The Faithfulness of God
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Important messages
Among the reasons that A.
W. Tozer is one of my favorite authors is because his writings are balanced. He
is not hyper-Calvinistic, nor ultra-Arminian. He does not arrive at
conclusions, strictly by following logic, but is faithful to the flow of the
biblical text. In other words, he does not take a pet doctrine and follow it to
other deductions, saying, for example, “All right, if my first premise is
right, then it follows logically that the second, third, fourth and fifth, must
also be true.” Tozer understood well that the Bible is the product of divine
thoughts, well above those that a man can imagine or reach, and for that
reason, he accepted the Scripture, as it states. This chapter of his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, is a good
example of his theology. L. Brueckner
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| A. W. Tozer |
The Faithfulness of God
It is a good thing to give thanks unto Thee and to sing praises
unto Thy name, O Most High, to show forth Thy loving-kindness in the morning
and Thy faithfulness every night. As Thy Son while on earth was loyal to Thee,
His Heavenly Father, so now in heaven He is faithful to us, His earthly
brethren; and in this knowledge we press on with every confident hope for all
the years and centuries yet to come. Amen.
As emphasized earlier, God’s
attributes are not isolated traits of His character but facets of His unitary
being. They are not things-in-themselves; they are, rather, thoughts by which
we think of God aspects of a perfect whole, names given to whatever we know to
be true of the Godhead.
To have a correct
understanding of the attributes it is necessary that we see them all as one. We
can think of them separately but they cannot be separated. “All attributes
assigned to God cannot differ in reality, by reason of the perfect simplicity
of God, although we in divers ways use of God divers words,” says Nicholas of
Cusa. “Whence, although we attribute to God sight, hearing, taste, smell,
touch, sense, reason and intellect, and so forth, according to the divers
significations of each word, yet in Him sight is not other than hearing, or tasting,
or smelling, or touching, or feeling, or understanding. And so all theology is
said to be stablished in a circle, because any one of His attributes is
affirmed of another.”
Ten Shekels and a Shirt
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Important messages
To be sure, this is a very
personal opinion, but the message that I am posting today is the most important one that I
have heard in the last 50 years. It moved me deeply and greatly affirmed my
position, concerning every Christian’s purpose in this life. It also influenced
my presentation of the gospel. Please read this message, praying that God will anoint
your ears to receive the immense truth that Paris Reidhead presents.
Ten Shekels and a Shirt was one of the first articles
that I posted, when we opened this blog in 2011, and since then, we have
offered hundreds more. Possibly, many of our readers of Call to Commitment have not read it. For this reason, I am
preparing it anew, to bring it to the attention of every one of you. I am
adding Reidhead’s account of how his message came to be preached many years
ago.
How this Message Came To Be
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| Paris Reidhead |
In over fifty years of Bible
teaching and preaching "Ten Shekels and a Shirt" is the only message
that I feel constrained to explain how it came to be preached. During a Bethany
Fellowship Summer Conference in the mid-sixties I was preparing to speak at the
Tuesday morning Bible hour. Upon returning to my room after breakfast to
meditate and pray about the message for that morning hour, I felt strangely
impressed that I could not deliver the message that had been prepared for the
session.
Instead, I felt that there
was some other message that was needed which I was to bring. After prayer, the
message that came to mind was one on which I had begun preparation for the
ministry at the church in New York City of which I was pastor at that time. My
notes were not with me, but were in a file folder in my study. An empty
envelope was on the desk in my room, on the back of which I wrote the scripture
texts to be used and one or two ideas that came to mind. With the envelope in
my Bible marking Judges, Chapter 17, and myself utterly cast upon the Lord, I
went to the auditorium where between four and five hundred people waited to
hear from the Lord through me.
Why We Must Think Rightly...
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Important messages
Chapter
One: Why We Must Think Rightly About God
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| A. W. Tozer |
Lord God Almighty, not the
God of the philosophers and the wise but the God of the prophets and apostles;
and better than all, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, may I express
Thee unblamed? They that know Thee not may call upon Thee as other than Thou
art, and so worship not Thee but a creature of their own fancy; therefore
enlighten our minds that we may know Thee as Thou art, so that we may perfectly
love Thee and worthily praise Thee. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts
of God.
For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always
God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a
given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be
like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of
God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of
Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the
Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she
says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than
her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning
God.
Knowledge of the Holy... Preface
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Important messages
PREFACE
True
religion confronts earth with heaven and brings eternity to bear upon time. The
messenger of Christ, though he speaks from God, must also, as the Quakers used
to say, “speak to the condition” of his hearers; otherwise he will speak a
language known only to himself. His message must be not only timeless but
timely. He must speak to his own generation.
The
message of this book does not grow out of these times but it is appropriate to
them. It is called forth by a condition which has existed in the Church for
some years and is steadily growing worse. I refer to the loss of the concept of
majesty from the popular religious mind. The Church has surrendered her once
lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to
be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping men. This she has done not
deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very
unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic.
The
low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of
a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the
Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious
thinking.
The Root of the Righteous
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Important messages
Chapter seven:
By A. W. Tozer
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| A. W. Tozer |
By A. W. Tozer
An odd little passage in the book of Ecclesiastes
speaks of “an old and foolish king, who will no more be admonished” (4:13).
It is not hard to understand why an old king,
especially if he were a foolish one, would feel that he was beyond admonition.
After he had for years given orders he might easily build a self-confident
psychology that simply could not entertain the notion that he should take
advice from others. His word had long been law, and to him right had become
synonymous with his will, and wrong had come to mean anything that ran contrary
to his wishes. Soon the idea that there was anyone wise enough or good enough
to reprove him would not so much as enter his mind. He had to be a foolish king
to let himself get caught in that kind of web, and an old king to give the web
time to get so strong that he could not break it and to give him time to get
used to it so that he was no longer aware of its existence.
Regardless of the moral process by which he arrived at
his hardened state, the bell had already tolled for him. In every particular he
was a lost man. His wizened old body still held together to provide a kind of
movable tomb to house a soul already dead. Hope had long ago departed. God had
left him to his fatal conceit. And soon he would die physically too, and he
would die as a fool dieth.
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