The Call Of A Prophet by A.W. Tozer

What Is It To Accept Jesus by A.W. Tozer

The Voice of The Lost by A.W. Tozer

The Theology of Christmas by A.W. Tozer

The New Year As God Sees It by A.W. Tozer

The Menace of the Religious Movie

The Holy Spirit Let Him Come by A.W. Tozer

The Hidden Life of Faith by A.W. Tozer

The Heart is the Best Theologian by A.W. Tozer

The Bridge That Was Too Short by A.W. Tozer

The Saint must walk alone: by A.W. Tozer

Most of the world's great souls have been lonely.

Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness.

In the morning of the world (or should we say, in that strange darkness that came soon after the dawn of man's creation), that pious soul, Enoch, walked with God and was not, for God took him; and while it is not stated in so many words, a fair inference is that Enoch walked a path quite apart from his contemporaries.

Another lonely man was Noah who, of all the antediluvians, found grace in the sight of God; and every shred of evidence points to the aloneness of his life even while surrounded by his people.

Again, Abraham had Sarah and Lot, as well as many servants and herdsmen, but who can read his story and the apostolic comment upon it without sensing instantly that he was a man "whose soul was alike a star and dwelt apart"? As far as we know not one word did God ever speak to him in the company of men. Face down he communed with his God, and the innate dignity of the man forbade that he assume this posture in the presence of others. How sweet and solemn was the scene that night of the sacrifice when he saw the lamps of fire moving between the pieces of offering. There, alone with a horror of great darkness upon him, he heard the voice of God and knew that he was a man marked for divine favor.

Moses also was a man apart. While yet attached to the court of Pharaoh he took long walks alone, and during one of these walks while far removed from the crowds he saw an Egyptian and a Hebrew fighting and came to the rescue of his countryman. After the resultant break with Egypt he dwelt in almost complete seclusion in the desert. There, while he watched his sheep alone, the wonder of the burning bush appeared to him, and later on the peak of Sinai he crouched alone to gaze in fascinated awe at the Presence, partly hidden, partly disclosed, within the cloud and fire.

The prophets of pre-Christian times differed widely from each other, but one mark they bore in common was their enforced loneliness. They loved their people and gloried in the religion of the fathers, but their loyalty to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and their zeal for the welfare of the nation of Israel drove them away from the crowd and into long periods of heaviness. "I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children," cried one and unwittingly spoke for all the rest.

Most revealing of all is the sight of that One of whom Moses and all the prophets did write, treading His lonely way to the cross. His deep loneliness was unrelieved by the presence of the multitudes.

'Tis midnight, and on Olive's brow

The star is dimmed that lately shone;
'Tis midnight; in the garden now,
The suffering Savior prays alone.

'Tis midnight, and from all removed
The Savior wrestles lone with fears;
E'en the disciple whom He loved
Heeds not his Master's grief and tears.

- William B. Tappan

He died alone in the darkness hidden from the sight of mortal man and no one saw Him when He arose triumphant and walked out of the tomb, though many saw Him afterward and bore witness to what they saw. There are some things too sacred for any eye but God's to look upon. The curiosity, the clamor, the well-meant but blundering effort to help can only hinder the waiting soul and make unlikely if not impossible the communication of the secret message of God to the worshiping heart.

Sometimes we react by a kind of religious reflex and repeat dutifully the proper words and phrases even though they fail to express our real feelings and lack the authenticity of personal experience. Right now is such a time. A certain conventional loyalty may lead some who hear this unfamiliar truth expressed for the first time to say brightly, "Oh, I am never lonely. Christ said, `I will never leave you nor forsake you,' and `Lo, I am with you alway.' How can I be lonely when Jesus is with me?"

Now I do not want to reflect on the sincerity of any Christian soul, but this stock testimony is too neat to be real. It is obviously what the speaker thinks should be true rather than what he has proved to be true by the test of experience. This cheerful denial of loneliness proves only that the speaker has never walked with God without the support and encouragement afforded him by society. The sense of companionship which he mistakenly attributes to the presence of Christ may and probably does arise from the presence of friendly people. Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross. "They all forsook Him, and fled."

The pain of loneliness arises from the constitution of our nature. God made us for each other. The desire for human companionship is completely natural and right. The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from that of the unregenerate world. His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others of his kind, others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share inner experiences, he is forced to walk alone. The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way.

The man who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. A certain amount of social fellowship will of course be his as he mingles with religious persons in the regular activities of the church, but true spiritual fellowship will be hard to find. But he should not expect things to be otherwise. After all he is a stranger and a pilgrim, and the journey he takes is not on his feet but in his heart. He walks with God in the garden of his own soul - and who but God can walk there with him? He is of another spirit from the multitudes that tread the courts of the Lord's house. He has seen that of which they have only heard, and he walks among them somewhat as Zacharias walked after his return from the altar when the people whispered, "He has seen a vision."

The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honored but to see his Savior glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none, he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.

It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. "When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up." His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else. He learns in inner solitude what he could not have learned in the crowd - that Christ is All in All, that He is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, that in Him we have and possess life's summum bonum.

Two things remain to be said. One, that the lonely man of whom we speak is not a haughty man, nor is he the holier-than-thou, austere saint so bitterly satirized in popular literature. He is likely to feel that he is the least of all men and is sure to blame himself for his very loneliness. He wants to share his feelings with others and to open his heart to some like-minded soul who will understand him, but the spiritual climate around him does not encourage it, so he remains silent and tells his griefs to God alone.

The second thing is that the lonely saint is not the withdrawn man who hardens himself against human suffering and spends his days contemplating the heavens. Just the opposite is true. His loneliness makes him sympathetic to the approach of the broken hearted and the fallen and the sin-bruised. Because he is detached from the world, he is all the more able to help it. Meister Eckhart taught his followers that if they should find themselves in prayer and happen to remember that a poor widow needed food, they should break off the prayer instantly and go care for the widow. "God will not suffer you to lose anything by it," he told them. "You can take up again in prayer where you left off and the Lord will make it up to you." This is typical of the great mystics and masters of the interior life from Paul to the present day.

The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. In their effort to achieve restful "adjustment" to unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very moral order against which they are sent to protest. The world recognizes them and accepts them for what they are. And this is the saddest thing that can be said about them. They are not lonely, but neither are they saints.

AW Tozer

Christ’s Flesh Is Real Food; His Blood Is True Drink

This is a great mystery, but it has nothing to do with transubstantiation.
Just previous to His declaration to the Jews after feeding the five thousand, Jesus spoke something similar to the Woman at the Well of Samaria. Jesus mercifully opened her eyes to her sinfulness and her need for true water that springs up to eternal life. He tells her in this conversation that He is indeed the Messiah. She believes and rushes into the town, abandoning her precious water pot, and tells anyone and everyone that she has possibly met the Messiah. And surely it is more than a possibility for her to rush into her town, without her water pot, and to sound like a madwoman about this long-awaited Messiah. I mean, haven’t people learnt yet that the Messiah is just the stuff of legends? Not so.
He speaks of living waters to the woman and real food to His disciples. Then in John 6:47-58 he reveals to the Jews what real food is—His flesh, the propitiation of all of humankind’s sins—and real drink, His blood, or the cross and suffering of carrying the Cross, and ultimately the infilling of the Holy Spirit. It is all connected. Let us examine.
Firstly, the propitiation, or His flesh, is the sacrifice once for all the sins of the world. Once we believe in His work on the Cross, and His resurrection for the sake of our sins so we won’t go to Hell, and we confess Jesus Christ as our Saviour and Lord, we are saved. This is true food.
Secondly, the blood represents His suffering on the Cross and how we must also hate our very lives for the sake of Christ. This is our Cross. This is true drink…but He doesn’t stop there for in John 7:37-39, Jesus says that “If anyone is thirsty, let him (her) come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.’ “ But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive…” So oddly enough, and I have yet to figure out if this is just a semantic connection or if it is truly related, the blood of Christ seems to tie in both the Cross and the Holy Spirit’s indwelling. I wonder if we could have one without the other—this I believe we can’t; we must have both to be truly Christian and truly victorious as a Christian.
That’s all fine and dandy, but how does that translate into our modern lives now? Believing takes His work in us. But the Cross, once we believe, is difficult only because we don’t hate ourselves (our fleshly lives) unto death with the vision of Christ as our prize, and eternal life as our goal. Hence if we take up His burden we shall find that His “yoke is easy” and His “burden is light”, for the Spirit teaches us all things and comforts us. In every way the Holy Spirit guides us and speaks through us without any preparation or previous training. He also heals. He gives us the water that springs unto eternal life because it comes from God, Himself.
I have many things I need take care of in the next many months or years as the Lord leads. Each of them means denying the self (the flesh) and picking up the Cross of Christ to follow Him. One thing is a Chinese craft book full of stories and customs of ancient China that I gave to a young daughter of a friend. I have tried asking for it back, to no avail. For “woe to the man who presents himself as a stumbling block…to these little ones…better if he had had a millstone tied around his neck and was thrown into the sea…” And “if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. Better to have one hand than to have both hands and be thrown into the Lake of Fire…Be not afraid of him who destroys the body, but Him who has the power to destroy both body and soul in Hell.” This is serious. I haven’t been able to get this off my mind that I might have led this poor little one astray…so I have to reckon with it. I am giving her a much nicer book that I personally like a lot to induce her to give back the old one that I might destroy that superstitious book. You may think now that I brag to get my reward from you, but truth is I get no reward from the One Father whose reward from whom it truly matters because I have made it public. But I do this as an illustration to help you, my readers, in knowing that you are not alone in tizzies and dilemmas. For the Devil, that old Serpent, loves to get us into dilemmas, real or imagined. He loves to confound the sincere Christian as well as those just escaping the vice grip of sin. If in doubt, ask God the Father for wisdom and believe that God gives wisdom freely without finding fault. Then ask for the Holy Spirit to help you to obey. (For His burden is easy and His yoke is light!) Amen.
Do not be discouraged if you are rebuked by a God or convicted quietly by the Holy Spirit to repent. It is life. It is truth. It is food and drink. Eat and drink, and desire more.

God's Peculiar People

A.W. Tozer's Choices, Deeds and Consequences Sermon

This is the Day that the Lord hath made! We will rejoice and be glad in it!

What is salvation if not a childlike trust in the Lord that He has all things in His control?

Today we surrendered our cats to the local shelter because we could no longer care for them. My parents, approaching their 70s within a year, are unable to give them much more than daily necessities. I am unable to care for them 24/7 because of my own taxing needs. Often they went without love or medical attention.

I cried for two nights after being told we could surrender them. How will they adjust? Who will adopt them? Would they be put down? Most of all, how will I be able to leave them there, with their trusting eyes burning in my memory? They have been sweet companions for six years and the last thing I wanted to do was to betray them.

Then the verse came: Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground but that the Father knows; are you not worth more than many sparrows? My friends and family rallied to buoy us up in prayer today. I offered the Lord Jesus and the Heavenly Father my praises and the more I praised, the more joyful I became. I realized this: That true salvation has to do with trusting and rejoicing in childlikeness in the Heavenly Father, period. None of this complicity of church corruption and even the sanctioned non-law laws, but a real lifting up our hearts in praise and thankfulness…a surrendering of ourselves and our worries to the Master who knows all, sees all, and swiftly acts to bring about good.

I prayed for the cats. Hard. I prayed that they’d be healed and taken care of and rehomed almost as immediately as they can stand it after being healed. May they find good loving homes and cat-savvy owners who can afford to keep them. The Good Lord have tender mercies upon them!