No man lives unto himself. Either directly or indirectly, you are deeply influencing somebody else. If you are a carelessly living Christian, there may be persons who will use your careless life as a shield, a hiding place for his own much more serious iniquity. Or there may be those who kneel at night and say, "God, make me like brother So-and-so, make me like Mrs. So-and-so." It can be both ways, for deeds have consequences and are the result of choices, whether they are impulsive choices or carefully thought out choices. In the Bible, a wise man is not necessarily an educated man or one of high cultural level, although he could be. A wise man is a man who acts with an eye to consequences. He thinks, "What will the result of this be?" Then he acts in a way that will bring him consequences he will not have to be ashamed of or afraid of in the day to come. --Paragraphs excerpted from "The Dangers of a Shallow Faith," A. W. Tozer I'm not dead, bu...

AMONG CERTAIN CHRISTIANS it has become quite the fashion to cry down creed and cry up experience as the only true test of Christianity. The expression “Not creed, but Christ” (taken, I believe, from a poem by John Oxenham) has been widely accepted as the very voice of truth and given a place alongside of the writings of prophets and apostles. When I first heard the words they sounded good. One got from them the idea that the advocates of the no-creed creed had found a precious secret that the rest of us had missed; that they had managed to cut right through the verbiage of historic Christianity and come direct to Christ without bothering about doctrine. And the words appeared to honor our Lord more perfectly by focusing attention upon Him alone and not upon mere words. But is this true? I think not. ... While we may worship (and thousands of Christians do) without the use of any formal creed, it is impossible to worship acceptably without some knowledge of the One we seek to worsh...

There’s no way I could say this better myself, so for this blog post, I present you with a lengthy quote from one of my favorite devotional writers, A. W. Tozer: “One of the puzzling questions likely to turn up sooner or later to vex the seeking Christian is how he can fulfill the scriptural command to love God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself. The earnest Christian, as he meditates on his sacred obligation to love God and mankind, may experience a sense of frustration gendered by the knowledge that he just cannot seem to work up any emotional thrill over his Lord or his brothers. He wants to, but he cannot. The delightful wells of feeling simply will not flow. Many honest persons have become discouraged by the absence of religious emotion and concluded that they are not really Christian after all.… They do believe in God; they do indeed trust Christ as their Savior, but the love they hoped to feel consistently eludes them. What is the trouble? The problem is not a l...

I often fret about the comparatively little time I spend reading my Bible. It’s as if the time spent reading the Bible, praying, reading devotionals or singing worship songs must be equal to the time I spend in my waking hours doing anything else… which would, of course, amount to a solid 7 or 8 hours a day doing those things. But then what of the other 7 or 8 hours? Are they wasted hours, because I am not steeped in God’s Word then? It pushes me to despair. And then I am refreshed by something like this, part of the A. W. Tozer book I’ve finished (re)reading tonight. One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian encounters is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas, the sacred and the secular. As the seas are conceived to exist apart from each other and to be morally and spiritually incompatible, and as we are compelled by the necessities of living to be always crossing back and forth from the one to the other, our inner lives tend to break up...

Yeah—community is a buzzword in Christian circles (and octagons for that matter). People wonder how to define it, how to create it, how to nurture it—I do too. Who doesn’t want community? But it’s elusive. Maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree, though, by focusing on community itself. If it’s anything like humility, the moment you turn your attention to it in and of itself it begins to break down… Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshippers meeting together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become “unity” conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship. Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified. --A.W. Tozer, towards the end of the chapt...

I've been reading A.W. Tozer again. If you've been reading long enough or paying attention, I love his writing . His book "The Pursuit of God" was wonderful the first time I read through it, and I keep drawing insights from that each time I read it again. However, this book I'm in is a collection of Tozer's 52 best chapters (which still makes for a little paperback, since his chapters are fairly short). I've read this before too. It has excerpts from "Pursuit of God" in addition to ten other books he wrote (I think there are eleven in total, anyway). Thing is, when I read Tozer I have to stop and think a lot, and pray, and read my Bible in the meantime. So I've been on several long bus rides since I started this and I'm still in chapter 11 or something. It amuses me that I started this blog, what, three years ago, with posts about Tozer. But his writing is really something. I recommend "Pursuit of God" especially.

I've been working on The Screwtape Letters this week... don't remember when I started them; yesterday morning, probably. I'd forgotten how much I like C.S. Lewis's writing. After this I'll probably re-read Mere Christianity again. So far my favorite part of Screwtape is letter 13, in which Screwtape is exhorting his nephew Wormwood not to let his assigned human enjoy any real pleasures... because "the characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality... it (a real pleasure) would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value...." Intriguing, isn't it? I also started re-reading A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God , but that was awhile ago and I still haven't gotten far... still, the good thing about this book is that you can read one of those chapters in about five or ten minutes (they...

Some other interesting quotes, which I ran out of time for on Thursday: "The heart of man is like a musical instrument and may be played upon by the Holy Spirit, by an evil spirit or by the spirit of man himself. Religious emotions are very much the same, no matter who the player may be.... The nun who kneels 'breathless with adoration' before an image of the Virgin is having a genuine religious experience. She feels love, awe and reverence, all enjoyable emotions, as certainly as if she were adoring God. The mystical experiences of Hindus and Sufis cannot be brushed aside as mere pretense. Niether dare we dismiss the high religious flights of spiritists and other occultists as imagination. These may have and sometimes do have genuine encounters with something or someone beyond themselves. In the same manner Christians are sometimes led into emotional experiences that are beyond their power to comprehend.... The big test is, what has this done to my relationship ...

I recently finished a book-compilation of A.W. Tozer's 52 best chapters.... and, really, Tozer is the best author I've read in awhile. He just opens my eyes to what God's saying in His Word, and he's brilliant besides, although by this time, he's somewhat dated (but sometimes prophetic). A few interesting quotes: "No one with a due regard for the wisdom of God would argue that there is anything wrong with laughter, since humor is a legitimate component of our complex nature. Lacking a sense of humor we fall that much short of healthy humanity. But.... some things lie outside the field of pure humor. No reverent Christian, for instance, finds death funny, nor birth nor love. No Spirit-filled man can bring himself to laugh at the Holy Scriptures, or the Church which Christ purchased with His own blood, or prayer or righteousness or human grief or pain. And surely no one who has been in the presence of God could ever laugh at a story involving the Deity....