Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer Devotional for September 16

 Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer Devotional for September 16

Tozer in the Morning
The Necessity of the Spirit's Illumination

I said that the causes of religious confusion were four, and I named misunderstanding of the nature of truth as one of them.

The others are lack of love, unbelief and nonobedience.

"Wisdom is a loving spirit," says the Wisdom of Solomon. "He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way" (Psalms 25:9), says David, the father of Solomon, and these set forth a truth which the whole Bible joins to celebrate; namely, that love and wisdom are forever joined and that soundness of moral judgment is for the meek alone. The humble, loving heart intuits truth as the Scriptures reveal it and the Holy Spirit illuminates it. The Spirit will not enlighten an unloving mind; and without His enlightenment the mysteries of Christian truth must forever remain a stranger to us.

To the loving mind God gives the power of immediate apprehension, and to none other. The theologian who is only a theologian must work out the teachings of the Scriptures as a child works out a jigsaw puzzle, fitting piece to piece with painstaking labor till at last he has a body of doctrine bearing some resemblance to the Biblical revelation. The difficulty (and the source of confusion) is that certain pieces will fit anywhere and others nowhere, so they may be forced into place or tossed back in the box at the whim of the student. But where love and illumination are, the picture always comes out right. The Spirit says one thing to all loving hearts.

Tozer in the Evening
Exercising Our Option to Experience God

Without doubt the greatest need of the human personality is to experience God Himself. This is because of who God is and who and what man is. God is the essence of intelligent, self-conscious life and man is created in His image. God is love, and man is made for God. God and man exist for each other and neither is satisfied without the other. Though God is self-sufficient He has sovereignly willed to have communion with the being He made in honor next to Himself, and He takes every means to secure this communion short of coercion, which would be a violation of man?s free will. Were God to override our wills He would be forcing Himself upon us and by so doing would make us a little less than human and so a little less than the being He made for Himself.

Copyright Statement
This material is considered in the public domain.