Aiden Wilson Tozer (better known as A. W. Tozer) was born in Pennsylvania on April 21, 1897. He converted to Christianity in Akron, Ohio, as a teenager, after hearing a street preacher. Five years later, in 1919, he began to pastor, despite no formal theological training. He spent 44 years in ministry, 33 of it as pastor of several churches.
Besides pastoring, Tozer was an author, magazine editor, and spiritual mentor to many. Though he did not attend seminary, he was awarded two honorary doctoral degrees. He also did not attend high school or college, having been born into poverty, but educated himself.
Tozer and his wife, Ada, had seven children (6 boys and a girl). They lived simply, choosing not to own a car. He gave away most of his royalties from book sales.
Tozer died in 1963, leaving over 60 books either written by him or compiled from his sermons and other articles. His most well known books are The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy.
Quotes
God
You can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him.
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
With the goodness of God to desire our highest welfare, the wisdom of God to plan it, and the power of God to achieve it, what do we lack?
To meditate on the three Persons of the Godhead is to walk in thought through the garden eastward in Eden and to tread on holy ground. Our sincerest effort to grasp the incomprehensible mystery of the Trinity must remain forever futile, and only by deepest reverence can it be saved from actual presumption.
Were all human beings suddenly to become blind, still the sun would shine by day and the stars by night, for these owe nothing to the millions who benefit from their light. So, were every man on earth to become an atheist, it could not affect God in any way. He is what He is in Himself without regard to any other. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections; to doubt Him takes nothing away.
God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all His works. He is transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.
The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.
God wants us to worship Him. He doesn’t need us, for He couldn’t be a self-sufficient God and need anything or anybody, but He wants us. When Adam sinned it was not He who cried, “God, where art Thou?” It was God who cried, “Adam, where art thou?”
We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work.
Faith
Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.
True faith rests upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfections of the One who cannot lie. It is enough that God has said it.
Faith, as Paul saw it, was a living, flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ.
Life
We must face the fact that many today are notoriously careless in their living. This attitude finds its way into the church. We have liberty, we have money, we live in comparative luxury. As a result, discipline practically has disappeared. What would a violin solo sound like if the strings on the musician’s instrument were all hanging loose, not stretched tight, not “disciplined”?
The great of this world are those who simply loved God more than others did.
Boasting is an evidence that we are pleased with self; belittling, that we are disappointed in it. Either way, we reveal that we have a high opinion of ourselves.
The important thing about a man is not where he goes when he is compelled to go, but where he goes when he is free to go where he will.
An honest man with an open Bible and a pad and pencil is sure to find out what is wrong with him very quickly.
If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.
Gratitude is an offering precious in the sight of God, and it is one that the poorest of us can make and be not poorer but richer for having made it.
We’re here to be worshippers first and workers only second. We take a convert and immediately make a worker out of him. God never meant it to be so. God meant that a convert should learn to be a worshiper, and after that he can learn to be a worker… The work done by a worshiper will have eternity in it.
Christians don’t tell lies; they just go to church and sing them.
I do not think I exaggerate when I say that some of us put our offering in the plate with a kind of triumphant bounce as much as to say: “There – now God will feel better!” I am obliged to tell you that God does not need anything you have. He does not need a dime of your money. It is your own spiritual welfare at stake in such matters as these. You have the right to keep what you have all to yourself – but it will rust and decay, and ultimately ruin you.
The Bible
The Bible is a supernatural book and can be understood only by supernatural aid.
There is scarcely anything so dull and meaningless as Bible doctrine taught for its own sake. Truth divorced from life is not truth in its biblical sense, but something else and something less.
I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.
The Bible recognizes no faith that does not lead to obedience, nor does it recognize any obedience that does not spring from faith. The two are at opposite sides of the same coin.