A. W. Tozer explains the effect on the one who will learn and find rest from Jesus,

The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather, he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at the same time that he is, in the sight of God, more important than angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto. He knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring. He rests perfectly content to allow God to place His own values. He will be patient to wait for the day when everything will get its own price tag and real worth will come into its own. Then the righteous shall shine forth in the Kingdom of their Father. He is willing to wait for that day. (The Pursuit of God, pp. 104-5)

A. W. Tozer, “a 20th century prophet” and faithful Chicagoan pastor, considers the act of denying self, taking up the cross and following Jesus:

… In human experience that veil [our sin that separates us from God] is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.

Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life, hoping ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it crucified. But we must be careful to distinguish lazy “acceptance” from the real work of God. We must insist upon the work being done. We dare not rest content with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion. That is to imitate Saul and spare the best of the sheep and the oxen.

Insist that the work be done in very truth and it will be done. 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 is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered in actual spiritual experience the presence of the living God.

“Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels — men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes.” -Carl Friedrich Bahrdt

“Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.” -Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“I like the noise of democracy.” -James Buchanan

“He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.” -Edmund Burke

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” -Jesus Christ

Dissent can be either noble or ignoble. Hitler, Luther, Ghandi, Cain, Moses & Israel, American Patriots, Radical Islam, King, children, and so on. What difference it makes depends on the motivation, be it love or hatred of fellow man, overcommitment to some ideal or reality, process or rule, power or greed, and ultimately for or against the glory of God. It matters just from whom one is dissenting and for the sake of exactly whom and what.

All men are dissidents. Today, one will rebel against God or rebel against the world. I pray it is the latter.

“To understand the American student, it is important to have experienced life in a hostel.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer’s impression of American life:

Living together day by day produces a strong spirit of comradeship, of a mutual readiness to help. The thousandfold “hullo” which sounds through the corridors of the hostel in the course of the day and which is not omitted even when someone is rushing past is not as meaningless as one might suppose. . . . No one remains alone in the dormitory. The unreservedness of life together makes one person open to another; in the conflict between determination for truth with all of its consequences and the will for community, the latter prevails. This is characteristic of all American thought, particularly as I have observed it in theology and the church; they do not see the radical claim of truth on the shaping of their lives. Community is therefore founded less on truth than on the spirit of “fairness.” One says nothing against another member of the dormitory as long as he is a “good fellow.”

Must absolute truth be pitted against true community? It would seem so for most Americans, but Bonhoeffer lived, exemplified, and died revealing quite the opposite.

[Source: quotations taken from Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy; pp. 103-104.]