Violence: A Parable (Part 2)

A parable is a story that teaches a deeper truth by way of analogy. In this particular analogy, the yard is the city, the weed is violence, the grass is people and families, and the soil is the spiritual matrix those families and people grow in. Or don’t.

Now as with all parables, one cannot press the analogy too hard. The point is to illustrate the point.

So what’s my point? The spiritual soil many people in Chicago grow in is toxic. It’s poor at best and dead and barren at worst. This “soil” includes the way people relate to other people, the cumulative effect of both the sins committed against them and the consequences of the sins they commit, their emotional and social health, and especially the way they relate to God.

Violence comes from all kinds of people – rich and poor, white and minority, educated and uneducated. But it seems especially prevalent among the poor and minorities in blighted neighborhoods in the city. The soil these people grow in has been made toxic by everything from systemic disenfranchisement to generations of bad choices to corporate greed to exploitation by the record industry to open rebellion against God. It’s complex. Neither the liberals nor the conservatives have a corner on explaining the actual nature of the problem, which is often what happens when an issue becomes politicized and polarized.

But the problem at hand is that kids are dying, and all the awareness campaigns, candlelight vigils, prayer marches, gun legislation, prison sentences and educational initiatives have failed so far to make a lasting dent. Interestingly, this was not happening 40 or 50 years ago, even among the poor and disenfranchised. One would think people would ask themselves what has changed between then and now. Of course, people were killing each other back in the day. In fact, that has been happening since Cain killed Abel. But one did not see the devastated families and kids killing kids. I believe the increasing rejection of God is at the heart of this issue. Rejection by every level of society in Western culture. Humans have always been guilty of gross sin, and it always brings death, but the Western phenomenon of seeing God as quaint, even among professing Christians, surely causes us to forfeit His peace and order.

Nothing short of a spiritual revolution can change this problem. Even if the shooting stopped, the toxicity would simply manifest itself in another way. The bad soil has to be stripped away, rich, living soil has to be put down, and the grass needs to be able to grow healthy and strong. Families and people have to be healed. We must deal with the problem at its root. There is no solution that does not include the spiritual healing of families and people, and I just don’t see this happening unless the church rises up.

Something Good...

Pursuit of God Preface – A.W. Tozer

In this hour of all-but-universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct "interpretations" of truth. They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water.

This is the only real harbinger of revival which I have been able to detect anywhere on the religious horizon. It may be the cloud the size of a man's hand for which a few saints here and there have been looking. It can result in a resurrection of life for many souls and a recapture of that radiant wonder which should accompany faith in Christ, that wonder which has all but fled the Church of God in our day.

But this hunger must be recognized by our religious leaders. Current evangelicalism has (to change the figure) laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel. But God be thanked that there are a few who care. They are those who, while they love the altar and delight in the sacrifice, are yet unable to reconcile themselves to the continued absence of fire. They desire God above all. They are athirst to taste for themselves the "piercing sweetness" of the love of Christ about Whom all the holy prophets did write and the psalmists did sing.

There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.

I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real. Milton's terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to his: "The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed." It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving while actually seated at the Father's table. The truth of Wesley's words is established before our eyes: "Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this."

Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold "right opinions," probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.

Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.

This book is a modest attempt to aid God's hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.

A. W. Tozer
Chicago, Ill.
June 16, 1948