Tozer in the Morning – When the Heart Lights Go On
God is concerned with the whole man and has designed that Christian experience should embrace the entire personality. The Christian faith deals not with the spiritual only but with the moral and the rational as well. The rational and moral elements in religion are the proper objects of thought and willingly yield their rich treasures to prayerful meditation. The Christian faith deals with God and man and what can be known about them and their relation one to the other. It contemplates creation, redemption, righteousness, sacred history, the destiny of mankind and the future of the world. Such truths, once they have been revealed by divine inspiration, lie where they can be got at by the redeemed intellect and wait to be exploited by the sons of the kingdom. Under the illumination and guidance of the Holy Spirit the prayerful, studious believer can become a Christian philosopher, a sage, a doctor of divine things. More than that, he can become a man of God and a light to his generation. I repeat, we cannot know God by thinking alone, but we can never know Him very well without a lot of hard thinking.
Tozer in the Evening – The Tyranny of the Customary
In the Old Testament, the enemy that threatened Israel the most was the dictatorship of the customary. Israel became accustomed to walking around in circles and was blissfully content to stay by the safety of the mountain for a while. To put it another way, it was the psychology of the usual. God finally broke into the rut they were in and said, “You have been here long enough. It is time for you to move on.” To put Israel’s experience into perspective for our benefit today, we must see that the mountain represents a spiritual experience or a spiritual state of affairs. Israel’s problem was that they had given up hope of ever getting the land God had promised them. They had become satisfied with going in circles and camping in nice, comfortable places. They had come under the spell of the psychology of the routine. It kept them where they were and prevented them from getting the riches God had promised them. If their enemy, the Edomites, would have come after them, the Israelites would have fought down to the last man and probably would have beaten the Edomites–Israel would have made progress. Instead they were twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the customary to keep on being customary.