The Bible says God is a God of deliverances. Many times this wonderful article by A. W. Tozer has delivered me from unwitting entanglement in fear, guilt, compulsion, and more. Positively, it faithfully calls me back to the one true place of rest: the presence of our loving Heavenly Father.

May it be a blessing to you.

God Is Easy To Live With

By A. W. Tozer

Satan’s first attack upon the human race was his sly effort to destroy Eve’s confidence in the kindness of God. Unfortunately for her and for us, he succeeded all too well. From that day on, men have had a false conception of God, and it is exactly this that has cut out from under them the ground of righteousness, and driven them to reckless and destructive living.

Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God. Certain sects, such as the Pharisees, while they held that God was stern and austere, managed to maintain a fairly high level of external morality; but their righteousness was only outward. Inwardly they were “white sepulchres,” as our Lord Himself told them. Their wrong conception of God resulted in a wrong idea of worship. To a Pharisee, the service of God was a bondage that he did not love but from which he could not escape without a loss too great to bear. The God of the Pharisee was not an easy God to live with, so his religion became grim and hard and loveless. It had to be so, for our notion of God must always determine the quality of our religion.

Much Christianity since the days of Christ’s flesh has also been grim and severe. And the cause has been the same – an unworthy or an inadequate view of God. Instinctively we try to be like our God, and if He is conceived to be stern and exacting, so will we ourselves be.

From a failure to properly understand God comes a world of unhappiness among good Christians even today. The Christian life is thought to be a glum, unrelieved cross-carrying under the eye of a stern Father who expects much and excuses nothing. He is austere, peevish, highly temperamental, and extremely hard to please. The kind of life which springs out of such libelous notions must of necessity be but a parody on the true life in Christ.

It is most important to our spiritual welfare that we hold in our minds always a right conception of God. If we think of Him as cold and exacting, we shall find it impossible to love Him, and our lives will be ridden with servile fear. If, again, we hold Him to be kind and understanding our whole inner life will mirror that idea.

He Is All Love

The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings, and His service is one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love. He is just, indeed, and He will not condone sin; but through the blood of the everlasting covenant He is able to act toward us exactly as if we had never sinned. Toward the trusting sons of men His mercy will always triumph over justice.

Fellowship with God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive or selfish or temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of newly created worlds.

Unfortunately, many Christians cannot get free from their perverted notions of God, and these notions poison their hearts and destroy their inward freedom. These friends serve God grimly, as the elder brother did, doing what is right without enthusiasm and without joy, and seem altogether unable to understand the buoyant, spirited celebration when the prodigal comes home. Their idea of God rules out the possibility of His being happy in His people, and they attribute the singing and shouting to sheer fanaticism. Unhappy souls, these, doomed to go heavily on their melancholy way, grimly determined to do right if the heavens fall, and to be in the winning side in the day of judgment.

He Remembers Our Frame

How good it would be if we could learn that God is easy to live with. He remembers our frame and knows that we are dust. He may sometimes chasten us, it is true, but even this He does with a smile: the proud, tender smile of a Father who is bursting with pleasure over an imperfect but promising son or daughter who is coming every day to look more and more like the One whose child he is.

Some of us are religiously jumpy and self-conscious because we know that God sees our every thought and is acquainted with all our ways. We need not be. God is the sum of all patience and the essence of kindly good will. We please Him most, not by frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms with all our imperfections, and believing that He understands everything and loves us still.

A. W. Tozer was a man known for his personal intimacy with God and for inspiring in others that same intimacy. He authored over a dozen books, and is probably best known for The Pursuit Of God and Knowledge Of The Holy. Born in Pennsylvania in 1897, he became a pastor at the age of 22. Tozer pastored a Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Chicago for 31 years, and later served a congregation in Toronto, Canada, where he died in 1963.

Then Elkanah her husband said to her,

“Hannah, why do you weep, why aren’t you eating, and why is your heart sad?

Am I not better to you than ten sons?”

1 Samuel 1:8

Hannah really, really wanted babies. She was a woman, she lived in a culture that exalted motherhood, and she had an adversary who tormented her with gloating and scorn, for her adversary had many babies, whereas Hannah had none.

Elkanah, Hannah’s loving husband, sought to comfort her with the words found in the text above. But, like Rachel of old, she refused to be comforted.

Perhaps she should have been. For as close as motherhood is to the heart woman, closer still is wife-hood. For a woman, no relationship, apart from the one with God, should take higher priority. And as a rule, no relationship does. This is how things are, and this how they ought to be.

In all this, I hear a message to the Church. All Christians, and Christian leaders in particular, would love to see babies born into the Kingdom. The Church is the Mother of the Living, so she always yearns to see her children coming into the world.

But in the providence of God, she does not always see what she longs for. There are obstacles, delays, missteps. And sometimes there are impure motives as well. Sometimes we see souls and megachurches as little planets, orbiting around our own egos and ambitions. In such cases, purification and patience will be required as the the Spirit of Holiness works his way in the circumstances of life.

At such times we must ever keep before us the good words of Elkanah— but we must hear our Heavenly Husband speaking them:

“Am I not better than ten sons? Am I not better than hundreds of decisions? Am I not better than a dozen satellite campuses? If not, there is a problem. If not, we must work together on our marriage. For when I am better than ten sons in your sight, then our love will bear much fruit, and so you will prove to be my disciples.”