Thoughts from A.W. Tozer:
“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…The low view of God entertained almost universally is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us [like little prayer]…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 not producing the kind of Christians who can appreciate of experience the life in the Spirit. The words, “Be still, and know that I am God,” mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper.”
“We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that compose the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God… That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is or immense importance to us. Compared with out actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require and intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after and ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.”
“Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on His character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is-in itself a monstrous sin-and substitutes for the true god one made after its own likeness. Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges. A god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God.” “These things you have done and I kept silence; You thought that I was just like you; I will reprove you and state the case in order before your eyes” (Psalm 50:21).
Ezekiel 14:4 – “Therefore speak to them and tell them, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “Any man of the house of Israel who sets up his idols in his heart, puts right before his face the stumbling block of his iniquity, and then comes to the prophet, I the LORD will be brought to give him an answer in the matter in view of the multitude of his idols.”
Psalm 66:18 – “If I regard wickedness in my heart, The Lord will not hear.”
** The quotes above instruct us why there is so little prayer in our day and why we are in a period of a low degree of spirituality. A low view of God makes it is utterly impossible to pray to the one and true God. No matter what else we do, a low view of God makes true prayer impossible because we are actually praying to the god we have created in our own minds and hearts. As the concept one holds of God decreases, man’s view of himself will increase and our views that we have will not be of the true God. We always pray to the idea or concept we have of God and so our prayers can be nothing more than idolatry. This is why Proverbs 28:9 should shock us and drive us to our knees. “He who turns away his ear from listening to the law, Even his prayer is an abomination.”
Prayer is not a simple thing, but it is at the very essence and heart of true Christianity. It is not just asking God to do things for us; it is communion with God and seeking Him who is to be the chief and driving love of our whole being. In fact, all prayer does display the chief and driving love of our souls. If we are praying to an idol, it is an idol that we have produced in our own image. It is to pray to ourselves just as the Pharisee did (Luke 18:10-12). The words of our prayers may hide our own hearts from us as indeed the external holding to an orthodox creed can. If we have even a small flicker of a flame in our hearts with a desire for revival of the glory of God, we must seek humility and contrition before Him so that He may deliver us from the idols of our hearts. Without humility and true repentance of our idols we will never know that it means to truly pray. We must learn to cry out to God for a desire for His presence and for Him to give us a true reverence and awe before Him so we can truly pray.
God Loves... Himself 
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