Daily Devotionals

Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

Devotional: December 23rd

Tozer in the Morning
Exploring Divine Revelation

God has given us a broad world of truth for our spiritual and intellectual habitation. This universe of truth is to the human soul as limitless as the air to a bird or the sea to a fish. There the Christian mind can luxuriate at perfect liberty. While the ages unfold the believer will need no more than has been already given, for it represents the broad and manifold will of God, the happy home of saints and angels.

This vast sea of truth is expressed in nature, in the Holy Scriptures and in Christ, the Wisdom of God incarnate. Its rational phase can be reduced to a creed which may be learned as one would learn any other truth, and which when so learned constitutes Christian orthodoxy, best and most perfectly embodied in the beliefs of modern evangelical Christianity.

But we must also remember that orthodoxy is not synonymous with Procrustean uniformity. We may bring every thought into accord with divine revelation without sacrificing our intellectual freedom. We can be orthodox without becoming mentally stultified. We can believe every tenet of the Christian creed and still leave our imagination free to roam at will through the broad worlds of nature and grace. We are free but not ?freethinkers.?

Tozer in the Evening
Created for God's Glory

Philosophers have noted the vast difference between men and beasts and have tried to find that difference in one or another distinguishing characteristic. They have said, for instance, that man is the thinking animal, or that he is the laughing animal, or that he is the only animal with a conscience. The one mark, however, which forever distinguishes man from all other forms of life on earth is that he is a worshiper; he has a bent toward and a capacity for worship. Apart from his position as a worshiper of God, man has no sure key to his own being; he is but a higher animal, being born much as any other animal, going through the cycle of his life here on earth and dying at last without knowing what the whole thing is about. If that is all for him, if he has no more reason than the beast for living, then it is an odd thing indeed that he is the only one of the animals that worries about himself, that wonders, that asks questions of the universe. The very fact that he does these things tells the wise man that somewhere there is One to whom he owes allegiance, One before whom he should kneel and do homage. The Christian revelation tells us that that One is God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, who is to be worshiped in the Spirit in the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord. That is enough for us. Without trying to reason it out we may proceed from there. All our doubts we meet with faith?s wondering affirmation: ?O Lord God, thou knowest,? an utterance which Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared to be the profoundest in human speech.