With four girls, it is rarely quiet in my house, but I must take the time to get alone with God. I’ve been re-reading Tozer’s, The Knowledge of the Holy, and he has been nailing me. He said, “With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christians who can appreciate or experience the life of the Spirit. The words, ‘Be still, and know that I am God,’ mean net to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper in this middle period of the twentieth century.”
As I read those powerful words I was thinking, ‘Tozer wrote that 1961—what would he say about our worship today?’ I’m sitting in my house on a relatively quiet day—two of the girls spent the night with a friend and only one has a friend over today. The radio is playing upstairs, KJ is yelling and trying to get the neighbors horse to come to the fence, Kim and Hannah are in the kitchen making lunch, the washing machine and dryer are running, and the microwave just cut off, and yet God is here.
I don’t have to go looking for Him. I don’t have to go to the Temple—I am the Temple and He dwells in me! It’s not easy to be quiet in the midst of noise. It’s not easy to be still in the midst of chaos. It’s not easy to tune out the world, but I must. I must learn to listen to the voice that spoke the world into being. I must withdraw and worship Him. Tozer said, “The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men.” I hope you’ll join me today in worshiping Him.

The more I travel, the more I see the contrasts of life, and yet I see that things are the same. I’ve stood in corn fields provided by the World Hunger Fund and watched men and women who may starve before they get to harvest the crop. I’ve stood across the fence from refugee camps and watched children play in the dirt at the door of their tent home and realized that they have absolutely no hope on this earth. I’ve watched nurses and doctors give as much
medicine as they could give to hurting people knowing that it was like putting a band-aide on an open wound. I’ve stood at the end of Kenya and known that across the border was just more of the same.
It’s heartbreaking and reality shaking. But things are really not that different here. Our pantries are full of
food, but men and women are spiritually starving. Our children play video games sitting in million dollar homes, but they are just as hopeless. We have more access to medicines and surgeries, but they just can’t hide the fact that we are dying and even though the color of our skin and the languages of our tongues are different, we are just the same.

I read the following quote from George MacLeod, “I simply argue that the cross should be raised at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the Church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town’s garbage heap; at a
crossroads so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek…at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died, and that is what He died for, and that is what He died about…that is where churchmen ought to be and what churchmen ought to be about.”

I want to urge you to raise the cross as you travel throughout your Jerusalem, your Judea, your Samaria, and your ends of the earth. No one can reach your neighbor like you can reach your neighbor. No one can reach your co-worker like you can reach your coworker. No one can reach your family like you can reach your family. The only hope for the Kenyan family in the refugee camp is the only hope for the family in your neighborhood. The only hope is Jesus—let’s share that hope today!

In Christ,

John