A.W. Tozer, Bible studies and sermons

[Shammu]

FAITH AND PRAYER
By A.W. Tozer

      In Hebrews we find a long list of benefits which faith brings to its possessor: justification, deliverance, fruitfulness, endurance, victory over enemies, courage, strength and even resurrection from the dead. Then, everything that is attributed thus to faith might with equal truth be attributed to prayer; for faith and true prayer are like two sides of the same coin-they are inseparable! Men may, and often do, pray without faith though this is not true prayer, but it is not thinkable that men should have faith and not pray. Whatever God can do faith can do, and whatever faith can do prayer can do when it is offered in faith. It should not be considered strange, then, that an invitation to prayer is an invitation to omnipotence, for prayer engages the Omnipresent God and brings Him into our human affairs. According to the Bible, we have because we ask or we have not because we ask not. It does not take much wisdom to discover our next move. Is it not to pray and pray again and again until the answer comes? Let us not fail the world and disappoint God by failing to pray!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

THE LONELY HUMAN
By A.W. Tozer

      There is a strange contradiction in human nature all around us: the fact that a person can reek with pride, display a swollen ego and strut like a peacock-and yet be the loneliest and most miserable person in the world! We find these people everywhere-pretending and playing a game. Deep within their beings, they are almost overwhelmed by their great loneliness, by their sense of being orphans in the final scheme of things. The result of this strange, aching human sense of loneliness and cosmic orphanage is the inward, groping question: "What good is it to be a human being? No one cares about me!" In the garden, Eve believed Satan's lie-the lie that God was not concerned about her and that God had no emotional connection with her life and being. This is where the unregenerate person is in today's world. It is only sin and defeat that can bring this sense of orphanage, this sense of having been put out of the father's house, and the feeling that follows when the house is burned down and the father is dead.

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

POSTPONING OBEDIENCE
By A.W. Tozer

       A notable heresy has come into being throughout our evangelical Christian circle-the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need Him as Savior, and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to Him as long as we want to! The truth is that salvation apart from obedience is unknown in the sacred Scriptures. Peter makes it plain that we are "elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience." It seems most important to me that Peter speaks of his fellow Christians as "obedient children." He knew their spirituality-he was not just giving them an exhortation to be obedient. The entire Bible teaches that true obedience to God and His Christ is one of the toughest requirements in the Christian life. Actually, salvation without obedience is a self-contradicting impossibility! Humans do not want to admit it, but the Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans long ago that "by one man's disobedience" came the downfall of the human race!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

HUMANS JUDGE THE LORD?
By A.W. Tozer

       It is a fact that God made us to worship Him, and if we had not fallen with Adam and Eve, worship would have been the most natural thing for us. Sinning was not the natural thing for Adam and Eve, but they disobeyed and fell, losing their privilege of perfect fellowship with God, the Creator. Sin is the unnatural thing; it was never intended by God to be our nature. Men and women who are out of fellowship with God, the Creator, still have an instinct towards some practice of worship. In most of our "civilized" circles, the practice of picking out what we like to worship and rejecting what we do not like is widespread. This has opened up an entire new field for applied psychology and humanism under a variety of religious disguises. Thus men and women set themselves as judges of what the Lord has said-and so they stand with pride and judge the Lord. In the Bible, God takes the matter of worship out of the hands of men and puts it in the hands of the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to worship God without the impartation of the Holy Spirit!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

PROBLEMS AND PRESSURES
By A.W. Tozer

      Jesus did not promise any of us that consistent Christian living would be easy! He did not promise a release from daily problems and pressures. He did not promise to take us to our heavenly home on a fluffy pink cloud! We live our lives in the knowledge of the grace of God, but we dare not forget that our Lord came to die for us and to express the never-changing moral and redemptive will of God for His people. Before we condemn the Jews of Bible history for their failures, we must be sure that we are not overlooking spiritual and moral shortcomings of our own! As Christian believers, you and I must be careful about the reasons we give for not heeding God's Word and God's warning from heaven. Have we taken His grace seriously enough that we have sought forgiveness for spiritual carelessness, indifference and apathy?

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

CHEAP RELIGION
By A.W. Tozer

      What passes for Christianity in our day is cheap religion! To listen to the current concepts of Christianity, we would conclude it is little more than bits of beautiful poetry, a man-made bouquet of fragrant flowers, a kindly smile for our neighbor and a couple of good deeds on behalf of a brother or sister. When I consider some of the elements now offered in Christianity as acceptable religion, I have to restrain myself lest I speak too disapprovingly. I fear my words would be so strong that I would have to repent of them! And I read in the Scriptures that there are some things God does not want us to say even about the devil. What do we find surfacing in much of our Christian fellowship? The complaint that God takes a long time to work out His will. We do not want to take the time to plow and cultivate. We want the fruit and the harvest right away. We do not want to be engaged in any spiritual battle that takes us into the long night. We want the morning light right now! We do not want the cross-we are more interested in the crown!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

BROTHERHOOD OF THE REDEEMED
By A.W. Tozer

      Anyone making even a quick review of Genesis will discover that God has told us more about His presence in creation and in history than about the details of human civilization. We believe that eternity dwells in the Person of God and that the material universe came into being through God's creation. The first man and woman in the human race were created. They failed in their initial encounter with Satan, our archenemy. Following that, the Genesis record becomes a narrative of human failure against the abiding backdrop of God's faithfulness. God Himself, through the Holy Spirit, points out a universal problem: the natural brotherhood of human beings is a sinful brotherhood. It is the brotherhood of all who are spiritually lost. But the Bible has good news. It is the revelation of a new brotherhood, the brotherhood of the redeemed! We know it in our time as the believing church of our Lord Jesus Christ in all nations. It is a new brotherhood among men based on regeneration-and restoration!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
By A.W. Tozer

      It was a gracious revelation to my human spirit when I discovered that the Word of God was actually on my side, operating in my behalf! I was reading Psalm 71 and I came to this amazing statement: "Thou hast given commandment to save me!" My heart has been warmed with that realization ever since. I believe that the Word of the living God has gone throughout all the earth to save me and keep me! Let the theological experts raise their eyebrow -- I do not care! The living Word has charged Himself with responsibility to forgive, to cleanse and to keep me! Let us not be guilty of under rating the Word of God operating on our behalf I dare to say that there is not an uncontrolled stroke or force anywhere in all of God's mighty universe that can take eternal life away from a trusting, believing, obedient child of God. Let us thank God for the Word! It is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

"TOP SIDE OF THE SOUL"
By A.W. Tozer

       It is certainly a reality in our day that too few men and women are willing to keep the "top side" of their souls open to God and to His light from heaven. You may wonder about such expression as the "top side" of the soul, but I do think it is in line with Bible teaching, and certainly in line with all Christian experience. The heart and soul are open to God in some people's lives, but certainly not in others. We should be aware that man's forgiveness is not always like God's. When a man makes a mistake and has to be forgiven, the shadow may still hang over him among his fellows. But when God forgives, He begins the new page right away. Then when the devil runs up and says, "What about his past?" God replies, "What past? He has been forgiven!" Now, I think that kind of forgiveness and justification and acceptance with God depends upon a person's willingness to keep the "top side" of the soul open to God and His saving grace!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

A PRAYER AT COMMUNION
By A.W. Tozer

      Dear Lord and Savior, we come to your table in faith, for you have told us, "As often as you do this, do it in memory of Me." Help us to celebrate this remembrance of death and resurrection in the very best way we know how. Do then, we pray Thee, overshadow us with Thy very breathing Presence. Breathe on us, 0 Breath of God; quicken and heal and purify and cleanse. Strengthen and perfect that which is wanting in us. Bless the strangers and the friends who happen to be within our gates today. Dear Lord, make them sense that they have found a home among us as we worship, and to realize that they are just as much "owners" here as we are; for it is the Lord's house and the Lord's table-it is not ours. We are all guests and children in the household-all of us! And we pray that we may love Thee acceptably, for we would not wound Thee again! Thou didst love us with such poured-out love that not even the blood in Thy veins was dear enough to Thee-we were dearer than that blood! All of this we ask in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

A CAREER-AND CHRIST
By A.W. Tozer

       It is a beautiful New Testament story that tells us of Lydia of Philippi, a career woman in her own right, long before there were laws and proclamations to set women free. A seller of purple, Lydia traveled to the market of her day, and undoubtedly she had found freedom and satisfaction in that era when women were not counted at all. But Lydia heard the Apostle Paul tell of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the Lord opened her heart. In Christ she found an eternal answer, which career and position had never been able to give. Now, about conditions today. Our society has set women free to be just as bad as the men-and just as miserable. We have set them free to swear and curse and to set their own morals. Politically, women are now free to vote just as blindly as the men do. But I hope women today will find what Lydia found: that their careers will lack the word "eternal" until they find their answer in the eternal Christ, our Lord Jesus!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

REJOICE-OR GRUMBLE
By A.W. Tozer

      I think all of us meet Christian men and women who always seem to look on the gloomy side and are never able to do anything with life's problems but grumble about them! I meet them often and when I do, I wonder: "Can these people be reading and trusting the same Bible I have been reading?" The Apostle Peter wrote to the tempted, suffering and persecuted believers in his day and noted with thanksgiving that they could rejoice because they counted God's promises and provisions greater than their trials! We do live in a sinful and imperfect world, and as believers in Christ we acknowledge that perfection is a relative thing now-and God has not really completed a thing with us, as yet! Peter testified that the persecuted and suffering Christians of his day were looking, in faith, to a future state of things immeasurably better than that which they knew, and that state of things would be perfect and complete!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

IS THE CHURCH WEARY?
By A.W. Tozer

      As Christian believers, we stand together in the evangelical faith-the historical faith of our fathers. Yet, we must confess that many congregations seem bogged down with moral boredom and life-weariness. The church is tired, discouraged and unastonished-Christ seems to belong to yesterday. The prophetic teachers have projected everything into the dim future where it is beyond our reach-unavailable! They have dispensationalized us into a state of spiritual poverty-and they have left us there! But regardless of such teachers, the course of spiritual victory is clear; let us trust what the Word of God continues to say to us! The Scriptures are open and plain. Jesus Christ is our Savior and Lord. He is our great High Priest, alive and ministering for us today. His person, His power and His grace are the same; without change, yesterday, today and forever!

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

WORTHY - OR UNWORTHY?
By A.W. Tozer

      The love of Jesus is so inclusive that it knows no boundaries. At the point where we stop loving and caring, Jesus is still there-loving and caring! The question may be asked: "How does the living Christ feel today about the sinful men and women who walk our streets?" There is only one answer: He loves them! We may be righteously indignant about the things they do. We may be disgusted with their actions and their ways. We are often ready to condemn and turn away from them. But Jesus keeps on loving them! It is His unchanging nature to love and seek the lost. He said many times when He was on earth, "I have come to help the needy. The well do not need a doctor-but the sick need attention and love." We are prone to look at the needy and measure them: "Let us determine if they are worthy of our help." During all of His ministry, I do not think Jesus ever helped a "worthy" person. He only asked, "What is your need? Do you need My help?"

A.W. Tozer

[Shammu]

CLAIM YOUR INHERITANCE
By A.W. Tozer

      Did you know that it is possible for a Christian believer to live day after day, clutching the book of Ephesians, and still not realize that he is spiritually lean and hungry? If a pastor or evangelist suggests that this person could be in a more prosperous spiritual state, his reaction may be bristling: "Am I not accepted in the Beloved? Is not God my Father and am I not an heir with God?" Holding the text of the will is not enough. It is necessary to come into the possession of the riches. Suppose a rich man dies, leaving a will which passes on all of his millions to his only son. That boy borrows the text of the will from the attorney and carries it around with him. He is satisfied with the text of the will, but it has never been properly executed. Thus the son has never presented his legitimate claims to the inheritance. He may be going around ragged, hungry and weak. In actual experience he has received nothing. He simply holds the text of his father's will!

A.W. Tozer