Tozer on the "new cross"

“The new cross does not slay the sinner, it redirects him. It gears him into a cleaner and jollier way of living and saves his self-respect. To the self-assertive it says, "Come and assert yourself for Christ." To the egotist it says, "Come and do your boasting in the Lord." To the thrill- seeker it says, "Come and enjoy the thrill of Christian fellowship." The Christian message is slanted in the direction of the current vogue in order to make it acceptable to the public.”

-AW Tozer

Tozer on Sin

Aiden W Tozer wrote often about the need to press beyond an intellectual understanding of Christian theology and doctrine into a real experience of and relationship with God. In his day he saw an emphasis on such intellectual understanding at the expense of really knowing God. I think that in many circles the situation has reversed itself in our day - we crave experience and minimize theology and doctrine. This is equally dangerous. One place this problem manifests itself is in our response to sin. When we don't grasp the personal nature of our relationship with God it is easy to think of sin in merely legal terms, something that must be tolerated or dealt with according to certain procedures. Likewise, if our focus is entirely on a content-less experience of Christ, we may not have a high view of the holiness of God and of His wrath against sin. We may simply say, "Sorry," as if we just bumped into Him in the hall. Sin is very serious business. Tozer reminds us, however,

"Regardless of what men may say, we are still face to face with the sin question, and no man who has neglected to deal with his sins can even remotely understand the question of the deity of Christ and the mystery of the Godhead. Until the sinner has been brought before the bar of God and convicted of personal guilt, any notions he may have about Christ are bound to be academic, nothing more, and wholly unrelated to life. One deadly result of our failure to face up to the fact of sin is the widespread moral insensitivity which characterizes Christians these days... The nerve has died in the Christian conscience and the sin that would have driven our Christian fathers to their knees in a paroxysm of repentance leaves us almost untouched."

How do you think about sin? How do you respond to sin in your own life? Do you take it as seriously as God does? What would change if we did?

Tozer on "Temple Cleansing"

AW Tozer was a well-known preacher and writer who died in the 1950s (I think... anyway it was decades ago). It is amazing how prescient his writing is regarding the Church (and us as individual believers) in our day:

Temple Cleansers

"The critical need in this hour of the church's history is not what it is so often said to be: soul-winning, foreign missions, miracles. These are effects, not causes. The most pressing need just now is that we who call ourselves Christians should frankly acknowledge to each other and to God that we are astray; that we should confess that we are worldly, that our moral standards are low and we are spiritually cold. We need to cease our multitude of unscriptural activities, stop running when and where we have not been sent, and cease trying to sanctify carnal projects by professing that we are promoting them in the name of the Lord and for the glory of God. We need to return to the message, methods and objectives of the New Testament. We need boldly and indignantly to cleanse the temple of all that sell cattle in the holy place, and overthrow the tables of the money-changers. And this must be done in our own lives first and then in the churches of which we are a part."

Tozer on Prayer

AW Tozer is such a rich source of wisdom:

"Juliana of Norwich at the beginning of her wonderful Christian life addressed a prayer to her Savior and then added the wise words, "'And this I ask without any condition.'"

"It was that last sentence that gave power to the rest of her prayer and brought the answer in mighty poured-out floods as the years went by. God could answer her prayer because He did not need to mince matters with her. She did not hedge her prayers around with disclaimers and provisos. She wanted certain things from God at any cost. God, as it were, had only to send her the bill. She would pay any price to get what she conceived to be good for her soul and glorifying to her Heavenly Father. That is real praying.

"Many of us spoil our prayers by being too "dainty" with the Lord (as some old writer called it). We ask with the tacit understanding that the cost must be reasonable. After all, there is a limit to everything, and we do not want to be fanatical! We want the answer to be something added, not something taken away. We want nothing radical or out of the ordinary, and we want God to accommodate us at our convenience. Thus we attach a rider to every prayer, making it impossible for God to answer it."

From: We Travel an Appointed Way Chapter #17

Tozer on Worship

Today I want to leave a thought from AW Tozer, one of the great preachers of the first half of the twentieth century:

"It remains only to be said that worship as we have described it here is almost (though, thank God, not quite) a forgotten art in our day. For whatever we can say of modern Bible-believing Christians, it can hardly be denied that we are not remarkable for our spirit of worship. The gospel as preached by good men in our times may save souls, but it does not create worshipers.

Our meetings are characterized by cordiality, humor, affability, zeal and high animal spirits; but hardly anywhere do we find gatherings marked by the overshadowing presence of God. We manage to get along on correct doctrine, fast tunes, pleasing personalities and religious
amusements.

How few, how pitifully few are the enraptured souls who languish for love of Christ...."