The Frontier
Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people.
A.W. Tozer ~ The Pursuit of God
Spiritual growth, by Tozer’s definition, requires desire. The desire to know God. The desire to be truly alive.
The complacent heart is passive because it seeks nothing; it desires nothing. The longing heart moves out in search of its satisfaction and welcomes the exploration of new frontiers.
Christ is found in those wild frontiers.
This quote, attributed to Howard Macey, sums it up beautifully:
The spiritual life cannot be made suburban. It is always frontier and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed.
The frontier — specifically, embracing the frontier and venturing into it — plays a crucial role in our coming alive to Christ and seeing real freedom from our addictive pattern with lust and porn. The frontier can be literal or figurative.
Usually, it’s both.
The first time i went rock climbing, the whole experience was about venturing into a new frontier. And it was so good for me. The reality of a physical frontier forced me to grow, and opened the door for me to go boldly into other frontiers in terms of relational growth and personal healing.
In other words, Christ was manifest out on the frontier of my life.
We lose something vital when we chose complacency, or when we avoid the frontier — which happens more and more in our sophisticated, semi-urban existences.
Aside from the fact that complacency will never accomplish the freedom we desperately seek with regard to porn and lust, complacency cannot satisfy the deep desires of our hearts.
The untamed frontier offers something very rich for the hungry soul. And men trapped in porn and lust are hungry souls indeed.
The insatiability we have all experienced going from one porn video to the next; one magazine to the next; and one lustful fantasy to the next, shows us that our hunger is too great for anything in this world to satisfy.
Our souls will only be sated by God Himself, the One who calls us forth into an untamed frontier where Christ will manifest Himself.
The frontiers to which God calls us are as varied as are the individuals He has created in His Image. Tozer understood that pressing into those frontiers is where growth happens because in that active exploration the soul of man comes alive.
We rejoice in the wilderness of the spiritual life because it is there — finally — that the world is not bite-sized, shrink-wrapped, microwaveable, predictable and ruled by the overly cautious voices that leave us thinking: “Is this really all there is?”
We need a life that is big enough to dream in. Complacency steals our dreams.
We need a life that is big enough for adventure and storytelling. Complacency nullifies all stories.
The frontier is calling. God is calling.
When we find Him there, we will rejoice that the spiritual life is untamed, for it will be out on that frontier that we experience the abundant life that dwarfs anything and everything porn and lust ever falsely promised they would be to us.
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