But my mouth would encourage you; comfort from my lips would bring you relief.
Job 16:5 (NIV)
Loneliness Met by Cathy Vinson |
As the Church's songwriter/prophet Micheal Card puts it, the true essence our Father desires from worship is "to be with Him." The following passage of AWTozer has been so helpful in bearing this out: "...We habitually stand in our 'now' and look back by faith to see the past filled with God. We look forward and see Him inhabiting our future; but our 'now' is uninhabited except for ourselves. Thus we are guilty of a kind of pro tem atheism which leaves us alone in the universe while, for the time, God is not. We talk of Him much and loudly, but we secretly think of Him as being absent, and we think of ourselves as inhabiting a parenthetical interval between the Lord who was and the God who will be. And we are lonely with an ancient and cosmic loneliness. We are each like a little child lost in a crowded market who has strayed from his mother, yet because she cannot be seen the child is inconsolable. So we try every method devised by religion to relieve our fears and heal our hidden sadness; but with all our efforts we remain unhappy still, with the settled despair of men alone in a vast and deserted universe.... "Wherever faith has been original, whenever is has proved itself to be real, it has invariably had upon itself the sense of the 'present God.' The Holy Scripture possess in marked degree this feeling of actual encounter with a real Person. The men and women of the Bible talked with God. They spoke to Him and heard Him speak in words they could understand. With Him they held person-to-person converse, and a sense of shining reality is upon their words and deeds." May we be encouraged that our loneliness uncovered is not desirable. Let us open up the shade again to the willing presence of the One who died for our fellowship. |
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| "We are lonely with an ancient and cosmic
loneliness." A. W. Tozer |
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Send a note to Cathy Vinson , the writer of this devotion.
Other Whispers from the Wilderness Devotions are found HERE
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