Quote of the Day (2)

Walking home in the rain this morning, I passed a sun-faded, comprehensively rusted-out, seedpod-covered sports car.

The fact that I can’t even hazard a guess as to its make and model is probably a dead giveaway as to how little I’ve ever thought of a vehicle as anything more than a means of getting from Point A to Point B. Nobody but a starry-eyed auto buff with a serious mechanical bent would tolerate this thing in his garage, even for spare parts. It didn’t look salvageable to me.

And yet at one point it was somebody’s dream. Not mine, but if I haven’t fantasized about cars and can’t relate to theirs, I’ve certainly had plenty of dreams of my own.

Looking at it, I thought, “Man, that’s gotta be a metaphor for SOMETHING”.

No metaphor required. In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer says this:

“Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.

Our Lord referred to this tyranny of things when He said to His disciples,

‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.’ ”

Paul said the present form of the world of his day was passing away. Those who buy, he said, should live as though they had no goods. Those who deal with this world should do so as though they had no dealings with it.

If it was passing away then, what shall we say about today? “Monstrous substitution” indeed.