Aiden Wilson Tozer was an American Christian pastor, author, magazine editor, and spiritual mentor. Profoundly inspirational AW Tozer quotes will challenge the way you think, and make your life worth living.
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Famous AW Tozer Quotes
The best preparation for worship is not a rehearsal, but surrender. – AW Tozer
Jesus came not to condemn, but to reclaim. – AW Tozer
If God gives you a watch, are you honoring Him more by asking Him what time it is or by simply consulting the watch? – AW Tozer
Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul. – AW Tozer
Do not allow the enemy of your soul to rob you of that unique quality God has breathed into you. – AW Tozer
Nothing bothers the devil more than a Christian delighting in God’s presence. – AW Tozer
God tells us to make a sanctuary of our thoughts in which He can dwell. – AW Tozer
When a man of God dies, nothing of God dies. – AW Tozer
Only the redeemed have the ability to like what God likes and to be pleased with what pleases God. – AW Tozer
We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum. – AW Tozer
An idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand. – AW Tozer
It is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend a meeting where the only attraction is God – AW Tozer
The complacency of Christians is the scandal of Christianity. – AW Tozer
I want the presence of God Himself, or I don’t want anything at all to do with religion… I want all that God has or I don’t want any. – AW Tozer
The fruit is what really matters, not how gnarly or beautiful the apple tree is. – AW Tozer
Love is both a principle and an emotion; it is something both felt and willed. It is capable of almost infinite degrees. Love in the human heart may begin so modestly as to be hardly perceptible and go on to become a raging torrent that sweeps its possessor before it in total helplessness. – AW Tozer
You can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him. – AW Tozer
Heaven is beautiful because it is the expression of that which is the perfection of beauty. – AW Tozer
Though the cross of Christ has been beautified by the poet and the artist, the avid seeker after God is likely to find it the same savage implement of destruction it was in the days of old. The way of the cross is still the pain-wracked path to spiritual power and fruitfulness. – AW Tozer
Let her love God as He is in Himself, and not as her imagination says He is, and pictures Him. – AW Tozer
Let God be true but every man a liar is the language of true faith – AW Tozer
Failure to get a right viewpoint in the beginning of our Christian lives may result in weakness and sterility for the rest of our days! – AW Tozer
The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel to much at home in the world. In their effort to achieve restful ‘adjustment’ to unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very moral order against which they are sent to protest. – AW Tozer
Man appears for a little while to laugh and weep, to work and play, and then to go to make room for those who shall follow him in the never-ending cycle. – AW Tozer
Constantly practice the habit of inwardly gazing upon God. You know that something inside your heart sees God. Even when you are compelled to withdraw your conscious attention in order to engage in earthly affairs, there is within you a secret communion always going on. – AW Tozer
I do not think I exaggerate when I say that some of us put our offering in the plate with a kind of triumphant bounce as much as to say: There – now God will feel better! I am obliged to tell you that God does not need anything you have. He does not need a dime of your money. It is your own spiritual welfare at stake in such matters as these. You have the right to keep what you have all to yourself – but it will rust and decay, and ultimately ruin you. – AW Tozer
A Christian expects to go to Heaven on the virtue of another. – AW Tozer
To escape the error of salvation by works we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience. – AW Tozer
Refuse to be average. Let your heart soar as high as it will. – AW Tozer
Are you satisfied being filled with good information about God, or do you long to burst into His manifest presence? – AW Tozer
Holiness has nothing to do with what we know and everything to do with Who we know. – AW Tozer
We Christians must look sharp that our Christianity does not simply refine our sins without removing them. – AW Tozer
Some morning, get up and allow the power of God to come on you, and allow Him to bless you. – AW Tozer
There are such things as consecrated griefs, sorrows that may be common to everyone but which take on a special character when accepted intelligently and offered to God in loving submission. – AW Tozer
We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work. – AW Tozer
Spiritual Christians look upon the world not as a playground but as a battleground. – AW Tozer
If we try to obey without faith, we get nowhere. If we try to have faith without obedience, it ends in nothing. – AW Tozer
If we make provision for sinning tomorrow, we will be sinning tomorrow. – AW Tozer
To me, it has always been difficult to understand those evangelical Christians who insist upon living in the crisis as if no crisis existed. They say they serve the Lord, but they divide their days so as to leave plenty of time to play and loaf and enjoy the pleasures of the world as well. They are at ease while the world burns…. – AW Tozer
I contend that whatever does not raise the moral standard of the church or community has been a revival from God. – AW Tozer
At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His Presence. – AW Tozer
We can afford to follow Him to failure. Faith dares to fail. The resurrection and the judgment will demonstrate before all worlds who won and who lost. We can wait. – AW Tozer
It’s hard to rest knowing that millions of people merely carry on religious traditions but don’t actually reach God. – AW Tozer
The inner life must overcome the flesh or the flesh will overcome and destroy the inner life. – AW Tozer
To accept Christ is to know the meaning of the words ‘as he is, so are we in this world.’ We accept his friends as our friends, his enemies as our enemies, his ways as our ways, his rejection as our rejection, his cross as our cross, his life as our life and his future as our future. If this is what we mean when we advise the seeker to accept Christ, we had better explain it to him. He may get into deep spiritual trouble unless we do. – AW Tozer
We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing. – AW Tozer
Faith is not merely a journey for the feet, but it is also a journey for the heart. – AW Tozer
Everything is wrong until Jesus sets it right. – AW Tozer
To know God is to fear Him. And this fear is to love Him as He deserves to be loved. – AW Tozer
God’s redemptive revelation in Scripture is necessary to saving faith and peace with God. Faith in a risen Savior is necessary if the vague stirrings toward immortality are to bring us to restful and satisfying communion with God. – AW Tozer
The yearning to know what cannot be known, to comprehend the incomprehensible, to touch and taste the unapproachable, arises from the image of God in the nature of man. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its source. – AW Tozer
God is never impressed with what a man can do. He is more concerned with what a man is. – AW Tozer
O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ’s sake, Amen. – AW Tozer
Save me from the error of judging a church by its size, popularity or the amount of its yearly offerings. – AW Tozer
Any faith that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living. – AW Tozer
In almost everything that touches our everyday life on earth, God is pleased when we’re pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our maker’s praise without anxiety. – AW Tozer
An infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as fully as if there were no others. – AW Tozer
No matter what the circumstances, we Christians should keep our heads. God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, of love and of a sound mind. It is a dismal thing to see a son of heaven cringe in terror before the sons of earth. – AW Tozer
I say that a Christian congregation can survive and often appear to prosper in the community by the exercise of human talent and without any touch from the Holy Spirit! All that religious activity and the dear people will not know anything better until the great and terrible day when our self-employed talents are burned with fire and only that which was wrought by the Holy Ghost will stand forever! – AW Tozer
Where God is not glorified, that place is sick – AW Tozer
It is necessary for God to use the hammers, the file, and the furnace in His holy work of preparing a saint for true sainthood. It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply. – AW Tozer
We tend by a secret law of the soul to move towards our mental image of God. – AW Tozer
The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still. – AW Tozer
Truth is a glorious but hard mistress. She never consults, bargains or compromises. – AW Tozer
Be hard on yourself and easy on others. Carry your own cross but never lay one on the back of another – AW Tozer
If I am to wholly follow the Lord Jesus Christ, I must forsake everything that is contrary to Him. – AW Tozer
We have our ambition for the future and God. And thus we put God as a plus sign after something else we want. – AW Tozer
We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety; this is especially true when those treasures are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed. – AW Tozer
There is more healing joy in five minutes of true worship than in five nights of revelry. – AW Tozer
With a sacred expectation, I look for God in ALL of the circumstances of my day. – AW Tozer
We may sing, ‘Crown Him Lord of all,’ and rejoice in the tones of the loud-sounding organ and the deep melody of harmonious voices, but still we have done nothing until we have left the world and set our faces toward the city of God in hard practical reality. When faith becomes obedience then it is true faith indeed. – AW Tozer
It takes simplicity and humility to worship God acceptably. – AW Tozer
What has the church gained if it is popular but there is no conviction, no repentance, no power? – AW Tozer
I wish that we might get back to worship again. Then when people come into the church they will instantly sense that they have come among holy people, God’s people. They can testify, ‘Of a truth God is in this place’ – AW Tozer
God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God. He has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays. – AW Tozer
Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now. – AW Tozer
The main thing is this: we should never blame anyone or anything for our defeats. No matter how evil their intentions may be, they are altogether unable to harm us until we begin to blame them and use them as excuses for our own unbelief. – AW Tozer
I believe that entertainment and amusements are the work of the Enemy to keep dying men from knowing they’re dying; and to keep enemies of God from remembering that they’re enemies. – AW Tozer
To expose our hearts to truth and consistently refuse or neglect to obey the impulses it arouses is to stymie the motions of life within us and, if persisted in, to grieve the Holy Spirit into silence. – AW Tozer
The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian. – AW Tozer
Pay no heed to the passing religious vogue. Go back to the grass roots. Open your hearts and search the Scriptures. Bear your cross, follow your Lord. The masses are always wrong. In every generation the number of the righteous is small. Be sure you are among them. – AW Tozer
If you’re not worshiping God on Monday the way you [did] the day before, perhaps you’re not worshiping Him at all. – AW Tozer
The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing. The word Jesus used means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do. His own meekness, that is the rest. – AW Tozer
The most important thing about you is what comes to your mind when you think of God. – AW Tozer
To know that God thinks about me is the beginning of my journey of faith. – AW Tozer
Salvation is from our side a choice, from the divine side it is a seizing upon, an apprehending, a conquest by the Most High God. Our ‘accepting’ and ‘willing’ are reactions rather than actions. The right of determination must always remain with God. – AW Tozer
The trouble is that the whole ‘accept Christ’ attitude is likely to be wrong. It shows Christ applying to us rather than us to him. It makes him stand hat-in-hand awaiting our verdict on him, instead of our kneeling with troubled hearts awaiting his verdict on us. It may even permit us to accept Christ by an impulse of mind or emotions, painlessly, at no loss to our ego and no inconvenience to our usual way of life. – AW Tozer
What God declares the believing heart confesses without the need of further proof. Indeed, to seek proof is to admit doubt, and to obtain proof is to render faith superfluous. – AW Tozer
The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself. – AW Tozer
True religion is removed from diet and days, from garments and ceremonies, and placed where it belongs – in the union of the spirit of man with the Spirit of God. – AW Tozer
Beauty is in the eye of the Creator. – AW Tozer
Perfect love knows no because – AW Tozer
There is a strain of loneliness infecting many Christians, which only the presence of God can cure. – AW Tozer
Whom God would use greatly He will hurt deeply. – AW Tozer
When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life. But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart. – AW Tozer
Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies. – AW Tozer
One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always. – AW Tozer
God doesn’t need anything nevertheless He wants worshipers. – AW Tozer
It is because of the hasty and superficial conversation with God that the sense of sin is so weak and that no motives have power to help you to hate and flee from sin as you should. – AW Tozer
History is little more than the story of man’s sin, and the daily newspaper a running commentary on it. – AW Tozer
