Tozer in the Morning – Marching in Place
God in His conscending love and kindness often sends a Moses, or maybe a Joshua or an Isaiah, or in latter times a Luther or Wesley to show us that the work of the Lord is not progressing. Times are bad in the kingdom and getting worse. The tendency is to settle into a rut, and we must get out of it. The time has come to arise and go on from here because God’s will is as broad as the land He gave to the Israelites–“in the mountains, in the western foothills, in the Negev and along the coast, to the land of the Canaanites and to Lebanon, as far as the great river, the Euphrates” (Deuteronomy 1:7). . . . I am quite sure that when the man of God thundered, “You have stayed long enough in this place. You are going around in circles. Get you out and take what is given to you by the hand of your God,” nobody got up and said, “Mr. Chairman, let’s eat something.” Eating probably would not have helped. I am quite certain that they did not get up and say, “Let’s take a trip,” or “Let’s start another club.” Starting a club is another reaction we have when we find ourselves in a rut and realize we are no taller than we were five years ago; we are no farther along than we were five years ago; we don’t know any more than we did five years ago; we are no holier than we were five years ago. We simply met ourselves coming around. If a song could be worn out, we have worn out the same old song: “Revive us again, fill each heart with Thy love.” We have sung that one and nobody means it–nobody will pay the price. But we go around and around, and all we see is the other fellow’s heels just ahead of us. All the fellow behind us sees is our heels. We go around and around the circle, and somebody says, “Let’s start a club now.”
Tozer in the Evening – Being Church
If we could bring together in one huge directory a list of all the organizations, great and small, that exist throughout the earth for the promotion of special interests we would be astounded at the number of them. Almost everything that human beings do or can do has its organization, association, society or guild to focus attention upon it and promote its ends. Some of these are good, some are bad, most of them are just neutral; but each one, however boring or comical it may appear to those who are not interested, has its starry-eyed devotees who live for it alone and who derive their keenest pleasure from their preoccupation with it. In the midst of all this there is one group of persons whose absorbing interest is, or should be, God. That group is the Church. The Church is born out of the gospel and that gospel has to do with God and mans relation to God. Christianity engages to bring God into human life, to make men right with God, to give them a heart knowledge of God, to teach them to love and obey God and ultimately to restore in them the lost image of God in full and everlasting perfection.