Aiden Wilson Tozer Quotes

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.

Prayer will become effective when we stop using it as a substitute for obedience.

Because we have shut out the Holy Spirit in so many ways, we are stumbling along as though we are spiritually blindfolded.

Every advance that we make for God and for His cause must be made at our inconvenience. If it does not inconvenience us at all, there is no cross in it.

The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of Christians.

Wherever faith has eyes to see, there is a smiling presence of the Son of God.

You know, we'll hardly get our feet out of time [and] into eternity that we'll bow our heads in shame and humiliation. We'll gaze on eternity and say, 'My God! Look at all the riches there were in Jesus Christ, and I've come to the Judgment Seat almost a pauper!

Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its faith not in the living God, but in dying men.

The devil loves it when we say we believe then prioritize everything in our lives ahead of God.

If God gives you a watch, are you honoring Him more by asking Him what time it is or by simply consulting the watch?

As God is exalted to the right place in our lives, a thousand problems are solved all at once.

The widest thing in the universe is not space, it is the potential capacity of the human heart

No one need fear to listen to the voice of God unless he has already made up his mind to resist it.

Some people's lives would drastically change if they would obey God as strictly as they obey their doctors.

The church has lost her testimony. She has no longer anything to say to the world. Her once robust shout of assurance has faded away to an apologetic whisper. She who one time went out to declare now goes out to inquire. Her dogmatic declaration has become a respectful suggestion, a word of religious advice, given with the understanding that it is after all only an opinion and not meant to sound bigoted. Pure Christianity, instead of being shaped by its culture, actually stands in sharp opposition to it.

There are two classes of Christians: the proud who imagine they are humble and the humble who are afraid they are proud. There should be another class: the self-forgetful who leave the whole thing in the hands of Christ and refuse to waste any time trying to make themselves good. They will reach the goal far ahead of the rest.

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.

The victorious Christian neither exalts nor downgrades himself. His interests have shifted from self to Christ. What he is or is not no longer concerns him. He believes that he has been crucified with Christ and he is not willing either to praise or deprecate such a man.

To men and women everywhere Jesus says, "Come unto me, and I will give you rest." The rest He offers is the rest of meekness, the blessed relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to pretend.

Love is both a principle and an emotion; it is something both felt and willed. It is capable of almost infinite degrees. Love in the human heart may begin so modestly as to be hardly perceptible and go on to become a raging torrent that sweeps its possessor before it in total helplessness.

Christians must understand most emphatically that the world around us is in conflict with the Word within us.

It is time for us to seek again the leadership of the Holy Spirit. Man's lordship has cost us too much.

If you have to be reasoned into Christianity, some wise fellow can reason you out of it! If you come to Christ by a flash of the Holy Spirit so that by intuition you know that you are God's child, you know it by the text but you also know it by the inner light, the inner illumination of the Spirit, and no one can ever reason you out of it.

Anything that God has declared that we should be we can be.

There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the [christian] life. Because it is so natural, it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is. But its outworkings are tragic.

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

The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.

God's redemptive revelation in Scripture is necessary to saving faith and peace with God. Faith in a risen Savior is necessary if the vague stirrings toward immortality are to bring us to restful and satisfying communion with God.

The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear. Fear is a painful emotion that arises at the thought that we may be harmed or made to suffer. As long as we must trust for survival to our ability to out look or out maneuver the enemy, we have every good reason to be afraid. Fear is torment. To know that love is of God and to enter into the secret place leaning upon the arm of the Beloved, this and only this can cast out fear.

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.

We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is.

God doesn't work through us because we're flawless; rather, He works through us in spite of our imperfections.

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

Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us.

The true Church has never sounded out public expectations before launching her mission. Her leaders heard from God, they knew their Lord's will and did it. Their people followed them - sometimes to triumph, oftener to insults and public persecution - and their sufficient reward was the satisfaction of being right in a wrong world!

To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator. God has a voluntary relationg to everything He has made, but He has no Necessary relation to anything outside of Himself. His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply nor from any completeness they can dring to Him who is complete in himself.

Faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all.

God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God. He has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays.

We now demand glamour and fast-flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals...The tragic results of this spirit all all about us: shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies...the glorification of men, trust is religious externalities....salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such of these are the symptoms of an evil disease.

Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines him to bestow benefits on the undeserving.

Complacency is easy...and it is a deadly foe of spiritual growth.

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

The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the 'poor in spirit.'

Genuine Christian experience must always include an encounter with God Himself.

I don't want the world to define God for me. I want the Holy Spirit to reveal God to me.

We get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God. We are right when, and only when, we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position.

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