I have been reading through A.W. Tozer's book The Knowledge of the Holy (Amazon.com link) for the past few weeks, and felt like sharing a few choice quotes from Tozer.

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man's spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.

….

It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity.

All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.

The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which at the most cannot concern him for very long…

….

Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, "What is God like?" and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.

- A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, Chapter 1, "Why We Must Think Rightly About God"

I have a bunch more quotes from Tozer that I will probably post over the next week or two, and I may add some comment to those, but Chapter 1 pretty much stands on its own. The only thing I have to add is that I'm really glad that I've been taught to pray the following over and over and over again:

Ephesians 1:17-19
…that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, 18 the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power…

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Here is an excellent article providing background to the current situation in Turkey and the importance of the elections this weekend.

Old versus the new as Turkey finds its way - In Depth - theage.com.au

The economic miracle across Anatolia, Turkey's heartland, has happened so fast that sons of peasants who could not read are sending their children overseas to study. Dr Ibrahim Kalin, of Ankara's SETA think tank, says that is changing Turkey.

'Kids coming out of these small places … are going to New York or London to be educated. When they come back, Istanbul and Ankara suddenly look small, and they think, 'How can you claim to be the elite?' They don't have an inferiority complex any more.'

Only five years old, the AKP is part of this phenomenon, says Kalin: a party to represent a new class. It provokes derision in the best Istanbul cafes. Yes, Erdogan is charismatic, but he's common. Look at how he eats, with one hand. As for Gul, he made a traditional Muslim marriage to a 15-year-old girl, 15 years his junior! On the surface the talk is about religion, but really it is about class and expresses a division that goes back to the birth of the nation.

Ataturk set Turkey on what his biographer Andrew Mango calls "a forced march to modernity". Every reform — from abolishing religious courts and polygamy to introducing Latin script and giving women the vote — was done in the name of Westernisation and against what he saw as the backwardness of Islam.

Yet although Ataturk created Turkish democracy, he was not at heart a democrat. His revolution was a project of the secular elites, who turned their faces to Europe, producing an existential desire to belong to the West that has never gone away. Meanwhile, they turned their backs on the illiterate Muslims of Anatolia. But one day the "black Turks", as the elites call them, would knock on the door.

....

It is true it made changes as part of its bid to get into the EU. Critics who say there is a hidden Islamist agenda accuse the AKP of practising takiye, a concept that allows the faithful to lie to promote Islam. Erdogan proposed making adultery illegal then backed down. Some AKP mayors have banned alcohol and introduced segregated sporting facilities. But is there really a secret plan to introduce sharia?

Baskin Oran is a hero of the Turkish left, a Marxist politics professor who is running as an independent candidate on a human rights agenda. If anyone should fear the rise of a reactionary Islam it is him.

Oran is dismayed that the AKP has not moved to prevent the rising number of prosecutions of people for the crime of "insulting Turkishness" — the case of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk being the most famous example. Yet he thinks the idea the AKP "is Islamist is baloney". Rather, it represents emerging capitalists, whose attraction to the profit motive will force their faith ever further into private life. Money, Erdogan has proclaimed, "has no religion".

A few other articles on the same topic:

Bitter election fight polarizes Turkey
Q&A: Your questions on Turkey election


I'm sure that there is no one who is going to talk publicly about the issue that I care about for Turkey: Freedom of religion for the few thousand Turks who have turned away from Islam to follow Jesus Christ. But there is One who has a plan for Turkey which transcends politics, class struggles, religion, military strategy, and social stress. And for Him, those few thousand souls are at the very center of the agenda.

Daniel 2:20b-21

“ Blessed be the name of God forever and ever,
For wisdom and might are His.
21 And He changes the times and the seasons;
He removes kings and raises up kings;
He gives wisdom to the wise
And knowledge to those who have understanding."


Your kingdom come, Your will be done, in Turkey as it is in heaven!

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There are two big things to pray for Turkey about right now:

1. A significant election is coming up this week, but it's anything but clear what outcome would be best for the Turkish church. From what I've read, the ruling AKP party, even though they are professedly Islamist, may actually be the most balanced and centrist party. In Turkey, as in much of Central Asia, freedom of religion towards Islam also often means freedom of religion towards the Church.


2. Relations with the US over the PKK and northern Iraq are getting increasingly tense. It's easier to know how to pray for this one. As far as human understanding goes, war with the US would be a disaster for the Turkish church. Most Turks already assume that missionaries work for the CIA (as laughable as this claim appears to us). Ironically, if the CIA is indeed arming the PKK using another short-sighted "the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend" strategy (like the one that got us our wonderful friend Osama bin Laden...), that's probably one of the most harmful things that the US could do to foreign believers in Turkey.

However, when I came across this article, it provided a very enlightening view of what daily life is really like in Turkey:

TheStar.com - News - Anarchy on the Bosporus? Punk rock lyrics draw Turkey's ire: "The troubles besetting Deli as the five-man group heads to trial Thursday are typical of the extremes endured by a country historically torn between cultures – Islam and secularism, Europe and Asia, democracy and military dictatorship, and a reverence for institutions of state that often collides with civil liberties."

...

"There's been little public discussion about the wisdom of prosecuting the punk band. Turkish prosecutors routinely file defamation complaints, creating a glut of cases, some of which never go to trial."

How do you maintain the respect and public decorum demanded by a proud, Islamic, nationalist, and largely conservative society which is also trying to be European and modern? File lots of lawsuits, apparently...

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I'm now live on my new URL. Please update bookmarks, etc, though I think Blogger will continue to forward requests to storkbryght.blogspot.com to www.todayandthatday.com.

Props to EveryDNS.net for providing straightforward access to DNS records so you can easily create the 1 record you need to redirect a blog from your URL to Blogger/Google.

And, although 1and1.com has quite reasonable pricing for domain names (I got this name for $7/year I think), I highly recommend NOT trying to use their DNS servers – the way they create DNS records either does not work at all, or else their interface is so poorly explained that I couldn't figure out how to create a single CNAME record for "www" that pointed to "ghs.google.com"… after hours of trying.

And for anyone else thinking of making the leap to custom domain names whose using blogger, here's the blogger help page that explains it nicely (other than the fact that the instructions for 1and1.com don't work…):

How do I create a CNAME record for my custom domain?

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