This is another installment in a series that has been adapted from my 11-part CD teaching series on A. W. Tozer’s spiritual classic, The Pursuit of God.

Are you ready to ask God to tear off that woven veil of hyphenated sins of the self-life, that opaque barrier that separate you from the manifest presence and matchless glory of God? He is able. And he will employ the same instrument of death that purchased our freedom from sin’s slavery – the cross. As Tozer says, “The cross is rough and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep its victim hanging there forever. There comes a moment when its work is finished and the suffering victim dies. After that there is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered in actual living experience the presence of the living God.”

I believe that there comes a point in our spiritual journey where we hit a barrier, a barrier that bars our way to the best of what God has prepared for us. Everything we hope to have in Christ is on the other side. Yet nothing we do can breach that wall. It is the point at which we come face to face with the stark challenge of Romans 12:1, “I urge you therefore, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual act of worship.” It involves the total and voluntary sacrifice of self, offered to God without condition. Paul is telling you to willingly climb up on the altar and lay down as a living sacrifice. But there’s always a problem with living sacrifices, is there not? It wants to keep crawling off the altar. So, this death of self must be followed by a transformation, a new way of living life that is well-pleasing to God. “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is, His good, pleasing and perfect will.” Then each successive day we must recommit ourselves to the immolation of the self and to the transformation of the self into Christlikeness.

• Are you ready to ask God to tear off the woven veil of  the self-life?