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News | Nate Talks: Out of Africa

15 May 2009

By Nathan Morgan Locke, Christianity Explored's youth evangelist

I’ll never forget the first time I saw the African moon. As I journeyed from the dusty airport, that faithful orb shone with a brightness not its own. This aged continent was to be my temporary home. This air, which carried the languages of a thousand tribes, would be my breath and this moon would watch me through the night. . .

I should point out that I had arrived in Africa to spend one week in an all-inclusive hotel in Tunisia’s most celebrated zone touristique. The familiar Mediterranean would lap the nearby shore; each drink, snack and meal were paid for and every barman, waiter and concierge spoke English to a more than competent level.

Anyway, I was still able to enjoy something of a cultural first, since I had never stayed in an ‘all-inclusive’ hotel before. I’m not sure what I was expecting but this place seemed to be something of a Tunisian Butlins; each morning’s sunbathing broken by the calls to play volleyball, crazy golf and something called ‘Wasser Gymnastique’, and the evening cabaret shows made the average nativity play look over-rehearsed.

Declining almost every invitation to take part in the planned activities, I chose to spend the week reading. The particular writings, with which I would silently fill my mind, were to be those of Aiden Wilson Tozer, an American minister who lived in the first half of the twentieth century.

AW Tozer seems to me to have been a peculiarly frustrated man. A man who held firmly to the evangelical doctrines as found in the Scriptures, but one who had most to say to those who held those doctrines as their own. Tozer’s main complaint seemed to be that evangelical Christians were generally happy to let the truths of the Bible sit in their brains and pour from their mouths but baulk that they should ever trickle into their hearts or (heaven forbid!) be seen in their lives. Tozer served to rebuke me for coldness and dead orthodoxy.

He took issue with those who took the gospel of grace as a licence for laziness; with those who protested that Christian discipline was dangerously close to legalism; with those who claimed that since Christ had done everything on the cross and that they would be made perfect in heaven, could now indulge in worldly pursuits without a thought for their spiritual wellbeing. Tozer was really frustrated with the standards of holiness in the evangelical church of his day. And it seemed to me, at least, that not much has changed.

One particular phrase from Philippians stuck in my mind:

“I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”
Phil 2:12b

These verses are discussed in the Discipleship Explored course and as such are fairly familiar to me, but the problem is that so many of us are content to sit back in the Christian life, to measure our Christian living against those around us and to feel satisfied with pathetic levels of personal holiness and a lacklustre experience of God.

We must remember that (as Mark’s gospel records in chapter 15, verse 38) at the death of Jesus the temple curtain was torn in two, the No Entry sign was removed, the lights changed from red to green. We have the freedom to draw close to Almighty God, to be filled with his Spirit and adopted as his children. Hallelujah!

And yet after accepting these things as true, we are content crawl along at a snail’s pace in the Christian life, repeating our doctrines to one another, busying ourselves with questions of culture and developing strategies for mission so that others can come to know God when we barely know Him ourselves.

The curtain has been torn, the way is open, the Christian resort is all-inclusive because the price has been paid. By the blood of Christ we have access to the throne room of Heaven, to the Creator of all things, to the power of the Holy Spirit. We are free to actually have a transforming relationship with Almighty God.

So what are we waiting for?

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