Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

Many times in history the Christians in various towns, cities and even whole countries have given up their defense for reasons wholly evil. Worldliness, sinful pleasures and personal ungodliness have often been the cause of the churchs disgraceful surrender to the enemy. Today, however, Satans strategy is different. Though he still uses the old methods where he can do so with success, his more effective method is to paralyze our resistance by appealing to our virtues, especially the virtue...

Men and women who read and study the Scriptures for their literary beauty alone have missed the whole purpose for which they were given. God's Word is not to be enjoyed as one might "enjoy" a Beethoven symphony or a poem by Wordsworth. The reason: the Bible demands immediate action, faith, surrender, committal. Until it has secured these, it has done nothing positive for the reader, but it has increased his responsibility and deepened the judgment that must follow. The Bible was called forth...

The happiest man in the world," said a well-known preacher some time ago, "is the new convert before he has met too many Bible teachers and seen too many church members."

Even after we have made what allowance we must for the obvious irony in these words, there still remains in them sufficient truth to perturb the honest Christian soul more than a little.

Surely one of the happiest persons in the world should be the new convert. Has he not found Him of whom Moses and all...

It is precisely because God is, and because man is made in His image and is accountable to Him, that theology is so critically important. Christian revelation alone has the answer to life"s unanswered questions about God and human destiny. To let these authoritative answers lie neglected while we search everywhere else for answers and find none is, it seems to me, nothing less than folly. No motorist would be excused if he neglected to consult his road map and tried instead to find his way...

We need sweeping reformation. Let me give a definition of reformation as it is given in a religious dictionary: "Change by removal of faults or abuses, and a restoration to a former good estate." Now that is not so bad. I do not know how anybody who believes he or she is a Christian could ever object to changing in the direction of the removal of faults and abuses toward the restoration to a former good estate. The problem is change, which disturbs many people. They have accepted the status...

Having as the High Priest of our profession the incarnation of all divine wisdom and having as our source book of religious knowledge the holy Scriptures, the soundest and saltiest work ever written, why do we tend so easily to become confused about things spiritual" I believe the causes are four, and I propose to state them in this and the next chapters.

The first cause of religious confusion is our failure to understand that the truth as it is in Christ Jesus is a moral and...

Once the heart is freed from its contrary impulses, Christ within becomes a wondrous experiential fact. The surrendered heart has no more controversy with God, so He can live in us congenial and uninhibited. Then He thinks His own thoughts in us: thoughts about ourselves, about Himself, about sinners and saints and babes and harlots; thoughts about the Church, about sin and judgment and hell and heaven. And He thinks about us and Himself and His love for us and our love for Him; and He woos...

Absalom dwelt two full years in Jerusalem and saw not the king's face, though the king was his own father. Are there not many in the kingdom of God who have no awareness of God, who seem not to know that they have the right to sit at the King's table and commune with the King" This is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is a hard and grievous burden.

To know God, this is eternal life; this is the purpose for which we are and were created. The destruction of our...

This is hard for people to face up to. Religion deteriorates just as fruit rots and just as people get old in spite of all they try to do at the drug stores. It is inevitable that we get old, and so it is with religion. It is built-in that we start to deteriorate shortly after God comes and blesses us. Look what happened to Israel. God called Israel out of Egypt, and it began to deteriorate before it reached the Red Sea. Then He gave it a revival by taking it through the Red Sea and into the...

Read your New Testament again and you will agree that mediocrity in the Christian life is not the highest that Jesus offers. Certainly God is not honored by our arrested spiritual development - our permanent half-way spiritual condition. We all know that the Bible tells us that we honor God by going on to full maturity in Christ! Why, then, do we settle for those little pleasures that tickle the saintlets and charm the fancy of the carnal" It is because we once heard a call to take up the...

Think with me about beauty-and about this matchless One who is the Lord of all beauty, our Savior! God has surely deposited something within our human beings that is capable of understanding and appreciating beauty - the love of harmonious forms, appreciation of colors and beautiful sounds. Brother, these are only the external counterparts of a deeper and more enduring beauty-that which we call moral beauty. It has been the uniqueness and the perfection of Christ's moral beauty that have...

While Jesus grew through the various stages of developing childhood, He never saw a mechanical device more complicated than a cart. He never saw paper, or plastic, or a telephone, or a radio, or a camera, or a printed sheet, or a paved highway, or a gun, or a steam engine, or an electric motor. No one in His day ever got vaccinated or took vitamin pills or consulted a psychiatrist or had a song recorded or rode in a balloon or airplane or elevator. The people of His time had to get along...

There is an evil which I have seen under the sun--one that grows and does not diminish. And it is all the more dangerous because it is done without evil aforethought but, as it were, carelessly and without wrong intent.

It is the evil of giving to them that have and withholding from them that have not. It is the evil of blessing with a loud voice them that are already blessed and letting the unblessed and the outcast lie forgotten.

Let a man appear in a local Christian...

The Bible record is very plain when it assures us that John the Baptist was a man sent from God. Our generation would probably decide that such a man ought to be downright proud of the fact that God had sent him. We would urge him to write a book. Seminary leaders would line up to schedule him as guest lecturer. Actually, John the Baptist would never have fit into the contemporary religious scene in our day - never! He did not keep his suit pressed. He was not careful about choosing words...