Top 896 Quotes & Sayings by Aiden Wilson Tozer - Page 10

One thing is certain: the call of Christ is always a promotion. Were Christ to call a king from his throne to preach the gospel to some tribe of aborigines, that king would be elevated above anything he had known before. Any movement toward Christ is ascent, and any direction away from Him is down.

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.

Nothing's easier to talk about than surrendering ourselves and dying on the Cross. Nothing's harder than actually doing it.

A local church will only be as great as its conception 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 is his deep heart conceives God to be like.

God's mercy is boundless, free and, through Jesus Christ our Lord, available to us now in our present situation.

Until self-effacing men return again to spiritual leadership, we may expect a progressive deterioration in the quality of popular Christianity year after year till we reach the point where the grieved Holy Spirit withdraws - like the Shekinah from the temple.

Nowhere in the Word of God is there any text or passage or line that can be twisted or tortured into teaching that the organic living church of Jesus Christ just prior to His return will not have every right and every power and every obligation that she knew in that early part of the book of Acts.

Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, "What comes into your mind when you think about God?" we might predict with certainty the future of that man.

When a man falls on his knees and stretches his hands heavenward, he is doing the most natural thing in the world.

The world is waiting to hear an authentic voice, a voice from God- not an echo of what others are doing and saying, but an authentic voice.

The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems.

Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightest word in any language is its word for God.

I must be frank in my feeling that a notable heresy has come into being throughout our evangelical Christian circles -- the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need Him as Saviour and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to Him as Lord as long as we want to... The truth is that salvation apart from obedience is unknown in the sacred scripture... Apart from obedience, there can be no salvation, for salvation without obedience is a self-contradictory impossibility.

We who follow Christ are men and women of eternity. We must put no confidence in the passing scenes of the disappearing world. We must resist every attempt of Satan to palm off upon us the values that belong to mortality. Nothing less than forever is long enough for us.

Faith is not merely a journey for the feet, but it is also a journey for the heart.

We are too quick to live this life and forget that there is another world to come...this is not the end.

Only a disciple can make a disciple.

The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin.

The good news isn't that God is victorious. How can He not be victorious? The good news is we can be victorious, too.

God formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He can in divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities. He meant us to see Him and live with Him and draw our life from His smile.

We fear extremes and shy away from too much ardor in religion as if it were possible to have too much love or too much faith or too much holiness.

We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensibl e and unattainable... Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard.

The Christian is strong or weak depending upon how closely he has cultivated the knowledge of God.

The gravest question any of us face is whether we do or do not love the Lord.

Judas Iscariot was not a greatly wicked person, just a common money-lover, and like most money-lovers, he did not understand Christ.

No man gives anything acceptable to God until has has first given himself in love and sacrifice.

The kingdom of God is not in words. Words are only incidental and can never be fundamental. When evangelicalism ceased to emphasize fundamental meanings and began emphasizing fundamental words, and shifted from meaning to words and from power to words, they began to go down hill.

Were all human beings suddenly 2 become blind, still the sun would shine by day and the stars by night, for these owe nothing 2 the millions who benifit from their light. So were every man on earth 2 become 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.

It is useless for large companies of believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament pattern there can be no true revival.

Very few things in life matter.

Because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological.

Honesty that can be trusted and respected is a very fragrant flower in the life of a Christian.

When our Lord looked at us, He saw not only what we were -- He was faithful in seeing what we could become! He took away the curse of being and gave us the glorious blessing of becoming.

God wants the whole person and He will not rest till He gets us in entirety. No part of the man will do" (101) - "The Pursuit of God

Let any man turn to God in earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness, let him seek to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days.

It's hard to rest knowing that millions of people merely carry on religious traditions but don't actually reach God.

Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there.

Beauty is in the eye of the Creator.

Christianity at any given time is strong or weak depending upon her concept of God.

Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus' feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.

Our most pressing obligation is to do all in our power to obtain a revival that will result in a reformed, revitalized, purified church. Each generation of Christians is the seed of the next, and degenerate seed is sure to produce a degenerate harvest.

We can express our worship to God in many ways. But if we love the Lord and are led by His Holy Spirit, our worship will always bring a delighted sense of admiring awe and a sincere humility on our part.

You can blame circumstances, but backsliding always begins in the heart.

There are rare Christians whose very presence incites others to be better Christians. I want to be that rare Christian.

Prayer is always in danger of degenerating into a glorified gold rush. How to get things from God occupies most [books].

Lord, how great is our dilemma! In Thy Presence silence best becomes us, yet love inflames our hearts and constrains us to speak.

What good is all our busy religion if God isn't in it? What good is it if we've lost majesty, reverence, worship-an awareness of the divine? What good is it if we've lost a sense of the Presence and the ability to retreat within our own hearts and meet God in the garden?

God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.

What else should we do with the Word of God but obey?

God loves us for ourselves. He values our love more than he values galaxies of new created worlds.

Always God’s goodness is the ground of our expectation.

I find that when people haven't found God and do not know the new birth and the Spirit is not on them, yet they have the ancient impulse to worship something. If they're not educated they kill a chicken and put a funny thing on their head and dance around. If they are educated they write poetry.

It is necessary for God to use the hammers, the file, and the furnace in His holy work of preparing a saint for true sainthood. It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.

Progress in the Christian life is exactly equal to the growing knowledge we gain of the Triune God in personal experience.

Wherever we turn in the church of God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning, middle and end of everything to us.

Faith in faith is faith astray.

Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.

If you're not worshiping God on Monday the way you [did] the day before, perhaps you're not worshiping Him at all.

To accept Christ is to know the meaning of the words 'as he is, so are we in this world.' We accept his friends as our friends, his enemies as our enemies, his ways as our ways, his rejection as our rejection, his cross as our cross, his life as our life and his future as our future. If this is what we mean when we advise the seeker to accept Christ, we had better explain it to him. He may get into deep spiritual trouble unless we do.