Tozer in the Morning – Committing to Personal Revival
One consequence of our failure to see clearly the true nature of revival is that we wait for years for some supernatural manifestation that never comes, overlooking completely our own individual place in the desired awakening. Whatever God may do for a church must be done in the single unit, the one certain man or woman. Some things can happen only to the isolated, single person; they cannot be experienced en masse. Statistics show, for instance, that 100 babies are born in a certain city on a given day. Yet the birth of each baby is for that baby a unique experience, an isolated, personal thing. Fifty people die in a plane crash; while they die together they die separately, one at a time, each one undergoing the act of death in a loneliness of soul as utter as if he alone had died. Both birth and death are experienced by the individual in a loneness as complete as if only that one person had ever known them.
Three thousand persons were converted at Pentecost, but each one met his sin and his Savior alone. The spiritual birth, like the natural one, is for each one a unique, separate experience shared in by no one. And so with that uprush of resurgent life we call revival. It can come to the individual only. Though a visitation of divine life reaches seventy five persons at once (as among the Moravian Brethren at Dusseldorf), yet it comes to each one singly. There can exist no collective body of believers that can be revived apart from the units that compose the body.
Understood aright these are truths full of great encouragement and good hope. Nothing can hinder you or me from experiencing the revival we need. It is a matter for God and the solitary heart. Nothing can prevent the spiritual rejuvenation of the soul that insists upon having it. Though that solitary man must live and walk among persons religiously dead, he may experience the great transformation as certainly and as quickly as if he were in the most spiritual church in the world.
Tozer in the Evening – Laboring in the Lord
Certain passages of Scripture, if carelessly read, might give the impression that God delegates some of His work to Christian leaders to do for Him as a manufacturer might sublet to others certain items in a contract; such, for instance, as First Corinthians 15:58, “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” In First Corinthians 16:10 Paul says plainly that Timothy “is carrying on the work of the Lord, just as I am,” but we must never understand from this that these men did a work of God apart. Rather they were the obedient instruments in whom and through whom God wrought His own work.
Any misunderstanding about this is cleared up by the explanation of Paul in Colossians 1:29, “To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me”; and First Corinthians 15:10, “I worked harder than all of them–yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”