Tag: A.W. Tozer

“Paul’s exhortation to ‘do all to the glory of God’ is more than pious idealism. It is an integral part of the sacred revelation and is to be accepted as the very Word of Truth. It opens before us the possibility of making every act of our lives contribute to the glory of God. Lest we should be too timid to include everything, Paul mentions specifically eating and drinking. This humble privilege we share with the beasts that perish. If these lowly animal acts can be so performed as to honour God, then it becomes difficult to conceive of one that cannot.” (p120)

“Bodily acts done in sin and contrary to nature can never honour God. Let us, however, assume that perversion and abuse are not present. Let us think of a Christian believer in whose life the twin wonders of repentance and the new birth have been wrought. Of such a one it may be said that every act of his life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord’s Supper. To say this is not to bring all acts down to one dead level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole life into a sacrament.” (p121)

-AW Tozer
The Pursuit of God

“All our heartaches and a great many of our physical ills spring directly out of our sins. Pride, arrogance, resentfulness, evil imaginings, malice, greed: these are the sources of more human pain than all the diseases that ever afflicted mortal flesh.” (p110)

“The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto.” (p113)

“To all the victims of the gnawing disease (pretense) Jesus says, ‘Ye must become as little children.’ For little children do not compare; they receive direct enjoyment from what they have without relating it to something else or someone else.” (p114-115)

“Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus’ feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased.” (p115)

“The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of Christ.” (p116)

-AW Tozer
The Pursuit of God

“We are right when and only when we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position.” (p101)

“‘Be thou exalted’ is the language of victorious spiritual experience. It is a little key to unlock the door to great treasures of grace.” (p103)

“The man of God set his heart to exalt God above all; God accepted his intention as fact and acted accordingly. Not perfection, but holy intention made the difference.” (p106)

“His desire is toward the sons of men, and more particularly toward those sons of men who will make the once-for-all decision to exalt Him over all.” (p107)

“In speaking thus I have one fear; it is that I may convince the mind before God can win the heart. The mind may approve it while not having the consent of the will to put it into effect. While the imagination races ahead to honour God, the will may lag behind and the man never guess how divided his heart is. The whole man must make the decision before the heart can know any real satisfaction. God wants us all, and He will not rest till He gets us all. No part of the man will do.” (p107)

“Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.” (p89)

“Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God.” (p90)

“It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the range of possibility for the weakest and poorest of us.” (p94)

“But at the bottom of all these things (private prayer, Bible meditation, service, work and activity), giving meaning to them, will be the inward habit of beholding God.” (p96)

“Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified. The body becomes stronger as its members become healthier.” (p97)

-AW Tozer
The Pursuit of God

“Whoever will listen will hear the speaking Heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion.” (p80)

“The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech.” (p82)

-AW Tozer
The Pursuit of God

“The truth is that while God dwells in His world He is separated from it by a gulf forever impassable. However closely He may be identified with the work of His hands they are and must eternally be other than He, and He is and must be antecedent to and independent of them. He is transcendent above all His works even while He is imminent within them.” (p62)

“God is here.” (p62)

“The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same. There can be the one without the other. God is here when we are wholly unaware of it. He is manifest only when and as we are aware of His Presence.” (p64)

“Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us. The approach of God to the soul or of the soul to God is not to be thought of in spatial terms at all. There is no idea of physical distance involved in the concept. It is not a matter of miles but of experience.” (p65)

“God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, ‘O Lord, Thou knowest.’ Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God’s omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints.” (p68)

“The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. The tragic results of this spirit are all about us.” (p69)

-AW Tozer
The Pursuit of God

“The Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or thing that comes with the field of their experience.” (p50)

“At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The object of the Christian’s faith is unseen reality.” (p56)

“Our uncorrected thinking, influenced by the blindness of our natural hearts and the intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a contrast between the spiritual and the real; but actually no such contrast exists. The spiritual is real.” (p56-57)

-AW Tozer
The Pursuit of God

“That type of Christianity which happens now to be the vogue knows this Presence only in theory. It fails to stress the Christian’s privilege of present realization.” (p37)

“He has discovered Himself to some extent in nature, but more perfectly in the Incarnation; now He waits to show Himself in ravishing fullness to the humble of soul and the pure in heart.” (p38)

“God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.” (p42)

“Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wise as the sea. The hard voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy Presence is a privilege open to every child of God.” (p43)

“Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. As well try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins (self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love) to the cross for judgement. Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it.” (p46)

-AW Tozer
The Pursuit of God

 

“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 ever could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.” (p22)

“Abraham had everything but he possessed nothing. There is the sweet theology of the heart which can be learned only in the school of renunciation. The world said, ‘Abraham is rich’, but the aged patriarch only smiled. He could not explain it to them, but he knew he owned nothing, that his real treasures were inward and eternal.” (p27-28)

“The ancient curse will not go out painlessly; the tough old miser within us will not lie down and die obedient to our command. He must be torn out of our heart like a plant from the soil; he must be extracted in agony and blood like a tooth from the jaw.” (p30)

“Father, I want to know Thee, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and  do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself will be the light of it, and there shall be no night there.” (p30)

-AW Tozer
The Pursuit of God

“The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of the impulse is our following hard after Him, and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand.” (p11-12)

“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.” (p15)

“Now as always God discovers Himself to “babes” and hides Himself in thick darkness from the wise and the prudent. We must simplify our approach to Him. 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.” (p18)

-AW Tozer
The Pursuit of God