Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

What, then, is that world against which we are warned by the apostles" That world whose friendship constitutes spiritual adultery, the love of which stands in opposition to the love of God"

It is the familiar world of sinful human society which swells about and beneath us as the waters of the flood once surged and churned around the ark of Noah. No Christian need fail to recognize it, provided he wants to know what it is and where it is located. Here are a few infallible marks of...

God is love, and is for that reason the source of all the love there is. He has set as the first of all commandments that we love Him with all our hearts, but He knows that the desired love can never originate with us. We love him, because he first loved us, is the scriptural and psychological pattern. We can love Him as we ought only as He inflames our minds with holy desire. Yet there is also a love of willing as well as of feeling. Though we may not be conscious of any great degree of...

Men and women without God are helpless and hopeless human beings. We do well to remember that sin is to the human nature what cancer is to the human body! Who can argue with the fact that sin has ruined us" Our feverish activity is only one sign of what is wrong with us - sin has plunged us into the depths and so marked us with mortality that we have become brother to the clay-but God never meant it to be so. I recall being invited to speak at a summer conference where much of the emphasis...

Granted that the man who seeks revival has stopped thinking in plurals and has narrowed his faith down to one single individual, himself, what then" How can he find that after which his soul is yearning" How can he cooperate with his hungers to the end that he may indeed be filled"

He must rid his mind of the false notion that prayer alone will bring the blessing. Normally all transactions between the soul and God are carried on by prayer. It is right and scriptural and according to...

. . . No man is ever the same after God has laid His hand upon him. He will have certain marks, and though they are not easy to detect perhaps we may cautiously name a few. One mark is a deep reverence for divine things. A sense of the sacred must be present or there can be no receptivity to God and truth. This mysterious feeling of awe precedes repentance and faith and is nothing else but a gift from heaven. Millions go through life unaffected by the presence of God in His world. Good they...

A great deal can be learned about people by observing whom and what they imitate. The weak, for instance, imitate the strong; never the reverse. The poor imitate the rich. The self-assured are imitated by the timid and uncertain, the genuine is imitated by the counterfeit, and people all tend to imitate what they admire.

By this definition power today lies with the world, not with the church, for it is the world that initiates and the church that imitates what she has initiated. By...

Certain cultures have stressed memorization to a point where education consists largely in learning by rote a few of the classics. . . .

About this two things may be said: One, that great skill in memorizing is found almost exclusively among peoples where books are scarce and where a certain limited few important classics are about all the reading matter required for an education as understood by those peoples. In the English-speaking world of today we have available not only...

It is a fact that God made us to worship Him, and if we had not fallen with Adam and Eve, worship would have been the most natural thing for us. Sinning was not the natural thing for Adam and Eve, but they disobeyed and fell, losing their privilege of perfect fellowship with God, the Creator. Sin is the unnatural thing; it was never intended by God to be our nature. Men and women who are out of fellowship with God, the Creator, still have an instinct towards some practice of worship. In most...

Our constant effort should be to reach as many persons as possible with the Christian message, and for that reason numbers are critically important. But our first responsibility is not to make converts but to uphold the honor of God in a world given over to the glory of fallen man. No matter how many persons we touch with the gospel we have failed unless, along with the message of invitation, we have boldly declared the exceeding sinfulness of man and the transcendent holiness of the Most...

. . If we compare what we ought to be and could be with what we are, and we don't see that we are in a rut and we are not concerned, then one of three things may be wrong. First, we may not be converted at all. . . . Second, people may not be concerned about the rut because of sin they have committed. Perhaps they have been regenerated but have sinned against light too often, so the light has become darkness. That often happens. I don't say these people are lost, but I do say that they are...

We may need to look closely to discover the relation between inflation and unbelief, but such a relation does nevertheless exist. The man of faith is so sure of his position before God that he can quietly allow himself to be overlooked, discredited, deflated, without a tremor of anxiety. He is willing to wait out God's own good time and let the wisdom of the future judgment reveal his true size and worth. The man of unbelief dare not do this. He is so unsure of himself that he demands...

Until the full light of God"s inspired Word floods down upon the religious landscape, almost everything is obscure and indistinct. The finest minds see things that are not there and fail to see the things that are. This inability to make out the details is a frustrating thing to persons of a strong religious bent and results in a lot of guessing and theological improvising. Such persons demand to know, and though they neglect or reject the holy Scriptures they will know, regardless, in some...

There is such a thing as a renaissance, a personal revival. The best illustration is the coming of the springtime on the farm. The snow will lay all winter long, and in some places you don"t see the ground until springtime. How utterly dead everything looks, but you know that life is still there. The trees are stark, but there is life in them. The roots in the ground are all quiet, but there is life down there. Just below the frost line are the worms, the bugs, the mice, the moles and the...

Within the human heart "things" have taken over. . . . There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets "things" with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns "my" and "mine" look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of...