the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer
Tozer in the Morning
Causes of a Dozing Church
What is the present condition of the evangelical church? The bulk of Christians are asleep. I do not mean that the bulk of Christians who come to evangelical churches are not converted, because if I meant that I would say they were dead and never had been born again. But I say they are asleep. It is possible to be morally asleep yet mentally, intellectually, physically and theologically alert. The present condition is that we are asleep. These sleeping Christians do two things that God must grieve over. One is that they control church affairs. We are democratic, and if we do not like a pastor we give him the bounce or pray that he will get another call. Then when the time comes we vote in whom we want and vote out whom we do not want. Church people control church affairs because they are intellectually, mentally and physically awake, but they may be morally and spiritually asleep. That is, they are so far down in the rut that they do not see up. Many people who are asleep control church affairs. It gets into whole conferences. Representatives will meet at the expense of the local church people. They will read minutes and pass resolutions, but they are asleep. You know they are asleep by the way they talk as soon as the benediction is pronounced and they have adjourned. You know they are asleep by their conduct, the things they are interested in or lack interest in, yet they control church affairs. The second thing sleeping Christians do is set the standards for new Christians. When you bring in a newly converted Christian, he or she automatically takes on the coloration, general mood and temperature of the solemn seats around him or her. Pretty soon he or she is where they are, and once again there are no good examples of the Christian life.
Tozer in the Evening
Embracing God's Thoughts
Whenever and wherever there is a controversy between God and a man, God is always right and the man always wrong. "So that you may be proved right in your words and prevail in your judging" (Psalms 51:4).
The only way any man can be right is to come over onto God's side. Whoever sticks to his own side is forever wrong.
The points at which God's way and man's intersect are likely to be four (though there may be others), and we will usually find our differences with God to occur somewhere in these four areas.
First, our thoughts. Divine inspiration has declared that the thoughts of man are vain, and in the prophecy of Isaiah, God sets His case before us so plainly that comment is hardly necessary: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9).
