Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

It was a gracious revelation to my human spirit when I discovered that the Word of God was actually on my side, operating in my behalf! I was reading Psalms 71 and I came to this amazing statement: "Thou hast given commandment to save me!" My heart has been warmed with that realization ever since. I believe that the Word of the living God has gone throughout all the earth to save me and keep me! Let the theological experts raise their eyebrow — I...

Once while listening to a man reproach, disparage and scold an assembly of Christians with whom he was only slightly acquainted and whose personal lives he had no way of appraising, I asked myself some questions, the answers to which up to this point I have not received. Since they bear directly on the matter here being discussed I want to list them. Perhaps some reader can answer them for me. Here they are:

Why do some preachers—

It is important that we trace our benefits back to their source and express our thanks to the One "from whom all blessings flow," rather than merely to feel a vague stirring of gratefulness that results in nothing real. I once lived with a fine old couple, neither of whom was a Christian, and I was impressed with the profound sense of gratitude they felt for everything they possessed. When the winter winds moaned through the trees and made the old house tremble, the old man would smile and...

"Excitement, perturbation, feeling." These are states of mind we are all familiar with. In a world as violent and full of conflict as this these come and go, blaze up and die down in the average man's bosom a hundred times a day. The normal man and woman will in the course of a few months experience every degree of emotion from near ecstasy to mild dejection without apparently being any the better or the worse for it. Of course I have in mind here only the normal man and woman. The...

When the Bible says that God is calling a special people out of the nations to bear the name of His eternal Son, I believe it - and His name is Jesus! Our pious forefathers believed in spiritual preparation, and they said so. They saw themselves as a bride being prepared to meet the Bridegroom. They regarded this earth as the dressing room to outfit themselves for heaven. The evangelical church has come through a period when nearly everyone has believed that there is just one prerequisite to...

My aim is to awaken some from the rut. I know it is impossible to awaken everybody, but I hope to awaken some. I use the word awaken here advisedly and carefully because the Bible contains significant teaching gathered around the word sleep. There is first of all natural sleep. "He grants sleep to those he loves" (Psalms 127:2). "I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety" (

One thing must be kept in mind: We Christians are Christians first and everything else after that. Our first alliegiance is to the kingdom of God. Our citizenship is in heaven. We are grateful for political freedom. We thank God for democracy as a way of life. But we never forget that we are sons of God and citizens of another city whose builder and maker is God. For this reason, we must not identify the gospel with any political system or make Christianity to be synonymous with any form of...

The Church as announced by Christ, seen in the book of Acts and explained by Paul is a thing of great simplicity and rare beauty.

The church as we see it today is unsymmetrical, highly complex and anything but beautiful. Indeed I think that if some angel of God were made familiar with the church as it appears in the New Testament and then sent to the earth to try to locate it, it would be extremely doubtful whether the heavenly messenger would recognize anything now existing in...

Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous English sage, once said that one of the surest evidences of intellectual immaturity is the desire to startle people. Yet there are Christians who have been fed upon the odd, the strange and the curious so long and so exclusively that they have become wholly unfitted spiritually to receive or to appreciate sound doctrine. They live to be startled by something new or thrilled by something wonderful. They will believe anything so long as it is just a little away...

The happiest man in the world," said a well-known preacher some time ago, "is the new convert before he has met too many Bible teachers and seen too many church members." . . . The first half of our opening quotation, then, is so true as to need no verification. "The happiest man in the world is a new convert." But it is the last half that disturbs me. Why should a Bible teacher or a church member tend to destroy the joy of the new convert" Well, to be just to everyone I must assert...

We have developed in recent times a peace-loving, soft-spoken, tame and harmless brand of Christian of whom the world has no fear and for whom it has little respect. We are careful, for instance, never to speak in public against any of the false cults lest we be thought intolerant. We fear to talk against the destructive sins of modern civilization for fear someone will brand us as bigoted and narrow. Little by little we have been forced off the hard earth into a religious cloud-land where...

Actually the purest saint at the moment of his greatest strength is as weak as he was before his conversion. What has happened is that he has switched from his little human battery to the infinite power of God. He has quite literally exchanged weakness for strength, but the strength is not his; it flows into him from God as long as he abides in Christ. One of the heaviest problems in the Christian life is that of sanctification: how to become as pure as we know we ought to be and must be if...

. . . People in the rut never know when the last leaves are falling for them. Why are people in the rut" There are several possibilities. They may never have been truly converted at all, and this is one of our great problems now. We have a dozen ways of getting people into the kingdom of God, when the Lord said there was only one. They leak in, ooze in, come in by osmosis and get in by marriage—just get in by any kind of way. But there is only one true way. When people find that after being...

It should always be kept in mind that the Church is a divine family and that its loyalties sometimes cut sharply across the ties that bind earthly families together.

The cross is a sword and often separates friends and divides households. The idea that Christ always brings peace and patches up differences is found nowhere in His own teachings. Quite the contrary is true. For a man to cast in his lot with Christ often means that he will be opposed by his blood relatives and will find...