Marking Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year

Ses s i on 3: Keep i ng the Rhy thm of the Sp i r i t 77

1. The Church Year covers literally from the promise of God of a seed who would crush the serpents head in Genesis 3.15, to the coming of the risen and glorified Christ spoken of in Revelation 19.

2. The Church Year is designed to remember and participate in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ in real time: The Church Year ensures that the key events of the life and ministry of Christ are remembered, reflected upon, celebrated, and integrated in our spiritual journeys each year!

3. An obsession with trying to make each teaching, worship service, and emphasis unique can lead to a misuse of Scripture, i.e., torn from its historical context.

a. The “mad search for relevance and freshness” can result in the very worship of novelty itself, and the race for one new, hip fad after another.

b. Empty and unbiblical ritual can be produced just as easily with praise songs as with old hymns.

c. Failure to view Scripture as history can produce an ego-centric orientation of the use of Scripture with a failure to see the value of the ancient Scripture, faith, Creed, and spirituality.

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Nothing is new that matters and nothing that matters can be modernized. One way to evaluate anything in the world around us is to check for possible modernization. If it can be modernized you may safely put it far down in the scale of human values. Only the unchanged and the unchanging should be accounted worthy of lasting consideration by beings made in the image of God.

~ A. W. Tozer. Born after Midnight . Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, Inc. 1959. pp. 88-92.