Daily Devotionals

Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

Devotional: February 2nd

Tozer in the Morning
Detailing the "Everything"

It is important that we trace our benefits back to their source and express our thanks to the One ?from whom all blessings flow,? rather than merely to feel a vague stirring of gratefulness that results in nothing real. I once lived with a fine old couple, neither of whom was a Christian, and I was impressed with the profound sense of gratitude they felt for everything they possessed. When the winter winds moaned through the trees and made the old house tremble, the old man would smile and say, ?Ah! How good it is to have a warm place to sleep on a night like this.? And the mother would often speak of her large family, now grown and scattered: ?How grateful I am that they are all healthy and all mentally sound. I am so thankful.? Their gratitude was genuine. Of that there could be no trace of a doubt, but I often wondered who was the recipient of it. Whom were they thanking? They never said.

The irreligious world has its own way of reacting. When things ?break? fortunately for a businessman, an athlete or a politician he will slap his hands together and shout, ?Great! Wonderful!? He is thanking someone; but whom?

It could be that the old couple of whom I speak were actually meaning to express their thankfulness to God, and that the modern man who shouts his pleasure at his lot in life secretly feels his indebtedness to God; the trouble is that they were and are ashamed to direct their gratitude pointedly to One with whom they are not acquainted. They flee like Adam and hide among the trees of the garden rather than face up to the God they know they have offended. Fear of being thought queer sometimes leads people to express religious ideas in generalities instead of in concrete terms.

Tozer in the Evening
Seeing with Compassion

"Excitement, perturbation, feeling." These are states of mind we are all familiar with. In a world as violent and full of conflict as this these come and go, blaze up and die down in the average man's bosom a hundred times a day. The normal man and woman will in the course of a few months experience every degree of emotion from near ecstasy to mild dejection without apparently being any the better or the worse for it. Of course I have in mind here only the normal man and woman. The psychopathic personality lies outside the field of this study. The emotions are neither to be feared nor despised, for they are a normal part of us as God made us in the first place. Indeed the full human life would be impossible without them. One recoils from the thought of the man who lacked all feeling. He would be either a cold, naked intellect such as inhabits the pages of the science-fiction novel, or a mere vegetable, such as is sometimes found in the incurable wards of our mental hospitals. The right relation of intellect to feeling and feeling to will is disclosed in Matthew 14:14. "And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick." Intellectual knowledge of the suffering of the people stirred His pity and His pity moved Him to heal them. This is how it was with the ideal Man whose total organism was perfectly adjusted to itself; and this is the way it is with us in a less perfect measure.