The Best of A. W. Tozer Book One

The Best of A.W. Tozer

Book One

Compiled by Warren W. Wiersbe

© 1978, 2000 by Zur Ltd..

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tozer, A. W., 1897-1963

The Best of A. W. Tozer Book One / A. W. Tozer.

ISBN: 978-1-60066-286-7

Contents

Introduction

Excerpts from The Pursuit of God

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Excerpts from Born After Midnight

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Excerpts from God Tells the Man Who Cares

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Excerpts from That Incredible Christian

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Excerpts from The Root of the Righteous

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Excerpts from Of God and Men

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Excerpts from Man: the Dwelling Place of God

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Excerpt from How to Be Filled with the Holy Spirit

Chapter 48

Excerpt from Worship, the Missing Jewel of the Evangelical Church

Chapter 49

Excerpt from Who Put Jesus on the Cross?

Chapter 50

Excerpt from Paths to Power

Chapter 51

Excerpt from Let My People Go

Chapter 52

Introduction

I guess my philosophy is this: Everything is wrong until God sets it right.

That statement from Dr. A. W. Tozer perfectly summarizes what he believed and what he tried to do during his years of ministry. The entire focus of his preaching and writing was on God. He had no time for religious hucksters who were inventing new ways to promote their wares and inflate their statistics. Like Thoreau, whom he read and admired, Tozer marched to a different drummer; and for this reason, he was usually out of step with many of the people in the religious parade.

But it was this evangelical eccentricity that made us love him and appreciate him. He was not afraid to tell us what was wrong. Nor was he hesitant to tell us how God could make it right. If a sermon can be compared to light, then A. W. Tozer released a laser beam from the pulpit, a beam that penetrated your heart, seared your conscience, exposed sin, and left you crying, What must I do to be saved? The answer was always the same: surrender to Christ; get to know God personally; grow to become like Him.

Aiden Wilson Tozer was born in Newburg (then known as La Jose), Pennsylvania, on April 21, 1897. In 1912 the family moved from the farm to Akron, Ohio; and in 1915 he was converted to Christ. He immediately entered into a life of devotional intensity and personal witness. In 1919 he began pastoring the Alliance Church in Nutter Fort, West Virginia. He also pastored churches in Morgantown, West Virginia; Toledo, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; and in 1928 came to the Southside Alliance Church in Chicago. Here he ministered until November, 1959, when he became pastor of the Avenue Road Church in Toronto. A sudden heart attack on May 12, 1963, ended that ministry and Tozer was ushered into Glory.

I am sure that Tozer reached more people through his writing than his preaching. Much of his writing was reflected in the preaching of pastors who fed their souls on his words. In May, 1950, he was named editor of The Alliance Weekly, now The Alliance Witness, which was probably the only religious magazine purchased primarily for its editorials. I once heard Dr. Tozer at an Evangelical Press Association conference taking to task editors who practiced what he called super-market journalism—two columns of advertising and one aisle of reading material. He was an exacting writer and was as hard on himself as he was on others.

What is there about A. W. Tozer’s writings that gets hold of us and will not let us go? Tozer did not enjoy the privilege of a university or seminary training, or even a Bible School education for that matter; yet he has left us a shelf of books that will be mined for their spiritual wealth until the Lord returns.

For one thing, A. W. Tozer wrote with conviction. He was not interested in tickling the ears of the shallow Athenian Christians who were looking for some new thing. Tozer redug the old wells and called us back to the old paths, and he passionately believed and practiced the truths that he taught. He once told a friend of mine, I have preached myself off of every Bible Conference platform in the country! The popular crowds do not rush to hear a man whose convictions make them uncomfortable.

Tozer was a mystic—an evangelical mystic—in an age that is pragmatic and materialistic. He still calls us to see that real world of the spiritual that lies beyond the physical world that so ensnares us. He begs us to please God and forget the crowd. He implores us to worship God that we might become more like Him. How desperately we need that message today!

A. W. Tozer had the gift of taking a spiritual truth and holding it up to the light so that, like a diamond, every facet was seen and admired. He was not lost in homiletical swamps; the wind of the Spirit blew and dead bones came to life. His essays are like fine cameos whose value is not determined by their size. His preaching was characterized by an intensity—spiritual intensity—that penetrated one’s heart and helped him to see God. Happy is the Christian who has a Tozer book handy when his soul is parched and he feels God is far away.

This leads to what I think is the greatest contribution A. W. Tozer makes in his writings: he so excites you about truth that you forget Tozer and reach for your Bible. He himself often said that the best book is the one that makes you want to put it down and think for yourself. Rarely do I read Tozer without reaching for my notebook to jot down some truth that later can be developed into a message. Tozer is like a prism that gathers the light and then reveals its beauty.

To select the best of A. W. Tozer is an impossible task. Best for whom? For what needs? As a pastor, I could select fifty essays that would challenge and bless the hearts of my brothers in the ministry, but Tozer is read by many people who are not pastors. As a writer, I could choose chapters from his books that reveal his skill with words; but most readers are not writers. Those of us who appreciate Tozer’s writings certainly have our favorites, but no two of us would agree.

From the Tozer books published by WingSpread Publishers, I have made selections on the basis of theme and development. Dr. Tozer often said the same things in different ways, and I have tried to choose major themes in their best expression. If one of your favorite essays is missing, perhaps you will be compensated by reading a new one that you have missed or forgotten.

If this book is your first introduction to A. W. Tozer, then permit me to suggest the best way to read these essays. Please read them slowly and meditatively, thinking as you read. Do not speed read these chapters. As you read, listen for what Tozer called the other Voice speaking truth through these brief messages. If a certain truth begins to burn in your soul, put the book down and let God instruct you by His Spirit. Wait quietly before Him and deep within your heart God will speak to you.

The best book is not one that informs merely, Tozer wrote in Man: The Dwelling Place of God, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.

I trust that this book, composed of what I think are the best of Tozer’s writings, will meet that standard. I think that it will. I pray that it will introduce a host of new readers to the writings of this man of God, and that those of us who have known him longer will appreciate him more.

Warren W. Wiersbe

The Moody Church

Chicago, Illinois

Excerpts from The Pursuit of God

Chapter 1.

Following Hard After God

My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand, upholdeth me. Ps. 63:8

Christian theology teaches the doctrine of prevenient grace, which briefly stated means this, that before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man.

Before a sinful man can think a right thought of God, there must have been a work of enlightenment done within him; imperfect it may be, but a true work nonetheless, and the secret cause of all desiring and seeking and praying which may follow.

We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit. No man can come to me, said our Lord, except the Father which hath sent me draw him, and it is by this very prevenient drawing that God takes from us every vestige of credit for the act of coming. The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him; and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand: Thy right hand upholdeth me.

In this divine upholding and human following there is no contradiction. All is of God, for as von Hugel teaches, God is always previous. In practice, however, (that is, where God’s previous working meets man’s present response) man must pursue God. On our part there must be positive reciprocation if this secret drawing of God is to eventuate in identifiable experience of the Divine. In the warm language of personal feeling this is stated in the Forty-second Psalm: As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God? This is deep calling unto deep, and the longing heart will understand it.

The doctrine of justification by faith—a Biblical truth, and a blessed relief from sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort—has in our time fallen into evil company and been interpreted by many in such manner as actually to bar men from the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be received without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is saved, but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with little.

The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we Christians are in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word. We have almost forgotten that God is a Person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can. It is inherent in personality to be able to know other personalities, but full knowledge of one personality by another cannot be achieved in one encounter. It is only after long and loving mental intercourse that the full possibilities of both can be explored.

All social intercourse between human beings is a response of personality to personality, grading upward from the most casual brush between man and man to the fullest, most intimate communion of which the human soul is capable. Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created personalities to the Creating Personality, God. This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

God is a Person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires and suffers as any other person may. In making Himself known to us, He stays by the familiar pattern of personality. He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.

This intercourse between God and the soul is known to us in conscious personal awareness. It is personal: that is, it does not come through the body of believers, as such, but is known to the individual, and to the body through the individuals which compose it. And it is conscious: that is, it does not stay below the threshold of consciousness and work there unknown to the soul (as, for instance, infant baptism is thought by some to do), but comes within the field of awareness where the man can know it as he knows any other fact of experience.

You and I are in little (our sins excepted) what God is in large. Being made in His image we have within us the capacity to know Him. In our sins we lack only the power. The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life in regeneration our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the Kingdom of God. It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart’s happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead. That is where we begin, I say, but where we stop no man has yet discovered, for there is in the awful and mysterious depths of the Triune God neither limit nor end.

Shoreless Ocean, who can sound Thee?

Thine own eternity is round Thee,

Majesty divine!

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart. St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly understood by every worshiping soul:

We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread,

And long to feast upon Thee still:

We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead

And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.

Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking. Moses used the fact that he knew God as an argument for knowing Him better. Now, therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight, show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight; and from there he rose to make the daring request, I beseech thee, show me thy glory. God was frankly pleased by this display of ardor, and the next day called Moses into the mount, and there in solemn procession made all His glory pass before him.

David’s life was a torrent of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with the cry of the seeker and the glad shout of the finder. Paul confessed the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after Christ. That I may know Him, was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may win Christ.

Hymnody is sweet with the longing after God, the God whom, while the singer seeks, he knows he has already found. His track I see and I’ll pursue, sang our fathers only a short generation ago, but that song is heard no more in the great congregation. How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. Everything is made to center upon the initial act of accepting Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls. We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek Him. This is set before us as the last word in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever believed otherwise. Thus the whole testimony of the worshiping, seeking, singing Church on that subject is crisply set aside. The experiential heart-theology of a grand army of fragrant saints is rejected in favor of a smug interpretation of Scripture which would have sounded strange to an Augustine, a Rutherford or a Brainerd.

In the midst of this great chill, there are some I rejoice to acknowledge, who will not be content with shallow logic. They will admit the force of the argument, and then turn away with tears to hunt some lonely place and pray, O God, show me thy glory. They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God.

I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.

Every age has its own characteristics. Right now we are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is. rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all.

If we would find God amid all the religious externals we must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity. Now, as always, God reveals Himself to babes and hides Himself in thick darkness from the wise and the prudent. We must simplify our approach to Him. We must strip down to essentials (and they will be found to be blessedly few). We must put away all effort to impress, and come with the guileless candor of childhood. If we do this, without doubt God will quickly respond.

When religion has said its last word, there is little that we need other than God Himself. The evil habit of seeking God-and effectively prevents us from finding God in full revelation. In the and lies our great woe. If we omit the and, we shall soon find God, and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing.

We need not fear that in seeking God only we may narrow our lives or restrict the motions of our expanding hearts. The opposite is true. We can well afford to make God our All, to concentrate, to sacrifice the