Top 896 Quotes & Sayings by Aiden Wilson Tozer - Page 11

A true and safe leader is likely to be one who has no desire to lead, but is forced into a position of leadership by the inward pressure of the Holy Spirit and the press of the external situation.

Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.

Light means nothing to a blind man.

The problem of why God created the universe still troubles thinking men; but if we cannot know why, we can at least know that He did not bring His worlds into being to meet some unfulfilled need in Himself, as a man might build a house to shelter him against the winter cold or plant a field of corn to provide him with necessary food. The word 'necessary' is wholly foreign to God.

One thing the young Christian should be taught as quickly as possible after his conversion is that Jesus Christ is all he needs.

If man had written the Gospels - say Shakespeare or Eugene O'Neill - the story of the gospel would have been drastically different. They would have placed the prince in halls and palaces and had him walking among the great. They would have had him surrounded by the important and significant of the time. Potentates and kings would have been His companions. But how sweetly common was the real God-man; though He had inhabited all eternity, He had come down and was subject to the rising and the setting of the sun.

The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.

No matter what the circumstances, we Christians should keep our heads. God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, of love and of a sound mind. It is a dismal thing to see a son of heaven cringe in terror before the sons of earth.

Father, may my song today be a sweet sound in Your ears-even if in Yours alone. Amen.

Any manipulation of the Scriptures to make them speak peace to the natural man is evil and can only lead to ruin.

As Christians, we are not to be people without feelings.

I did not go through the Book. The Book went through me.

To me, it has always been difficult to understand those evangelical Christians who insist upon living in the crisis as if no crisis existed. They say they serve the Lord, but they divide their days so as to leave plenty of time to play and loaf and enjoy the pleasures of the world as well. They are at ease while the world burns.

The inner life must overcome the flesh or the flesh will overcome and destroy the inner life.

Everything is wrong until Jesus sets it right.

Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.

Thinking carries a moral imperative. The searcher for truth must be ready to obey truth without reservation or it will elude him.

We are here to affirm, not to deny... when we affirm all that is God, all that is not God is automatically denied.

If [something] is of God, your dependence upon God will increase.

I like Easter. But let's remember that Christ's resurrection is not truer at Easter than at any other time of the year.

If God is the Supreme good then our highest blessedness on earth must lie in knowing Him as perfectly as possible.

A thankful heart cannot be cynical.

One of the greatest foes of the Christian is religious complacency.. Orthodox Christianity has fallen to its present low estate from lack of spiritual desire. Among the many who profess the Christian faith, scarcely one in a thousand reveals any passionate thirst for God.

Churches are more prosperous than at any time within the past several hundred years. But the alarming thing is that our gains are mostly external and our losses wholly internal; and since it is the quality of our religion that is affected by internal conditions, it may be that our supposed gains are but losses spread over a wider field.

The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal, how can you hope to find inward peace?

True religion is removed from diet and days, from garments and ceremonies, and placed where it belongs - in the union of the spirit of man with the Spirit of God.

It's not what you did, but what you could have done if you allowed the Lord to work His will in your life.

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 a moral calamity.

Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now.

At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His Presence.

The idea of the divine-human friendship originated with God. Had not God said first 'Ye are my friends?' (John 15:14)

With a sacred expectation, I look for God in ALL of the circumstances of my day.

God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which he must work. Only to know this is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves.

Nothing that God has ever said about Himself will be modified; nothing the inspired prophets and apostles have said about Him will be rescinded. His immutability guarantees this.

Yes, I believe you can be right with God and still not like the way some people behave. Our admonition is to love them in a larger and more comprehensive way because we are all one in Christ Jesus. This kind of love is indeed a Christian virtue!

Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and bring Him nearer to our own image.

I want the presence of God Himself, or I don't want anything at all to do with religion... I want all that God has or I don't want any.

Unselfish love does not exploit its object and it does not ask for anything in return.

Let no one imagine that he will lose anything of human dignity by this voluntary sell-out of his all to his God. He does not by this degrade himself as a man; rather he finds his right place of high honor as one made in the image of his Creator. His deep disgrace lay in his moral derangement, his unnatural usurpation of the place of God. His honor will be proved by restoring again that stolen throne. In exalting God over all, he finds his own highest honor upheld.

Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God, we do not see ourselves - blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One.

The sacred page is not meant to be the end, but only the means toward the end, which is knowing God Himself.

Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies.

Worship is to feel in the heart . . . it is an attitude and a state of mind. It is a sustained act, subject to varying degrees of intensity and perfection . . . Real worship is, among other things, a feeling about the Lord our God . . . It is in our hearts. And we must be willing to express it in an appropriate manner. 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.

God is speaking. He is, by His nature, continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking voice.

Wherever we find Jesus is the perfect place to worship.

An honest man is strange when he is among dishonest men, but it is a good kind of strangeness.

Though the cross of Christ has been beautified by the poet and the artist, the avid seeker after God is likely to find it the same savage implement of destruction it was in the days of old. The way of the cross is still the pain-wracked path to spiritual power and fruitfulness.

We ought not to be looking for a place to hide, but a place to give ourselves as an offering to God.

The best way to prove that a stick is crooked is to set a straight one beside it. No words need to be spoken.

To pray with your fists closed means you're hanging onto something. Let it go. Open your hands to God.

The unattended garden will soon be overrun with weeds; the heart that fails to cultivate truth and root out error will shortly be a theological wilderness.

Prayer is the most sacred occupation a person could engage in.

Nothing is complete in itself but requires something outside itself in order to exist.

I find that many men and women are troubled by the thought that they are too small and inconsequential in the scheme of things. But that is not our real trouble - we are actually too big and too complex, for God made us in His image and we are too big to be satisfied with what the world offers us!.. Man is bored, because he is too big to be happy with that which sin is giving him. God has made him too great, his potential is too mighty.

If we possess nothing, God will allow us to have plenty.

The neglected heart will soon be a heart overrun with worldly thoughts; the neglected life will soon become a moral chaos.

We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.

Nothing should so occupy the mind of the Christian than discovering God each day.

God desires and is pleased to communicate with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills, and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the souls of the redeemed men and women is the throbbing heart of the New Testament.

Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its trust, not in the living God but in dying men. The unbeliever denies the selfsufficiency of God and usurps attributes that are not his. This dual sin dishonors God and ultimately destroys the soul of man.