernment materials far easier. For now you can visit our Books & Publications and Audio & Video pages to order books and tapes online from DITC.
FEATURE ARTICLE
I am attaching an article by A.W. Tozer called "The Unknown Saints" from Man: The Dwelling Place Of God, pg. 95-99. I want to thank those who hold the rights to Tozer articles for allowing me to post them on the web and send them out via this DITC e-Newsletter.
This article says so much about our modern era in terms of all the "cult of personality" issues we are dealing with today -- yet this article was written in the 1950s! It addresses the uselessness of celebrity in the kingdom of God, it is an encouragement to those who are faithfully serving the Lord, and it exposes those who put down Christians who are serious about their belief in Jesus Christ and His Word. In Tozer's day they were called "pessimists, misanthropes or joy-killers". Today you could substitute the words "Pharisees, heretic hunters, judgmental" instead of the above. Those of us who have been doing discernment ministries for awhile are quite used to being put down in this fashion for standing up for the truth.
I send this out and hope it will be an encouragement to those who are striving to obey God and are living faithful to God's Word. It is also sent out as a reminder to those who follow the throngs of celebrity "Christian leaders" out there that you are likely heading down a road of disappointment. Follow Christ!
In Christ,
Sandy Simpson, missionary
The Unknown Saints
by A.W. Tozer, Man: The Dwelling Place Of God, pg. 95-99
(c) 1966 Christian Publications
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH IN A FINE PASSAGE states his belief that there are many more poets in the world than we suppose,
"... men endowed with highest gifts,but who are unknown because they lacked or failed to cultivate the gift of versification.
The vision and the faculty divine,"
Then he sums up his belief in a sentence that suggests truth far beyond any that he had in mind at the time:
"Strongest mindsMost of us in our soberer moments would admit the soundness of this observation, but the hard fact is that for the average person it is not the findings of the sober moment that determine our total working philosophy; rather it is the shallow and deceptive notions pressed upon us by the "noisy world." Human society generally (and especially in the United States) has fallen into the error of assuming that greatness and fame are synonymous. Americans appear to take for granted that each generation provides a certain number of superior men and the democratic processes unerringly find those men and set them in a place of prominence. How wrong can people get!
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least."
We have but to become acquainted with, or even listen to, the big names of our times to discover how wretchedly inferior most of them are. Many appear to have arrived at their present eminence by pull, brass, nerve, gall and lucky accident. We turn away from them sick to our stomach and wonder for a discouraged moment if this is the best the human race can produce. But we gain our self-possession again by the simple expedient of recalling some of the plain men we know, who live unheralded and unsung, and who are made of stuff infinitely finer than the hoarse voiced braggarts who occupy too many of the highest offices in the land.
If we would see life steadily and see it whole we must make a stern effort to break away from the power of that false philosophy that equates greatness with fame. The two may be and often are oceans and continents apart.
If the church were a body wholly unaffected by the world we could toss the above problem over to the secular philosophers and go about our business; but the truth is that the church also suffers from this evil notion. Christians have fallen into the habit of accepting the noisiest and most notorious among them as the best and the greatest. They too have learned to equate popularity with excellence, and in open defiance of the Sermon on the Mount they have given their approval not to the meek but to the self-assertive; not to the mourner but to the self-assured; not to the pure in heart who see God but to the publicity hunter who seeks headlines.
If we might paraphrase Wordsworth we could make his lines run,
"Purest saintsand the words would be true, deeply, wonderfully true.
Are often those of whom the noisy church
Hears least,"
After more than thirty years of observing the religious scene I have been forced to conclude that saintliness and church leadership are not often synonymous. I have on many occasions preached to grateful Christians who had gone so much farther than I had into the sweet mysteries of God that I actually felt unworthy to tie their shoe laces. Yet they sat meekly listening while one inferior to them stood in the place of prominence and declared imperfectly truths with which they had long been familiar by intimate and beautiful experience. They must have known and felt how much of theory and how little of real heart knowledge there was in the sermon, but they said nothing and no doubt appreciated what little of good there was in the message.
Were the church a pure and Spirit-filled body, wholly led and directed by spiritual considerations, certainly the purest and the saintliest men and women would be the ones most appreciated and most honored; but the opposite is true. Godliness is no longer valued, except for the very old or the very dead. The saintly souls are forgotten in the whirl of religious activity. The noisy, the self-assertive, the entertaining are sought after and rewarded in every way, with gifts, crowds, offerings and publicity. The Christlike, the self-forgetting, the other-worldly are jostled aside to make room for the latest converted playboy who is usually not too well converted and still very much of a playboy.
The whole shortsighted philosophy that ignores eternal qualities and majors on trivialities is a form of unbelief. These Christians who embody such a philosophy are clamoring after present reward; they are too impatient to wait the Lord's time. They will not abide the day when Christ shall make known the secret of every man's heart and reward each one according to his deeds. The true saint sees farther than this; he cares little for passing values; he looks forward eagerly to the day when eternal things shall come into their own and godliness will be found to be all that matters.
Strange as it may be, the holiest souls who have ever lived have earned the reputation for being pessimistic. Their smiling indifference to the world's attractions and their steady resistance to its temptations have been misunderstood by shallow thinkers and attributed to an unsocial spirit and a lack of love for mankind. What the world failed to see was that these peculiar men and women were beholding a city invisible; they were walking day by day in the light of another and eternal kingdom. They were already tasting the powers of the world to come and enjoying afar the triumph of Christ and the glories of the new creation.
No, the unknown saints are not pessimists, nor are they misanthropes or joy-killers. They are by virtue of their godly faith the world's only true optimists. Their creed was stated simply by Julian of Norwich when she said, "But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Though sin is in the world, she argued, a frightful visitation to be reckoned with, yet so perfect is the atonement that the time will come when all evil shall be eradicated and everything restored again to its pristine beauty in Christ. Then "all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
The wise Christian will be content to wait for that day. In the meantime, he will serve his generation in the will of God. If he should be overlooked in the religious popularity contests he will give it but small attention. He knows whom he is trying to please and he is willing to let the world think what it will of him. He will not be around much longer anyway, and where he is going men will be known not by their Hooper rating but by the holiness of their character.