Tozer in the Morning – OUR HIGHEST HAPPINESS
Let me call it to your attention that the happiness of all moral creatures lies in the giving of obedience to God, the Creator. The psalmist cries out in Psalms 103:20: “Bless the Lord, ye his angels; that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word.” The angels in heaven find their complete freedom and highest happiness in obeying the commandments of God. They do not find it a tyranny-they find it a delight! Here is something that we should know and realize: heaven is a place of surrender to the whole will of God and it is heaven because it is such a place. I thank God that heaven is the world of God’s obedient children. Whatever else we may say of its pearly gates, golden streets and jasper walls, heaven is heaven because children of the Most High God find they are in their normal sphere as obedient moral beings.
Tozer in the Evening – Holding Unswervingly to Hope
In the dealings of God with men, hope has held a noble place. The expectation that Messiah would come cheered Israel in her years of victory and kept her from despairing in her periods of captivity and dispersal. Those who feared the Lord have often had rough going.
They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword: They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated–the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground (Hebrews 11:37-38).
That is a New Testament tribute to Old Testament saints; but the record of Christian times is fully as grim and sometimes worse. Only the strength of a great expectation enabled the suffering saints to hold out to the end. The cheerful hope of better days allowed them not only to endure the pain but to sing and rejoice in the midst of it.