Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

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....

It remains only to be said that worship as we have described it here is almost (though, thank God, not quite) a forgotten art in our day. For whatever we can say of modern Bible-believing Christians, it can hardly be denied that we are not remarkable for our spirit of worship. The gospel as preached by good men in our times may save souls, but it does not create worshipers. Our meetings are characterized by cordiality, humor, affability, zeal and high animal spirits; but hardly anywhere do...

Lack of balance in the Christian life is often the direct consequence of overemphasis on certain favorite texts, with a corresponding underemphasis on other related ones. For it is not denial only that makes a truth void; failure to emphasize it will in the long run be equally damaging. And this puts us in the odd position of holding a truth theoretically while we make it of no effect by neglecting it in practice. Unused truth becomes as useless as an unused muscle. Sometimes our dogmatic...

Among the innocent victims of this effete and degenerate age, there is none so pure and so beautiful as love.

Next to the word God with its various forms, there is no word so fair in all the language. Yet it may be said without qualification that this beautiful word has so suffered in the house of its friends as now to be scarcely recognizable. For the great mass of mankind, love has lost its divine meaning. The novelist, the playwright, the psychoanalyst, the writer of popular love...

In this hour of all-but-universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct `interpretations' of truth. They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water....

It was John Milton who said that hope springs eternal in the human breast. Indeed hope is such a vital thing that were it to die out of the heart of mankind, the burden of life could not long be sustained.

But precious as this hope may be, it is yet, when it is ill-founded,a dangerous thing. The hope, for instance, which almost all people feel, of long life here on earth, can be for many a deadly snare, a fatal delusion. The average man, when he thinks of his future, suspends reason,...

ONCE MARY AND JOSEPH, with a number of friends and relatives, were traveling back home from Jerusalem and, supposing the young Jesus to be in the company, went a whole day's journey before discovering that He had been left behind.

Their fault was that they assumed that what they wanted to believe was so in fact. They took too much for granted. A simple check at the start of the journey would have saved them a harrowing experience of fear and uncertainty and two days'...