The Divine Conquest // by A.W. Tozer

Also published as God’s Pursuit of Man.

//published 1950//

Wow, I don’t even really know where to begin with this book.  It is so incredibly challenging and thought-provoking.  It should come with a warning label – Don’t Read Unless You Are Ready to Be Convicted and Change Your Life.

I don’t mean to be rude or exclusive, but this is really a book for Christians.  I don’t see a non-Christian taking anything away from it, other than, perhaps, the urge to learn more about this mystery that is the relationship between man and God.  But Tozer is primarily writing to people who have at least a basic knowledge of Christianity – although he will challenge you to consider what exactly “being a Christian” means in real life as well.

Each chapter is a little essay, and they all build together to a cohesive overall message.  Tozer begins by discussing different aspects of the Christian faith, and how willing we are, as a rule, to “settle” for just sort of a cow-like behavior of coming to church when we’re supposed to, sitting in the pews, and then going home.  However, Tozer reminds us that becoming a Christian means accepting the Word means inviting an external force to change who we are from the inside out.

The argument of this book is the essential interiority of true religion.  I expect to show that if we would know the power of the Christian message our nature must be invaded by an Object from beyond it; that That which is external must become internal; that the objective Reality which is God must cross the threshold of our personality and take residence within.

Tozer reminds his readers, without mincing words, that becoming something means that you are changing, and changing means that you also are un-becoming things.

It is impossible to travel south without turning one’s back upon the north.  One cannot plant until he has plowed nor move forward until he has removed the obstacles before him.

In this day and age of constant fear of offending people, reading this book was like a drink of cool water on a hot day.  Tozer says flat out that, “Whatever stands in the way of spiritual progress I have felt it my duty to oppose,” and he does it firmly and without apology.

There is so much in this book.  I’ve underlined scores of passages.  After a few chapters of talking about turning one’s life around, Tozer begins to remind his readers that God does not expect us to do this on our own – and the rest of the book is devoted to the Holy Spirit.  When I first read this book, circa 2007, I had grown up in the church and attending churches and Bible studies and Sunday School and everything you can think of my entire life.  I had embraced the Christian faith as my own as an adult.  Yet I realized that I could not recall a single sermon on the topic of the Holy Spirit.  Tozer challenges his readers to embrace this aspect of God, not in the speaking-in-tongues-rolling-in-the-aisles way, but the fact that He does indwell the children of God and is there to help us make decisions, to live purely, to understand Scripture.  And instead of coming to Him, most of the time we just ignore Him.

Tozer says all of this much, much better than I ever could.  If you’re a Christian (or thinking about Christianity), I can’t recommend this book highly enough.  I’m still being challenged by it.  Tozer’s writing rarely feels dated.  Instead, it feels like he is writing today, and writing directly to his reader.  It’s like reading a letter from a well-loved but somewhat strict uncle.

Read The Divine Conquest.  But only if you’re willing to make some life changes along the way.

Reclaiming Christianity: A Call to Authentic Faith // by A.W. Tozer // Compiled & Edited by James L. Snyder

//published 2009//

Last September I reviewed another of these collections of Tozer’s sermons, Living as a Christian, and the beginning of my review of that book summarizes a bit about Tozer himself and how Snyder came to be going through his sermons and turning them into collections of essays.  Reclaiming Christianity is another of these sermon/essay collections that I was picking up now and then throughout the spring.  While they are loosely connected because of their common theme, each chapter is a complete lesson unto itself.

Tozer is always a challenge to read.  He isn’t afraid to shine a bright light on things we’d rather keep hidden – don’t read Tozer if you aren’t willing to face the fact that you probably have several areas of your life that you conveniently ignore and hope they just go away on their own.  But, as Tozer says, “The epistles do not advise; they command,” and Tozer reminds his readers that if you have claimed your place as a child of God, you are now bound to a life of continuing maturity and purity – the Scripture is no longer just some suggestions.

And while Tozer definitely plays hardball, he never comes through as condescending.  He writes like an older brother, or a sage old grandfather – someone who wants to help you avoid the mistakes that he’s made and is willing to take your hand and help you through.  It is so obvious that his words spring from love – love of God, and love of the brethren.

I think the way that Tozer reminds his readers that accepting Christ is only the first step of a process is really excellent.  While it is THE step that grants you a place in heaven, it isn’t genuine unless it changes other aspects of our lives as well.

We have people showing us that we ought not to be holier than thou, but that we ought to say, ‘We are the same as you, only we have a Savior.’

This would be like two men dying on hospital beds in the same ward and one saying to the other, ‘I have what you have but the only difference between us is that I have a physician and you don’t.’

You could not interest a dying man in another man who is so well off because he had a physician.  If the physician could not cure the fellow, what was the good of the physician?  …

If I go to a sinner and say, “I am exactly the same as you, the only difference is that I have a Savior,’ but I do all the same things he does – I tell the same dirty jokes he tells and I waste my time the same way he does and I do everything he does – and then I say, ‘I have a Savior, you out to have a Savior,’ doesn’t he have the right to ask me what kind of Savior I have?  What profit is there for a man to say, ‘I have a physician’ if he is dying on a cot?  What does it profit a man to say, ‘I have a Savior’ if he is living in iniquity?

Tozer isn’t a read for the faint of heart or for those not willing to be challenged.  He does not soften his words or sugarcoat anything.  But if you are looking for more depth and grit in your Christian walk, you would be hard pressed to find a better place to start.

NB: Not actually one of my #20BooksofSummer.  Ah well.  ;-)

Living as a Christian // by A.W. Tozer // compiled & edited by James L. Snyder

A.W. Tozer was a minister who lived, wrote, and preached in the early-to-mid 1900’s.  Known for his soundly and unapolgetically Biblical teaching, his most famous book, The Pursuit of God, has been in print constantly since it was written in 1948, and is still as insightful and challenging today as it was when it was first published.

//published 2009//

In the early 2000’s, James L. Snyder received rights from Tozer’s estate to sift through Tozer’s many recorded sermons and compile them into books.  Thus, in the last ten years, several “new” Tozer books have appeared, even though Tozer himself died in the 1960’s.  Living as a Christian is one of these books.  Challenging and gritty, Tozer’s writing isn’t afraid to make the reader examine her life.  Reading Tozer is like opening the curtains of a dark room to let the sunshine in so you can really, really get down to the cleaning the room needs.

Tozer thoroughly understands the strange balance that is the Christian life: that our good deeds do not save us or make us better.  Only Christ’s sacrifice, and our acceptance of it, allows us to eternal life.  But that very acceptance is only the first step in our pursuit of God and holiness.  Our good works stem from this.  Tozer preaches a strong line of no-compromise holiness to those who have agreed to follow God.  Not only does he not expect non-Christians to live up to these standards of holiness, he doesn’t really expect them to understand why anyone would.  Tozer’s writings are, for the most part, directed to Christians, to strengthen, challenge, and encourage them.

Someone may say, ‘Mr. Tozer, how can a man cleanse his own heart?  How can a man purge his own soul?’  I might ask you how can a man wash his own hands?  He cannot; he can only subject his hands to water and detergents and they do the washing.  If he does not subject himself to water and detergent, he will not be cleansed.  Just as a man is clean by washing his hands and yet cannot wash his hands, so a man’s heart is cleansed when he cleanses himself, yet he cannot cleanse himself.

Living as a Christian is a collection of writing based on the book of 1 Peter, which is actually one of my favorite epistles.  Peter wrote to a group of Christians who were being persecuted for their faith following the burning of Rome.  Peter encourages his readers to stand firm in their faith, and helps them to understand why trials and trouble are a part of our lives even after we have come to Christ.  Tozer expands on Peter’s writing, show how what he said then is just as applicable to our lives today.

Snyder has given us seventeen chapters, most only about 10-15 pages long, making them very accessible chunks to digest.  Tozer is never condescending or superior, but he is also never soft and never compromises.  Some people may have trouble with his hard-line approach, especially in our day of universal acceptance and the constant fear of – gasp! – offending someone, but I don’t think that anyone who genuinely reads Scripture can deny its overall hard-line approach.  It is not called the Sword for nothing.

One of the things that I love (LOVE) about Tozer is his insistence that Scripture is not inaccessible or difficult to understand.  He believes that God has given us a letter that is very clear in its terms and conditions, and that our efforts to make it muddy or complicated are because we don’t like what it says, not because it is actually hard to understand.

You can throw your flesh into the effort, and with strong religious determination break your teeth and batter your own head black and blue but never get anywhere.  You can do that in theology too.  The simplest explanation of any text it just what it says.  you read it, get on your knees and take it at its plainest meaning.  As Mark Twain quipped: ‘Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they don’t understand, but for me I have always noticed that the passages that bother me are those I do understand.’  You will have time enough following the text you understand without seeking piously underneath the surface to bring up some esoteric meaning that God never put there.

Tozer’s emphasis is always that God intends us to start where we are and work towards Him, and that the best way to get anywhere is to start on the path you can see and follow it, rather than worrying about where the path is a few miles away from where we’ve begun.  Those parts of the path will be clear when you get there.  So many people refuse to accept any Scripture unless they can understand all of it, rather than beginning with what they do understand, accepting that, and building from there.

A heresy always hunts obscurity, and false teaching always hunts the difficult text.  You see, it is as if I were to take you to my farm and say to you, ‘Here you will find apples and peaches and grapes and watermelons and cantaloupes and sweet potatoes … now, this is all yours, take over.’  And then I came back a month later and found my guests half starved, and said to them, ‘What’s the matter?  You look undernourished.’

They would say, ‘We are undernourished because we have found a plant we cannot identify.  There is a plant behind  the old oak stump back there in the near end of the far field, just over the hill, and we have stayed one month trying to identify this plant.’

‘But you’re starving!  You’ve got so many other plants around you, but you look sick.  What’s the matter with you?’

And they would reply, ‘We’re worried about this one plant.’

That is exactly what many of God’s children do.  They starve themselves to death knee-deep in clover because there is one little old plant … that they cannot identify.  Heretics are always starving to death while they worry about that one passage of Scripture.

While this is an excellent book and one that I definitely recommend to anyone wanting to know what the Christian’s life ought to look like, it is, at times, obvious that this book was mostly transcribed from sermons.  There are sections that are a bit repetitive, as Tozer reviews something he covered in last week’s sermon – which would make sense if you were listening to him and it had been a week since you heard the last lesson, but can bog down the book a bit when you read the last lesson just yesterday.

Still a challenging and insightful book that is a really wonderful contrast to the lazy compromises so prevalent in our churches today.