The Dangerous Illusion Of A Comfortable Christian | A.W. Tozer

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[00:00:00]There is something deeply wrong in the house of God tonight. Not wrong in the way that makes headlines. Not wrong in the way that draws committees and press conferences and denominational investigations.

[00:00:12]But wrong in the quiet, suffocating way that a man can be dying from the inside while his skin still looks healthy, while his eyes still catch the light, while his lips still move in the familiar cadences of prayer. Something is wrong in Christrysendom, and the wrongness is not loud. It is comfortable. It is cushioned. It is airond conditioned. We have built magnificent cathedrals to a god we no longer tremble before. We have installed multi-million dollar sound systems so that we may hear with perfect acoustic clarity words that we have no intention of obeying. We have padded our pews so that the body sits in perfect ease while the soul atrophies in the dark. We have hired professionals to manufacture an atmosphere of worship complete with fog machines and theatrical lighting. And we have called this thing, this production, this performance, this carefully orchestrated emotional event. We have called it the presence of God and heaven weeps. We have mistaken peace with the world for peace with God. We have confused the silence of a seared conscience with the stillness of a surrendered heart. We have taken the most violent, demanding, costly invitation ever extended to a human being. If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. And we have repackaged it, rebranded it, softened its edges, and sweetened its terms until it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the thing Christ said. This sermon will not make you comfortable. It was not designed to. If you have come here looking for encouragement that requires nothing of you, you have come to the wrong altar. But if somewhere beneath the layers of religious routine and spiritual mediocrity, there is still a pulse, still a faint, desperate hunger for something real, something holy, something that burns, then stay. Stay.

[00:02:08]Because what God has to say to this generation is urgent, and it is not gentle. Before we go any further, I want to ask you to do something simple. Leave a like on this video and drop your city and country in the comments below. Let us see where the hungry ones are. Let us see how far the thirst for truth has spread. And if you are waking up to the terrifying reality that comfortable religion is destroying your soul. If you sense that you need not another inspirational message but a definitive tactical strategy for building a disciplined and powerful prayer life, then look in the pinned comment below for the war room manual. It is a guide built for those who are done with spiritual comfort zones and ready to master the secret place. Now let us still our hearts. Let us prepare for the word of the living God. I want to speak to you today about a danger more subtle than heresy, more devastating than persecution, and more widespread than any theological error that has ever crept into the church of Jesus Christ. I want to speak to you about the dangerous illusion of the comfortable Christian. I want to talk about the man and the woman who sits in the pew, who carries the Bible, who knows the language of Zion, who sings the songs and recites the creeds and writes the tithe check, and who is by the solemn and fearful verdict of the eternal son of God himself, wretched and miserable, and poor and blind and naked. There is no sadder figure in all of scripture than the church of Leodysia.

[00:03:48]Not because she was openly wicked, not because she had abandoned the name of Christ or embraced some brazen and obvious apostasy. The tragedy of Leodysia is not the tragedy of the prodigal son in the far country, surrounded by swine and broken by deborttery.

[00:04:06]No, the tragedy of Leodysia is far more subtle and far more terrifying because Leodysia did not know she was in trouble. Leodysia was satisfied.

[00:04:17]Leodysia was comfortable. Leodysia had looked at herself in the mirror of her own opinion and declared herself adequate, sufficient, in need of nothing.

[00:04:28]because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing.

[00:04:36]Those words recorded in the third chapter of the revelation of Jesus Christ ought to make every comfortable Christian in the 21st century tremble to the marrow of his bones. Because those words describe not the atheist, not the open enemy of the cross, not the man who laughs at scripture and mocks the name of Jesus. Those words describe a church, a congregation that gathered, that worshiped, that presumably prayed and sang and preached. And yet the risen Christ standing in the midst of his own church surveying what he found there with eyes like a flame of fire rendered this verdict. Thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.

[00:05:24]In the gap between what Leodysia thought of herself and what Christ thought of her is one of the most arresting theological realities in all of the New Testament. She said, "I am rich." He said, "You are poor." She said, "I have need of nothing." He said, "You are naked."

[00:05:46]There is a blindness here that is not the blindness of the man who has never seen the light. This is the blindness of the man who has looked at the noonday sun and convinced himself it is midnight. This is a blindness that is born not of ignorance, but of selfdeception.

[00:06:02]And it is the most dangerous kind of blindness a human soul can experience.

[00:06:08]Because the man who knows he cannot see will reach for a hand to guide him. But the man who believes he sees perfectly will walk with great confidence straight off the edge of a cliff. Now what was Leodysa's fundamental error? What was the root beneath the surface of this terrible spiritual selfdeception?

[00:06:28]I believe and I say this with the full weight of scriptural conviction behind me that Leodysia's error was this. She had allowed the material and the external to become the measure of the spiritual and the internal. She was by the standards of the ancient world a prosperous city. Leodysia was wealthy.

[00:06:50]She was a center of banking, of textile production, of medicine. She was known for her black wool and for an isalve that was exported across the Roman world. And somewhere along the way that external prosperity had seeped into the consciousness of the church until the church began to measure her spiritual condition by her material condition. She was wealthy in the world. Therefore, she must be wealthy before God. She was comfortable in the culture. Therefore, she must be acceptable to Christ. She needed nothing from Rome or Athens or the great commercial centers of the empire. Therefore, she surely needed nothing from heaven. And I want to say to you with all the force I can muster that this precise error has not only survived the centuries, it has flourished. It has grown fat and sleek and self- congratulatory in the air conditioned sanctuaries of the modern western church. We have made the same calculation Leodysia made. We look at our buildings and we measure our congregation size and we count our ministry programs and we tally our budget figures and from all of this external quantifiable measurable data.

[00:08:08]We draw the conclusion that God is pleased with us. We have substituted the thermometer of heaven for the thermometer of human religious success.

[00:08:18]And we cannot understand why. For all our activity and all our programming and all our institutional momentum, there is no fire. There is no awe. There is no holy trembling in the presence of a holy God. There is no weeping over sin. There is no desperate agonizing cry from the depths of genuine repentance. We have filled the house with noise and called it worship. We have filled the calendar with events and called it ministry. We have filled the seats with bodies and called it revival. But the Christ who walks in the midst of the candlesticks is not deceived by our numbers. He is not impressed by our production values.

[00:09:00]And there is nothing in all of our institutional sophistication that can manufacture for one single moment the thing that we have lost. the immediate holy consuming terrifying and beautiful presence of the living God.

[00:09:18]I want to press deeper into the message to Leodysia because there is a detail here that the casual reader is in danger of passing over. Christ says to this church, I know thy works that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou w cold or hot. So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. Now understand what is being said here. The metaphor is drawn from the geographical and physical reality of Leodysia itself.

[00:09:52]The city was situated between Hierapoulos, which was known for its hot springs, waters that emerged from the earth at scalding volcanic temperatures and were valued for their healing properties, and Colos, which was known for its cold, refreshing mountain springs, pure and invigorating and life-giving in a different way.

[00:10:14]Leodysier itself had no springs. The water that reached Leodysia came through an aqueduct and by the time it arrived it was neither hot nor cold. It was tepid. It was lukewarm. And in the ancient world lukewarm water was not merely disappointing. It was nauseating.

[00:10:34]It was the water that made you sick. It was the water that caused you to wretch.

[00:10:40]And Christ says that is what you are.

[00:10:44]You are not the hot water that heals and cleanses with its burning intensity. You are not the cold water that refreshes and restores and brings life to the parched and dying. You are the water that makes me nous. You are the Christianity that has lost its capacity to shock, to heal, to challenge, to transform. and you have replaced it with a tepid, palatable, inoffensive religiosity that goes down easily enough and does precisely nothing. The lukewarm Christian is not the man who has rejected Christianity. He is the man who has reduced it. He has taken the consuming fire of the gospel of Jesus Christ. A gospel that demanded of the apostles their blood that turned the world upside down. that caused the Roman Empire to tremble. And he has turned down the flame until it is just warm enough to sit beside without discomfort.

[00:11:42]He has made of the religion of the cross a religion of convenience. He has made of the holy demands of God a set of lifestyle suggestions. He has taken the Lord's prayer and turned it into a liturggical exercise. He has taken the Lord's supper and turned it into a religious ritual. He has taken the call to deny himself, to take up his cross, to lose his life. And he has turned it into an occasional motivational experience. And this is the great spiritual crisis of our time. Not the crisis of atheism, not the crisis of secularism. The great crisis is the leodysian crisis. the crisis of men and women who have enough Christianity to inoculate them against the real thing, who carry enough religious vocabulary to silence the voice of conscience, who know just enough of God to feel comfortable in his presence without ever having truly encountered him. They have never stood as Isaiah stood before the vision of the seraraphim and the smoke and the shaking threshold and the voice like the sound of thunder and cried out, "Woe is me, for I am undone because I am a man of unclean lips." They have never been thrown on their faces as Saul of Tarsus was thrown on the Damascus road, blinded by a light that broke his world in two and remade him from the inside out. They have never wrestled through the night as Jacob wrestled and refused to let go until the blessing came. And the blessing came at the cost of a broken hip and a new name and a limp that they carried for the rest of their lives. The comfortable Christian does not want a blessing that costs him a limp. Now I must speak about the cross.

[00:13:32]I must speak about the most central, most defining, most costly and most magnificent reality in the entire history of the human race. And I must speak about the way in which the modern church has managed to strip from that reality everything that makes it what it is until what remains is not the cross of Christ at all, but a religious decoration, a piece of jewelry, a corporate logo, an architectural ornament. And he called to him the multitude with his disciples and said to them, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." This is the 8th chapter of Mark, the 34th verse. And I want you to feel the full force of that invitation because the way we have softened and domesticated it, we have rendered it essentially meaningless. We have made it sentimental when it is intended to be surgical. We have made it inspirational when it is intended to be confrontational. We have made it a poster when it is intended to be a verdict. In the world in which Jesus spoke those words, every person who heard him knew exactly what a cross was.

[00:14:48]A cross was not a symbol. A cross was not an emblem. A cross was not the thing you wore around your neck to indicate your religious affiliation. In first century Judea and Galilee and the broader Roman world, a cross was an instrument of execution. It was the most brutal, most public, most shameful form of death that Roman ingenuity had devised. And crucifixion was not merely a method of killing. It was a statement.

[00:15:18]When a man was condemned to crucifixion, he was forced to carry the instrument of his own death through the public streets. Everyone who watched him pass knew that this man was not coming back.

[00:15:31]He had been sentenced. He had been marked. He was, for all intents and purposes, already dead. He was a man walking toward his own grave, carrying the means of his execution on his broken shoulders.

[00:15:47]That is the image Christ chose. That is the metaphor.

[00:15:51]Except it is not a metaphor. It is a requirement that Jesus placed at the very entrance to disciplehip. Not after you have grown in faith. Not as an advanced spiritual discipline for the particularly committed at the entrance at the very door. If any man will come after me, this is not an invitation to a select group of advanced disciples. This is the condition of entry. Let him deny himself and take up his cross.

[00:16:22]And what does it mean to deny oneself?

[00:16:25]It is the most radical and countercultural demand ever issued because the entire edifice of human civilization is built upon self assertion, self-interest, self-promotion, self-preservation. From the first moment of consciousness, every human being is engaged in the project of self. We want what we want. We protect what we have. We pursue what we desire.

[00:16:51]We avoid what causes us pain. And Christ walks into the middle of all of this deeply embedded, utterly pervasive self-orientation and says, "Deny it.

[00:17:03]Repudiate it. Say no to the self. Not once, not occasionally, not in the moments when it is relatively painless to do so, but as a foundational posture of existence, as the orientation from which every subsequent choice flows, this is not the message of the modern church. The modern church has not denied the self. It has baptized the self. It has taken the self with all of its appetites and ambitions and preferences and demands and it has put a Christian veneer over the surface of it and called it blessed. We have convinced ourselves that God is interested in our fulfillment, our happiness, our personal development, our sense of well-being.

[00:17:47]And there is a thin strand of truth in this that makes the lie all the more dangerous. Yes, God is interested in our ultimate flourishing. Yes, the end of the gospel is joy unspeakable and full of glory. But the road to that joy passes through the denial of self and the taking up of the cross. And any gospel that skips from the promise of joy to the reality of joy without passing through the death of self-interest is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a gospel of another kind.

[00:18:21]And Paul did not mince words about what we ought to do with gospels of another kind. The cross, when it was real, was violent. It was bloody. It was not decorative. The cross was the place where ambition died. The cross was the place where reputation was destroyed.

[00:18:40]The cross was the place where comfort was utterly annihilated, where the body was racked with a pain so comprehensive and so relentless that death when it finally came was mercy. I am not suggesting that every follower of Christ is called to literal physical crucifixion, though history records that many have been. What I am saying is that the spiritual reality to which physical crucifixion points, the death of the old man, the end of the life lived for self, the total and unconditional surrender of every ambition and comfort and preference to the sovereign will of a holy God. That is not optional. That is not a spiritual elective course for those who happen to be drawn toward a more intense form of the faith. That is the threshold. That is the entrance.

[00:19:33]That is what Jesus said. And yet, we have replaced the cross with a couch. We have built our churches around the comfort of the congregation. We have tailored our services to the tastes of the consumer. We have asked not what does God require, but what does the audience prefer? And when the audience prefers entertainment, we have provided entertainment. When the audience prefers short messages that affirm their existing beliefs without challenging their existing behavior, we have provided short affirming messages. When the audience prefers music that produces emotional experiences without demanding spiritual transformation, we have given them that too. We have made of the house of God a house of pleasant experiences and we have confused the pleasant experience with the presence of God. and in doing so we have committed the most grievous pastoral malpractice in the history of the church. I want to speak about this at length because I believe it is one of the defining sins of this generation of Christianity and I do not use the word sin lightly. The desire to be amused in the house of God is not merely a preference. It is a symptom of a profound spiritual disorder. It reveals that the man who comes to church looking primarily to be entertained does not fundamentally understand why he is there. He has come consciously or unconsciously not to encounter the holy God but to have an experience that suits him. He has come as a consumer not as a worshipper. He has come as an audience not as a penitant. And a church that arranges its ministry around the preferences of the consumer rather than the requirements of the holy has ceased to be a church in any meaningful theological sense. It has become a religious entertainment venue and there is a world of difference between those two things. Let me say something that may disturb you and I say it with pastoral love and prophetic conviction in equal measure. God does not share his glory with the theater. The Holy Spirit of God who is holy and consuming and utterly beyond manipulation will not permanently inhabit a place where his presence is treated as a production element where his movements are scheduled and his manifestations are engineered and his convicting power is carefully managed to ensure that no one in the congregation becomes too uncomfortable. The Holy Spirit is not a feeling that can be manufactured by the right combination of lighting and bass frequencies and skillfully crafted lyrical repetition. He is a person. He is the third person of the eternal trinity. He is the breath of God, the fire of God, the wind of God. And wind, I remind you, blows where it wills. You do not control the wind. You do not program the wind. You cannot schedule the wind for the third segment of your Sunday morning service and then move on to the announcements when the designated time is up. There is a kind of cheap emotionalism that masquerades as the presence of the Holy Spirit and it is one of the most dangerous counterfeits in the history of the church because it is experiential.

[00:23:03]It feels like something. It produces tears and energy and a sense of elevation and a warmth in the chest. And none of these things in themselves are the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit does sometimes produce tears, but so does a well-crafted film. The Holy Spirit does sometimes produce energy, but so does a crowd. The test is not whether an experience produces emotion, but whether it produces transformation. The test is not whether the congregation felt something on Sunday morning, but whether they are more holy, more obedient, more broken before God, more committed to the cross on Monday morning. And by that test, the only test that ultimately matters, much of what passes for spiritfilled worship in the modern church is revealed to be not the presence of God, but the shadow of it.

[00:24:00]Not the fire, but the flickering of an artificial flame. And the consequence of this substitution is catastrophic. When a generation of Christians is raised on manufactured religious emotion rather than genuine encounter with the living God, they develop a spiritual immune system that becomes resistant to the real thing. They know the language of revival without having any idea what revival actually feels like. They know the songs about the Holy Spirit without ever having fallen on their faces in genuine conviction of sin. They know the theology of the cross without ever having bled on it. And when someone comes along who actually has been in the presence of God, who has been broken and remade, who carries in their voice and in their eyes the gravity of a man who has stood before the holy, they do not recognize it because they have been inoculated against it by years of spiritual approximation. I think about Isaiah again. The sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah is one of the most extraordinary passages in all of scripture and I want to inhabit it for a moment because I believe it holds the key to everything I am trying to say.

[00:25:16]Isaiah was not a pagan. Isaiah was not an outsider. Isaiah was a man of God, a prophet, a man who had presumably spent his life in devotion to the God of Israel. And yet, when Isaiah actually saw the Lord, when the veil was briefly, terrifyingly, mercifully pulled back, and Isaiah was given a glimpse of the reality that undergurs all other realities, his immediate, instinctive, overwhelming response was not excitement. It was not joy. It was not the warm, comfortable glow of a man who has confirmed what he already believed.

[00:25:53]It was devastation. Woe is me for I am undone. The word translated undone carries the sense of being destroyed, being silenced, being brought to the end of oneself.

[00:26:08]Isaiah had not expected to survive this encounter. He expected to die. That is what genuine encounter with the holiness of God produces in a human being. It produces what the Puritans called a broken and contrite heart. It produces what the mystics called the dark night of the soul. Not a spiritual depression, but a comprehensive stripping away of every false foundation, every self- constructed righteousness, every comfortable assumption about one's standing before God. And it is only when a man has been thus undone. Only when he has been brought to the end of his own resources, his own righteousness, his own spiritual adequacy, that he is fit to receive the coal from the altar. It is only the undone man who can say with genuine meaning, "Here am I, send me."

[00:27:00]The comfortable Christian has never been undone. He has never been silenced by the holiness of God. He has never trembled, genuinely trembled, not with manufactured religious feeling, but with the shaking of a soul that has brushed against the edge of the eternal and found itself desperately inadequate. And because he has never been undone, he has never been remade. He carries the form of religion but lacks the power of it.

[00:27:27]He has the vocabulary of transformation without the reality of it. He is, to use Christ's devastating phrase, like a whited sephila, beautiful on the outside and full of dead men's bones within. I want to speak now about the wilderness because I believe with my whole heart that before there can be a fresh fire in the church, before there can be genuine revival, before there can be any recovery of the power and purity of New Testament Christianity, there must be a willingness to go into the wilderness.

[00:28:01]And by the wilderness, I mean not a geographical location, but a spiritual posture, a willingness to be stripped of the comforts and stimulations and distractions that have kept us from facing the truth about ourselves and about our standing before God.

[00:28:19]Every great movement of God in the history of redemption has been preceded by a season in the wilderness.

[00:28:26]Moses spent 40 years in the desert of Midian before the burning bush.

[00:28:31]Elijah was sent to the wilderness of Horeb before the still small voice John the Baptist came out of the desert before the voice that shook the Jordan.

[00:28:42]Paul went into Arabia before he appeared in Jerusalem. And Jesus himself, the eternal son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, full of the Spirit without measure, was led by that same Spirit into the wilderness immediately after his baptism. And there he was tested and refined and prepared for the ministry that would end at Calvary. The wilderness is not a punishment. The wilderness is a mercy. The wilderness is the place where God strips away everything that is not essential, everything that is not real, everything that is not him until what remains is a soul that has been refined down to its core. A soul that has learned in the terrible and beautiful school of deprivation that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. The church does not want to go to the wilderness. The church wants the comfort and the warmth and the stimulation of the city. We want the crowd and the energy and the music and the lights and the approval of our peers and the sense of momentum that comes from belonging to a successful growing well-resourced institution. We want the benefits of the kingdom without the disciplines of the cross. We want the promise without the prerequisite. And we have spent decades building elaborate theological systems designed to justify this preference.

[00:30:10]systems that tell us that grace removes all demands. That love requires nothing.

[00:30:15]That the God who said, "Be ye holy, for I am holy," has reconsidered and is actually quite comfortable with our current level of spiritual commitment.

[00:30:25]These systems are lies. They are comfortable lies and they are widely believed lies, but they are lies nonetheless. The grace of God is not the removal of God's standards. It is the provision for meeting them. The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Grace teaches. Grace demands. Grace does not abolish the requirements of holiness.

[00:31:00]Grace enables them, empowers them, makes them possible for creatures who by their own strength could never attain them.

[00:31:06]But the grace that asks nothing, requires nothing, costs nothing, and changes nothing is not the grace of scripture. It is a cheap imitation that has been sold to a generation that wanted religion without repentance and salvation without surrender. I want to take you back to Leodysa one final time because I believe there is something in Christ's response to the Leodysian church that gives me hope even in the midst of everything I have said. Notice what Christ says to this church that has nauseiated him. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and repent. The severity of Christ's words to Leodysia is itself an expression of love. He has not yet given up on her. He has not yet removed the candlestick as he threatened the church at Ephesus. He has not yet given her over to the consequences of her lukewarmness. He is still speaking. He is still rebuking. And then he says the most remarkable thing. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come into him and will suck with him and he with me. Now I know this verse is almost universally used as an evangelistic text, as an invitation to the unconverted to receive Christ. And there is a sense in which that application is valid. But let us not miss the primary context. This is not Christ standing at the door of the unconverted heart. This is Christ standing at the door of his own church. This is the son of God standing outside the institution that bears his name, knocking at the door of a congregation that has become so occupied with its own comfort, so satisfied with its own adequacy, so busy with its own religious machinery that it has, practically speaking shut him out.

[00:33:07]He is not inside directing the service.

[00:33:10]He is outside asking to be let in, and he is knocking still. He is knocking on the door of every church that has traded the holy for the theatrical. He is knocking on the door of every minister who has traded the prophetic word for the pragmatic word. He is knocking on the door of every Christian who has traded the altar for the armchair, the secret place for the social media feed, the wrestling prayer for the comfortable devotional. He's standing outside all of our religious busyiness and all of our institutional success and all of our carefully manufactured religious experience. And he is knocking. And his voice is still the same voice that said, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden." Not, "Come unto me all ye who are satisfied and comfortable and in need of nothing, but all ye that labor and are heavy laden." Are you heavy laden today? Not with ministry burdens and church commitments and the obligations of religious life, but with the weight of your own spiritual emptiness. The weight of knowing that for all your religious activity, you have not been in the actual presence of God for longer than you can remember.

[00:34:24]The weight of the growing suspicion that something is deeply, fundamentally wrong and that no amount of church attendance or Bible reading or ministry involvement has been able to fix it. That weight is not your enemy. That weight is the mercy of God. That heaviness is the Lord himself pressing in upon the comfortable soul, refusing to let it stay in its selfdeception, knocking and calling and saying, "I know thy works. I see what you have built and what you have become.

[00:34:55]And I love you enough to tell you the truth. You are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. And I am the only one who can give you gold tried in fire and white raignment. And I salve for your blindness, gold tried in fire, white raignment, I salve. These are not the gifts of comfortable Christianity.

[00:35:17]These are the gifts of a God who takes a man into the wilderness and strips him bare before he clothe him again. These are the gifts that come not through the path of ease and entertainment and self-fululfillment, but through the narrow gate and the difficult road that lead to life. the road that remarkably few are finding because the broad road is so much more comfortable and so much more heavily trafficked and the signage pointing to it is so professional and so welldesigned and so accommodating of the human preference for comfort. I'm calling you today. I'm urging you with every fiber of prophetic and pastoral urgency that I possess to leave the broad road, to stop measuring your spiritual condition by the external markers of religious success, to take seriously with fear and trembling the possibility that the risen Christ's verdict on your Christianity might be different from your own. to stop accepting the cheap substitute of manufactured emotional experience in the place of genuine encounter with the holy God. To stop filling the silence with noise. Stop filling the emptiness with activity. And to do the one thing that comfortable Christianity most consistently refuses to do, to be still and to know. Go into your secret place.

[00:36:40]Not with a list of requests. Not with a devotional reading plan and a journal and a 45inut slot in your schedule between the gym and breakfast. Go into your secret place as a desperate man. As a man who has finally understood that he is wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked and that all of his religious activity has not changed this fundamental reality.

[00:37:07]Go in as the publican went in, unable to look up, beating his breast, saying, "God, be merciful to me a sinner who go in prepared to stay there until something happens, until the God who is a consuming fire begins to consume, until the false is burned away from the true, until the self that has been sitting comfortably in the seat of your spiritual life is finally fully voluntarily."

[00:37:35]And this is the miracle of grace that the surrender is voluntary.

[00:37:40]Finally surrendered.

[00:37:43]I am not promising you that this will be comfortable. The fire of God is not comfortable. The holiness of God when it meets the unholiness of man does not produce a pleasant warmth. It produces crisis. It produces the weeping that Jonathan Edwards described when the people under his preaching held onto the pillars of the church because the ground seemed to be giving way beneath them because they had had a genuine glimpse of the holiness of God and the corresponding horror of their own sin.

[00:38:16]It produces what David described in the 51st Psalm, the broken and contrite heart, the acknowledgment that against God and God alone he had sinned. the desperate plea not for comfort but for a clean heart, for a right spirit, for the restoration of the joy of salvation that he had lost in his comfortable complacency. But on the other side of this crisis, and there is another side, and it is glorious. On the other side of the burning is the promise that Isaiah received after he was undone. The coal from the altar, the cleansing, the commissioning, the fearless proclamation of a man who has been to the fire and come back, not destroyed but purified.

[00:39:02]The white-hot confidence of a man who has stood in the holy presence and been remade, who no longer needs the approval of the comfortable because he has received the approval of the eternal.

[00:39:14]who no longer fears the scorn of the world because he has already lost everything worth losing at the altar of God and gained in its place something that the world can neither give nor take away. This is what the church needs. Not better programming, not more effective strategies, not larger buildings or more sophisticated technology or more culturally relevant messaging. The church needs men and women who have been to the fire. Who have stopped performing Christianity and started inhabiting it.

[00:39:49]Who have stopped managing their relationship with God and started being broken by it. Who have taken up genuinely and costly taken up the cross that comfortable Christianity has laid down. Who have understood that the crown cannot come without the cross. that resurrection is only possible because of death, that the glory of Easter morning is inseparable from the agony of Good Friday, and that any gospel that offers the one without the other is no gospel at all. I close with this. There is a door standing open before you today, not the door of a more comfortable religious experience, but the door of reality. the door of genuine encounter with the holy God. The door that Christ himself stands before and knocks upon. It is a narrow door. It will cost you your comfort. It will cost you your reputation. Perhaps it will certainly cost you your self-sufficiency and your spiritual self- congratulation. It will cost you the pleasant illusion that you are rich and increased with goods and in need of nothing. But on the other side of that door is what your soul has been starving for. What no amount of religious entertainment has been able to provide.

[00:41:08]What the padded pew and the perfect sound system and the air conditioned sanctuary have never been able to give you. The immediate holy terrifying life transforming presence of the living God.

[00:41:21]Open the door. Fall on your face. Repent of the comfortable and do not get up until you have met the