As A. W. Tozer says in The Pursuit of God, "The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common.
"We now demand glamor and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God.
"We read our chapter, have our short devotions, and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.
"The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hallow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externailities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit:
"These and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul...we have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear satisfied.
"These and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul...we have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear satisfied.
"...Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed."