the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer
Tozer in the Morning
Working Out What God Works In You
The Holy Spirit in this passage is saying two things: God works in you to will, but you are to work with God in working it out. God works in you--that is, God is always previous. God is the aggressor. God saw you in the rut and wanted you to get out it. He thought of it first, not you. The impuse to know God came from Him and not from you. God works first, and because God works we are to work with Him. We are therefore to dismiss all doubts and all morbid humility. It is entirely possible to be so humble, in a sick kind of way, that you paralyze yourself and get nowhere. For instance, you say to yourself, "That man has been preaching about getting out of the religious rut. While I haven"t agreed with everything, I have been feeling that I am in a rut and that I ought to get out. This circular grave is getting deeper every year of my life, and I can hardly see out of it. Give me four or five more years and you"ll look right over me and not know I"m here. I need help. But I wonder if God will help me." That is morbid humility. . . . The very fact that you want out is proof that God has been working in you to will to get out. And if God worked in you to want to get out, then when you ask Him to get you out, do you suppose He would not help you out? Would God put an impulse in your heart and then refuse to accept your prayer when you came in answer to that impulse? . . .
Tozer in the Evening
No Morality Without God
It has always seemed to me completely inconsistent that existentialism should deny the existence of God and then proceed to use the language of theism to persuade men to live right. The French writer, Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, states frankly that he represents atheistic existentialism. ?If God does not exist,? he says, ?we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are all alone, with no excuses.? Yet in the next paragraph he states bluntly, ?Man is responsible for his passion,? and further on, ?A coward is responsible for his cowardice.? And such considerations as these, he says, fill the existentialist with ?anguish, forlornness and despair.? It seems to me that such reasoning must assume the truth of everything it seeks to deny. If there were no God there would be no such words as ?responsible.? No criminal need fear a judge who does not exist; nor would he need to worry about breaking a law that had not been passed. It is the knowledge that the law and the judge do in fact exist that strikes fear to the lawbreaker?s heart. There is someone to whom he is accountable; otherwise the concept of responsibility could have no meaning.
