Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

To read the Bible well in public we must first love it. The voice, if it is free, unconsciously follows the emotional tone. Reverence cannot be simulated. No one who does not feel the deep solemnity of the Holy Word can properly express it. God will not allow His Book to become the plaything of the rhetorician. That is why we instinctively draw back from every simulated tone in the reading of the Scriptures. The radio announcer's artificial unction cannot hide the absence of the real thing....

It might be a shock to some of us if we could know why we are disliked and why our testimony is rejected so violently. Could it be that we are guilty of a deep sinfulness of disposition that we just cannot keep hidden" Arrogance, lack of charity, contempt, self-righteousness, religious snobbery, fault-finding—and all this kept under careful restraint and disguised by a pious smile and synthetic good humor. This sort of thing is felt rather than understood by those who touch us in everyday...

This brief list does not at all exhaust the number of infirmities we are likely to find in the Christian assembly. Who has not had to bear lovingly with a brother (or sister) who is afflicted with logorrhea, the incurable propensity to talk without pause or punctuation" That the talk is "religious" does not make it the less painful. And the unstable brother who spends his time either falling or getting up again, who is either leaping for joy or lying face down bewailing his hard lot—what...

There is also spiritual sleep. Notice Ephesians 5:14: "Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead." This verse is often spoken to sinners, but it was not written to sinners. Ephesians was never written to sinners. It is not a message to sinners at all, but a message to one of the best churches in the New Testament. Yet the writer says, "Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you." Some of the Ephesians were in a somnolent...

Elsewhere I have said that we cannot know God by thinking, but that we must do a lot of thinking if we would know Him well. This sounds self-contradictory, but I am sure that the two statements are in full accord with each other. The inability of the human mind to know God in a true and final sense is taken for granted throughout the Bible and even taught in plain words in such passages as these: No man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he...

In spite of our lip-service to democracy, Americans are a decidedly class-conscious people. The very politicians and educators and church leaders among us who sound abroad the praises of the common man and plead for equal rights for all are in private practice as aloof from the plain people as the proudest monarch could ever be. There exists among us an aristocracy composed of famous people, rich men, social lions, actors, public figures and headliners of one kind or another, and these are a...

Churches get in ruts only because individuals get in ruts. It is impossible that the church should do anything that individuals do not do. It is impossible that we should make any progress except as made by individuals. It is impossible there should be any regress unless individual Christians go backward. Think about people who find themselves in religious ruts. They discover a number ot things about themselves. They will find that they are getting older but not getting any holier. Time is...

There are areas in our lives where in our effort to be right we may go wrong, so wrong as to lead to spiritual deformity. To be specific let me name a few: 1. When in our determination to be bold we become brazen. Courage and meekness are compatible qualities: both were found in perfect proportion in Christ and both shone in beauty in His conflict with His enemies. Peter before the Sanhedrin and Paul before Agrippa demonstrated both qualities, though on another occasion when Paul's boldness...

. . . the Lord may soon return. I realize there is a lot that we do not know about prophecy, but most Christians are looking for the second coming of the Lord. They expect Him to come. They do not know when He will come, and the ones who claim they do, do not. Nevertheless, He may come in your lifetime. He said that He would come back in an hour when we think not. It could be that this present decline in expectation may have an ominous significance. It can easily be said that this would be...

In order to express myself more freely on a matter that lies very near to my heart, I shall waive the rather stilted editorial we and speak in the first person.

The matter I have in mind is the place of the hymnbook in the devotional life of the Christian. For purposes of inward devotion, there is only one book to be placed before the hymnal, and that of course is the Bible. I say without qualification, after the Sacred Scriptures, the next best companion for the soul is a good...

The devotional works that have appeared have been so varied as to make classification difficult. Some of the great names are Meister Eckhart, Bernard of Clairvaux, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Michael Molinos, John of the Cross, Thomas Traherne, Richard Rolle, William Law, Walter Hilton, Francis de Sales, Jakob Boehme and Gerhart Tersteegen. To those might be added the more familiar names of Fenelon, Guyon and Thomas Kempis.

To a large extent these were universal Christians who...

Matthew says, "And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new tomb." Mark says, "And he [Joseph] bought fine linen, and took him [Jesus] down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock." Luke writes, "And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid." John says, ". . . There was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre,...

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...