Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

CLASSIFICATION IS ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT of all tasks. Even in the realm of religion there are enough lights and shades to make it injudicious to draw too fine a line between men and men. If the religious world were composed of squares of solid black and solid white classification would be easy; but unfortunately it is not.

It is a grave error for us evangelicals to assume that the children of God are all in our communion and that all who are not associated with us are ipso...

I know that I am being repetitious - but this needs to be said again and again: our Lord will not save those whom He cannot command! The lifetime God has given us down here is a lifetime of decisions. Each person makes his own decisions as to the eternal world he is going to inhabit. We must decide to take Jesus for what He is - the anointed Savior and Lord who is King of kings and Lord of all lords! He would not be who He is if He saved us and called us without the understanding that He can...

What is the worst enemy the church faces today" This is where a lot of unreality and unconscious hyprocrisy enters. Many are ready to say, "The liberals are our worst enemy." But the simple fact is that the average evangelical church does not have too much trouble with liberalism. Nobody gets up in our churches and claims that the first five books of Moses are just myths. Nobody says that the story of creation is simply religious mythology. Nobody denies that Christ walked on the water or...

The faith of the Christian rests upon Christ Himself. On Him we repose and in Him we live. Christ gains nothing from any human philosophy, however pure and noble it may be. He owes nothing to Plato or to Aristotle. If these men had never lived the Christ in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily would have been all He ever was and is world without end. His redemptive work was completed centuries before the dawn of modern science, and of course seeks no aid from science. Christ is...

I think we make two mistakes in our attitude toward our Christian leaders, one in not being sufficiently grateful to them and the other in following them too slavishly.

The first is a sin of omission, and because it is something that is not there it is not so likely to be noticed as a sin that is plainly present. For instance, it is a sin to be ungrateful to a man who has befriended us, but it is not as bad or as obvious a sin as stealing his pocketbook.

To be...

In the previous chapter I said that truth should not be passed out indiscriminately, but suited to the circumstances and needs of the hearers.

From the prophets we learn this and from the apostles, as well as from our Lord Himself. These were never bound by a mechanical religious "curriculum" which dictated unintelligently that certain doctrines were to be taught at certain times regardless of conditions. They prescribed truth as a divine medicine to be proclaimed with emphasis when...

For some reason, religious activity and godliness do not always go together. To discover this, it is only necessary to observe the current religious scene. There is no lack of soul-winning effort surely, but many of the soul-winners give one the impression that they are little more than salesmen for a brand of Christianity that simply does not lead to saintliness.

If this should strike you as being uncharitable, make this little test: kneel down and read reverently the Sermon on the...

When Christ Jesus died on that unholy, fly-infested cross for mankind, He never divided the Godhead!

We are assured from the earliest church fathers that the Father in heaven, His eternal Son, and the Holy Ghost are forever One - inseparable, indivisible - and can never be anything else. Not all of Nero's swords could ever cut down through the substance of the Godhead to cut off the Father from the Son.

It was Mary's son who cried out, "Why hast Thou forsaken me"" It was the...

This may sound strange-but it is a fact that death is not the worst thing that can happen to a believing Christian! I can recall the first time I heard that statement, in a quiet conversation with Harry M. Shuman, for many years the president of the international Christian and Missionary Alliance. He was a soft-spoken yet forceful man of God, rich in the wisdom of Goands Word. We were talking of the serious issues of life and death. When he had something especially important to say, Dr....

In a day when judgments are soon to come upon the earth, we are often warned by doctors that we eat too much-and that we worry too much. More of us suffer from mental illness than suffer from major physical illnesses. In our self-centered lives, even those who are professing believers are prone to think they will hear the trumpets of woe in time to do something about all this. But at that time, it will be too late! The voice of God is a quiet voice. The voice of God's love and grace is...

. . . There are two questions before us. The first question is: How many of us are willing to hear the voice of God" Jesus said, Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were...

It may shock some people to be told that Christ is not an American. Nor was He a Jew merely. He was born of the seed of Abraham of the line of David, and His mother was a Jewess of the tribe of Judah. Still Christ is vastly more than a Jew. His dearest name for himself was "the Son of man." He came through the Jewish race, but he came to the human race. He is Everyman's countryman and Everyman's contemporary. He is building a kingdom of all nations and tribes and tongues and peoples. He has...

There has probably never been another time in the history of the world when so many people knew so much about religious happenings as they do today. The newspapers are eager to print religious news; the secular news magazines devote several pages of each issue to the doings of the church and the synagogue; a number of press associations gather church news and make it available to the religious journals at a small cost. Even the hiring of professional publicity men to plug one or another...

Just as those who lived in the past had the privilege of being God's people of faith then, so do we in our own day! It is good to come to the understanding that while God wants us to be holy and Spirit-filled, He does not expect us to look like Abraham or to play the harp like David or to have the same spiritual insights given to Paul. All of the former heroes of the faith are dead. You are alive in your generation. A Bible proverb says that it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion....