Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

The thankful Christian will turn with true delight to the expression of Joseph Addison in his Thanksgiving hymn, "When All Thy Mercies, 0 My God," found in many of the better hymnals. Addison gives a mental image that requires music for its expression: Ten thousand thousand precious gifts My daily thanks employ; Nor is the least a cheerful heart That tastes these gifts with joy! Here is the spirit of thanksgiving. Here is the understanding of what pleases God in our acceptance and use of His...

Truth is like a bird; it cannot fly on one wing. Yet we are forever trying to take off with one wing flapping furiously and the other tucked neatly out of sight. Many of the doctrinal divisions among the churches are the result of a blind and stubborn insistence that truth has but one wing. Each side holds tenaciously to one text, refusing grimly to acknowledge the validity of the other. This error is an evil among churches, but it is a real tragedy when it gets into the hearts of individual...

I am being very frank about this and I hope I am being helpful: do not ever say you are not right with God because you like some people better than others! I believe you can be right with God and still not like the way some people behave. It is easy to love those who are the friendly; others rub us the wrong way or perhaps they cut us down. The writer to the Hebrews has appealed to us as Christian believers to "let brotherly love continue" -- in other words, "never stop loving one another in...

Seekers after God. Thanks be to God on high that these too are among us. They are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Their number is not large when counted against the millions who have forgotten their Maker, but taken together they are a goodly company and dear to the heart of God. Ah, those God-hungry souls! By nature they are no better than the rest of men, and by practice they have sometimes been worse. The one sign of their divine election is their insatiable thirst after...

Unnecessary burdens are crushing the life out of people every day. Mental institutions are overflowing and psychiatrists are doing a rushing business because the burden of living is getting to be more than we can bear. Civilization has not made our lot easier except in things pertaining to the body; the burdens of the heart are growing more numerous, and science has found no remedy. The silky voice of the practitioner may soothe the mind for a time, but the disease is too deep to yield...

No sin is private. It may be secret but it is not private.

It is a great error to hold, as some do, that each man's conduct is his own business unless his acts infringe on the rights of others. "My liberty ends where yours begins" is true, but that is not all the truth. No one ever has the right to commit an evil act, no matter how secret. God wills that men should be free, but not that they be free to commit sin.

Sin is three-dimensional and has consequences in three...

Are we raising a whole generation of young men and women without any sensitivity to the voice of God's Holy Spirit" I am on record, and I will be as long as I live, that I would rather lose a leg and hobble along throughout the rest of my life than to lose my sensitivity to God and to His voice and to spiritual things! Oh, how I want to keep that sensitivity within me-within my soul! I am thinking about a great throng of men and women raised in Christian homes. They have been brought up in...

The dream of a universal brotherhood based upon the ethics of Jesus is just that-a dream. It is compounded of a few words of Christ mixed with vast numbers of uninspired words spoken by men whose yearnings are to be commended but whose wisdom is suspect. To arrive at the doctrine of brotherhood it is necessary that we reject the major portion of the New Testament and misunderstand the rest. There were once two brothers. They lived in a society that had not had time to develop the many social...

Third, the church is depicted as an ark on the flood waters. As the ark of Noah floated on the waters and contained all who would be salvaged, so the church of Jesus Christ is an ark on the flood waters and contains all who will be salvaged. Remember that! All in the ark are saved, and all outside the ark perish. All around us is a perishing world, and we float on top of it in a little ark called the church. All that are not in the church—the ark—will perish. You say, "Now hold on a minute....

The ethics of Jesus must be imposed upon society, we are told, then all inequalities will vanish; the division of humanity into rich and poor, great and small, privileged and underprivileged will be no more. Under the benign influence of Christs ethics of love, greed and war will disappear from the earth and the dream of universal brotherhood be realized at last. The teachings of Jesus belong to the Church, not to society. In society is sin and sin is hostility to God. Christ did not teach...

. . . 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. I am convinced that many evangelicals are not truly and soundly converted. Among the evangelicals it is entirely possible to come into membership, to ooze in by osmosis, to leak through the cells of the church and never know what it means to be born of the Spirit and washed in the...

A lifetime of observation, Bible reading and prayer has led to the conclusion that the only thing that can hinder a Christian's progress is the Christian himself.

The true child of God can live and grow in circumstances that are wholly unfavorable to such life and growth. Outward circumstances can help little or none in a Christian's spiritual life. The whole philosophy of the spiritual way requires us to believe this.

For this reason, it is always bad to blame anyone or...

Do not try to short-circuit God's plans for your discipleship. and spiritual maturity here. If you and I were already prepared for heaven in the moment of our conversion, God would have taken us home instantly! We must remember that God exists in Himself. His holy nature is such that we cannot comprehend Him with our minds. He is of a substance not shared by any other being. Hence, God can be known only as He reveals Himself! I have found this to be a fact: every redeemed human being needs...

The announcement of the birth of Christ came as a sunburst of joy to a world where grief and pain are known to all and joy comes rarely and never tarries long.

The joy the angel brought to the awe-struck shepherds was not to be a disembodied wisp of religious emotion, swelling and ebbing like the sound of an aeolian harp in the rising and falling of the wind. Rather it was and is a state of lasting gladness resulting from tidings that there was born in the city of David a Savior...