This past week, I spent some time reading A.W. Tozer, known as a 20th-century “modern-day prophet.”[1] I don’t agree with everything Tozer writes, but much of what he said and wrote dug deeply into my soul. Maybe some of these words will challenge you as you begin this week:
- “Christianity at any given time is strong or weak depending upon her concept of God. And I insist upon this and I have said it many times, that the basic trouble with the Church today is her unworthy conception of God. . . . Our religion is little because our god is little.”[2]
- “There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.”[3]
- “Many great hymns I didn’t like in my early days, because I heard them sung in some dead prayer meeting with a dead song leader who did not expect anything, and a dead congregation in front of him who did not expect anything. . . . True worship that is pleasing to God creates within the human heart a spirit of expectation and insatiable longing.”[4]
- “What is the word when we come to the Bible? It is meditate. We are to come to the Bible and meditate. That is what the old saints did. They meditated. They laid the Bible on their old-fashioned handmade chair, got down on the old, scrubbed board floor and meditated on the Word. As they meditated, faith mounted. The Spirit and faith illuminated. They had nothing but a Bible with fine print and narrow margins and poor paper, but they knew their Bible better than some of us with all our helps.”[5]
- “Prayer is never an acceptable substitute for obedience. The sovereign Lord accepts no offering from His creatures that is not accompanied by obedience. To pray for revival while ignoring or actually flouting the plain precept laid down in the Scriptures is to waste a lot of words and get nothing for our trouble.”[6]
[1] Picture by www.awtozer.com, <a href=”//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_W_Tozer.jpg” title=”Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of A. W. Tozer”>Fair use</a>, <a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30767077″>Link</a>.
[2] The Attributes of God Volume 1 (Kindle location 567)
[3] The Pursuit of God (Kindle Locations 58-61)
[4] The Purpose of Man: Designed to Worship (p. 96), Kindle Edition
[5] How to Be Filled with the Holy Spirit (pp. 61-62), Kindle edition
[6] Prayer (p. 48), Kindle Edition
