A.W. Tozer: ‘Give Yourself to God’

A.W. Tozer (1897-1963) was one of American Christianity’s leading lights in the twentieth century.

To this day he continues to be one of the most widely-read devotional authors within Western Christendom. His ministry was marked by a strong sense of the divine presence and an aching longing for Spirit-sent revival.

Tozer was convinced that the Lord was going to raise up a godly standard as He had done in previous generations. He fed off the great exploits that the Almighty had done in the past and thus took great courage for the present in spite of much opposition.

Tozer was a pastor and author who lived out in life what he had once asked of his readers: “Keep your feet on the ground, but let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average or to surrender to the chill of your spiritual environment”.

Tozer was a soul-hot man of God all the way through. In today’s article, we have put together 35 great quotes from one of Tozer’s forgotten tomes ‘Of God and Men’ so as to give you a flavour of this servant of the Most High.1 Page numbers are at the end of each quote.

Be challenged! Be stirred! Be encouraged!

May the God of Tozer revive us again!

35 A.W. Tozer Quotes

The average so-called Bible Christian in our times is but a wretched parody on true sainthood. Yet we put millions of dollars behind movements to perpetuate this degenerate form of religion and attack the man who dares to challenge the wisdom of it. (13)

If evangelical Christianity is to stay alive she must have men again, the right kind of men. She must repudiate the weaklings who dare not speak out, and she must seek in prayer and much humility the coming again of men of the stuff prophets and martyrs are made of. (16)

God will hear the cries of His people as He heard the cries of Israel in Egypt. And He will send deliverance by sending deliverers. It is His way among men. And when the deliverers come –reformers, revivalists, prophets- they will be men of God and men of courage. They will have God on their side because they will be careful to stay on God’s side. They will be co-workers with Christ and instruments in the hand of the Holy Ghost. Such men will be baptized with the Spirit indeed, and through their labours He will baptize others and send the long delayed revival. (16)

In this day when shimmering personalities carry on the Lord’s work after the methods of the entertainment world it is refreshing to associate for a moment even in the pages of a book with a sincere and humble man who keeps his own personality out of sight and places the emphasis upon the working of God. (17-18)

It is our belief that the Evangelical movement will continue to drift farther and farther from the New Testament position unless its leadership passes from the modern religious star to the self-effacing saint who asks for no praise and seeks no place, happy only when the glory is attributed to God and himself forgotten. (18)

A prophet is one who knows his times and what God is trying to say to the people of his times. (20)

Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has heard a voice from the throne. When he comes (and I pray there will be not one but many) he will stand in flat contradiction to everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear.

He will contradict, denounce and protest in the name of God and will earn the hatred and opposition of a large segment of Christendom. Such a man is likely to be lean, rugged, blunt-spoken and a little bit angry with the world. He will love Christ and the souls of men to the point of willingness to die for the glory of the one and the salvation of the other. But he will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath. (23)

To be effective the preacher’s message must be alive; it must alarm, arouse, challenge; it must be God’s present voice to a particular people. (24)

To expect of once-born nations conduct possible only to the regenerated, purified, Spirit-led followers of Christ is to confuse the truth of Christianity and hope for the impossible. (32)

Christianity will always reproduce itself after its kind. (34)

To spread an effete, degenerate brand of Christianity to pagan lands is not to fulfil the commandment of Christ or discharge our obligation to the heathen. (35)

Evangelical Christianity is now tragically below the New Testament standard. Worldliness is an accepted part of our way of life. Our religious mood is social instead of spiritual. We have lost the art of worship. We are not producing saints. Our models are successful businessmen, celebrated athletes and theatrical personalities.

We carry on our religious activities after the methods of the modern advertiser. Our homes have been turned into theatres. Our literature is shallow and our hymnody borders on sacrilege. And scarcely anyone appears to care. (36)

God is more concerned with the state of people’s hearts than with the state of their feelings. (45)

I believe our problem is that we have been trying to substitute praying for obeying; and it simply will not work. (51)

It is not enough that we believe; we must believe the right thing about the right One. (56)

True faith requires that we believe everything God has said about Himself, but also that we believe everything He has said about us. Until we believe that we are as bad as God says we are, we can never believe that He will do for us what He says He will do. (56)

No man has a right to pick and choose among revealed truths. God has spoken. We are all under solemn obligation to hear the affirmations of the Holy Ghost. (56)

Let us beware that the Jesus we “accept” is not one we have created out of the dust of our imagination and formed after our own likeness. (57)

It is much easier to pray that a poor friend’s needs may be supplied than to supply them. (60)

The Bible is a record of the struggle of twice-born men to live in a world run by the once-born. (63)

Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian. (67)

We Christians are bound in all conscience to discourage the reading of subversive literature and to promote as fully as possible the circulation of good books and magazines. (78)

Tolerance of noxious literature is not a mark of intellectual size; it may be a mark of secret sympathy with evil. (78)

Christians should judge a book by its purity, not by the reputation of its author. (79)

The desire to appear broad-minded is not easy to overcome, for it is rooted in our ego and is simply a none-too-subtle form of pride. In the name of broad-mindedness many a Christian home has been opened to literature that sprang not from a broad mind, but from a mind little and dirty and polluted with evil. (79)

We have all met those people who will not be serious. They meet everything with a laugh and a funny remark. That is bad enough in the world, but positively intolerable among Christians. (80)

Few sights are more depressing than that of a professed Christian defending his supposed rights and bitterly resisting any attempt to violate them. Such a Christian has never accepted the way of the cross. (89)

It is hard to see how any man who has seen heaven opened and has heard the voice of God speaking to his own heart can ever be uncertain about the truth he is to hold or the message he must proclaim. (97)

Paul was a better man for his thorn. (102)

Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. (103)

Stop trying to compete with others. Give yourself to God and then be what and who you are without regard to what others think. (106)

The modern vogue of bringing science to the support of Christianity proves not the truth of the Christian faith but the gnawing uncertainty in the hearts of those who must look to science to give respectability to their belief. (113)

We are not opposed to science, but we recognize its proper limitations and refuse to stop where it is compelled to stop. (118)

Everything done by the churches should be completely above suspicion. The true church will have nothing to hide. Her books will be available to anyone for inspection at any time. Her officers will insist upon an audit by someone from the outside. (122)

The problems of origin and destiny have escaped the philosopher and the scientist, but the humblest follower of Christ knows the answer to both. (129)