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Removing the Veil, part 7 of 10: The scribe and the prophet · The Pursuit of God Daily

• 0:00
  Host: Good morning. This is The Pursuit of God Daily for Monday, November second. We continue in chapter three of The Pursuit of God, Removing the Veil, where Tozer has been showing us the burning devotion of the hymn writer Frederick Faber, and today he draws the line between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen.
• 0:19
  Reader: Isaiah chapter six, verses one through three. In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.
• 0:49
  Reader: From A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, chapter three, Removing the Veil. I love Thee so, I know not how My transports to control; Thy love is like a burning fire Within my very soul.
• 1:02
  Reader: Faber’s blazing love extended also to the Holy Spirit. Not only in his theology did he acknowledge His deity and full equality with the Father and the Son, but he celebrated it constantly in his songs and in his prayers. He literally pressed his forehead to the ground in his eager fervid worship of the Third Person of the Godhead. In one of his great hymns to the Holy Spirit he sums up his burning devotion thus:
• 1:31
  Reader: O Spirit, beautiful and dread! My heart is fit to break With love of all Thy tenderness For us poor sinners’ sake.
• 1:39
  Reader: I have risked the tedium of quotation that I might show by pointed example what I have set out to say, viz., that God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is. Such worship as Faber knew (and he is but one of a great company which no man can number) can never come from a mere doctrinal knowledge of God.
• 2:10
  Reader: Hearts that are “fit to break” with love for the Godhead are those who have been in the Presence and have looked with opened eye upon the majesty of Deity. Men of the breaking hearts had a quality about them not known to or understood by common men. They habitually spoke with spiritual authority. They had been in the Presence of God and they reported what they saw there. They were prophets, not scribes, for the scribe tells us what he has read, and the prophet tells what he has seen.
• 2:41
  Reader: The distinction is not an imaginary one. Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they? The hard voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.
• 3:19
  Host: Tozer makes a hard distinction this morning, and it is worth sitting with: the scribe tells us what he has read, and the prophet tells what he has seen. He is not throwing out doctrine. Faber believed the doctrine of the Holy Spirit's full deity, and Tozer honors that. But Tozer is saying that right belief about God was never meant to be the end of the road. It is meant to bring us into His presence.
• 5:14
  Host: Lord, we confess that we are often content to know about You. Open the eyes of our hearts. By Your Spirit, pour Your love into us, and let us behold Your glory in the face of Jesus Christ, until we are changed and can speak of what we have seen. In His name, amen.
• 5:31
  Host: The whole earth is full of His glory. Go with God.