Introduction
Aiden Wilson Tozer was born on a Pennsylvania farm at the end of the 1800s. At age 15, he moved to Akron, Ohio, and started working in the factories. When he was 17, a neighbor came alongside him, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, “You know, I have been wondering about you. I have been wondering if you are a Christian, if you are converted. I just wanted a chance to talk it over with you.”
Young Tozer said, “No, Mr. Holman, I am not converted, but I thank you for saying this to me. I am going to give it some serious thought.”
Sometime later while walking down the street, Tozer heard a man speaking with a strong German accent. Tozer paused to listen and he realized the man was a street preacher. The man said, “If you don’t know how to be saved, just call on God, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner,’ and God will hear you.”
Tozer went home, went up into the attic, and wrestled it out for himself. He emerged from the attic a new creation in Christ. Instantly he had a ravenous hunger to learn about the Lord. He lived in a crowded house with no privacy, but he found a small, unused space in the basement behind the furnace. He claimed the spot, cleaned it, made it comfortable, and there he spent hours in prayer and Bible study.
Tozer said that after becoming a Christian in his youth, he attended a church that seemed to be of little spiritual help to him. One Sunday he awoke in a bad mood and decided, “I’m not going to church today.” Instead he went for a walk in the country.
“I turned aside to walk through a grassy field,” he said. “In the middle of the field my foot suddenly kicked something hidden in the grass—something red. I stopped and picked up an old, red-bound book. It looked as if it had been out in the rain, had dried out, had been rained on again and again and dried out again. The book was not some old literary classic. It was not a discarded book of cheap fiction. It was a Christian handbook: a thousand questions and answers for anyone interested in Bible study.”
Tozer opened the book and scanned a few pages. He realized how much he didn’t know about the Bible, and how he had discarded the one place where the answers were to be found. He started for home, resolved to be faithful to the one who had providentially planted that book in his pathway.
“In the providence of God it was that day the reminder I needed of the goodness and faithfulness of God,” he wrote.
That’s how Tozer became a Bible student, and he particularly enjoyed reading the mystics.
In time, Tozer married, joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and started pastoring in West Virginia, though he had never received any formal theological training. In 1928, he became pastor of the Southside Gospel Tabernacle in Chicago, and there he stayed for over three decades. The church grew steadily but not spectacularly. At no time during his pastorate there did the Sunday morning congregation average more than 400 to 500 people.
He wasn’t a good pastor when it came to visiting his members or tending the flock. He didn’t even particularly want to chat with his people before or after the services on Sunday. He usually entered the service during the first hymn, and after the benediction instead of greeting people he would retreat to his study until most everyone had left. He was something of a recluse. He devoted time to prayer, Bible study, and sermon preparation. He so loved to read that he would sometimes buy a round-trip ticket on a train just to procure a few hours of privacy for study and prayer. “The cost is worth it,” he said, “And besides, I like riding the train!” Much of his inspiration came from reading the ancient Christian mystics, like Fénelon.
Tozer’s ministry of writing came to the forefront after he was hired as editor of his denominational magazine, The Alliance Weekly. His editorials were so powerful that many people of all denominations subscribed to the magazine just to read his columns. Even today, some of the various books that have been published after his death are compilations of these essays. My favorite is called We Travel An Appointed Way, and I’ve often quoted it in sermons and books.
Tozer said: “To the child of God, there is no such thing as an accident. He travels an appointed way…. Accidents may indeed appear to befall him and misfortune stalk his way; but these evils will be so in appearance only and will seem evils only because we cannot read the secret script of God’s hidden providence.”
Another of Tozer’s books is entitled The Pursuit of God. It was written under unusual circumstances. Tozer was invited to preach in Texas and he wrote the book on the train.
He boarded the Pullman at the old LaSalle Street Station in Chicago. He was bound for McAllen, Texas. He had a very small compartment on the train—a roomette—but it contained a small writing table. As the train lugged out of the station, Tozer sat at his small table with his Bible open before him and began to write. About 9 p.m., the porter offered to bring him some food. Tozer ordered toast and tea and kept writing. He wrote all night long, the words coming to him in torrents. By the time the train pulled into McAllen, Texas, he had a rough draft of The Pursuit of God.
Tozer preached and wrote at Southside Tabernacle in Chicago for 31 years. When it appeared his church needed to relocate he resigned to let someone else take over the work. He ended up in Toronto, where he became the preaching pastor of a church for the remaining five years of his life.
It was while he was in Toronto that he finished his greatest book (in my opinion), a book on the attributes of God entitled The Knowledge of the Holy.
He began the book saying, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God…. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.”
“It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to moral calamity.”
In 1963, Tozer suffered chest pains, entered the hospital, and passed away there at the age of 66.
Some insights:
A. W. Tozer said, “To say that God is omniscient is to say that He possesses perfect knowledge, and therefore has no need to learn. But it is more: it is to say that God has never learned and cannot learn.”
“Work that does not flow from worship is not spiritual work.”
“Worship is to feel in your heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe, astonished wonder and overpowering love in the presence of that most ancient Mystery which philosophers call the First Cause but which we call Our Father in Heaven.”
On angels, Tozer wrote:
Not only does a Christian believe in the invisible world but he also counts on it. He acts, plans, and lives as one who counts on the reality of the invisible…. The Christian counts on the other world, so that the invisible presence of God in His eternal kingdom, and the spirits made perfect in the holy church of the firstborn, and the Holy Ghost, and the invisible world actually influence his life…
It is a comforting thought that there are invisible worlds near us. It consoles us to know that when Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, angels came to comfort Him, and He could have had legions of angels by His side. Nothing has changed…. Angels are still here.
I’ve been enriched all my adult life by occasionally picking up a Tozer book. You will be too.