Book Review: The Attributes of God 2

The Attributes of God, volume 2: Deeper Into the Father's Heart. A.W. Tozer. 2001/2007. Wingspread. 203 pages. [Source: Bought]

Earlier this month, I reviewed A.W. Tozer's The Attributes of God. Ten "attributes" were discussed including God's goodness, God's justice, God's mercy, God's grace, God's infinitude, and God's omnipresence. What is an attribute? "An attribute of God is something we can know about God. It is knowing what kind of God  God is" (17).

But that was just the beginning. Tozer's sermons were collected into a second volume. In this volume, Tozer explores:

• God's Self-Existence
• God's Transcendence
• God's Eternalness
• God's Omnipotence
• God's Immutability
• God's Omniscience
• God's Wisdom
• God's Sovereignty
• God's Faithfulness
• God's Love

Each chapter begins with Scripture. Each chapter closes with prayer. These are contemplative, devotional readings. Tozer never lets readers forget that it is KNOWING GOD and not KNOWING ABOUT God that truly matters. His enthusiasm is contagious. His approach is passionate and demanding. He invites readers into theology. He encourages them to take God seriously, to take God at his word, to earnestly and passionately seek GOD for themselves.

Tozer died in 1963. Yet Tozer's messages remain relevant. In fact, they might be even more timely today than when they were first preached. For example, "I don't suppose there is ever a time in the history of the world when we needed a restored knowledge of God more than we need it now" (5) If you haven't read Tozer yet, you don't know what your missing. 

Favorite quotes:

We wonder why we don't have faith; the answer is, faith is confidence in the character of God and if we don't know what kind of God God is, we can't have faith. (5)

God is always nearer than you may imagine Him to be. God is so near that your thoughts are not as near as God; your breath is not as near as God; your very soul is not as near to you as God is. And yet because He is God, His uncreated Being is so far above us that no thought can conceive it nor words express it. (34)

When you meet God, you get over the dangers and fears of this world. But the fear, the dread that is God, is not a sense of danger. It's a sense of being in the presence of someone very awful, very wonderful, transcendent and highly lifted up. It's a creature consciousness. (44)

Whatever God felt about anything, He still feels. Whatever He thought about anyone, He still thinks. Whatever He approved, He still approves. Whatever He condemned, He still condemns. Today we have what they call the relativity of morals. But remember this God never changes. Holiness and righteousness are conformity to the will of God. And the will of God never changes for moral creatures. (99, 100)

I recommend to you Jesus Christ, the unchanging One. I recommend to you God's answer to your questions, God's solution to your problems, God's life for your dying soul, God's cleansing for your sin-cursed spirit, God's rest for your restless mind, and God's resurrection for your dying body. For advocate above, I recommend Him to you. You will find Him to be all He ever was--the very same Jesus. (104)

Wisdom is the ability to see the end from the beginning, to see everything in proper relation and in full focus. It is to judge in view of final and ultimate ends and to work toward those ends with flawless precision. (130)

Why don't you start reading your Bible with the thought that God meant exactly what He said there? (172)

We talk about love, but God proved His love. The save love that created us is the love that redeemed us and now keeps us. (194)

Heaven will not be heaven to the man who does not have the love of God in his heart. (196)

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

Book Review: The Root of the Righteous

The Root of the Righteous: Tapping The Bedrock of True Spirituality. A.W. Tozer. 1955/2006. WingSpread Publishers. 186 pages.

One marked difference between the faith of our fathers as conceived by the fathers and the same faith as understood and lived by their children is that the fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day descendants seem concerned only with the fruit. 

Dare I say it? I think I loved The Root of the Righteous *even* more than I loved The Knowledge of the Holy. I would definitely consider The Root of the Righteous to be just as much of a must-read as Tozer's beloved classic, The Knowledge of the Holy. It may just be THE BEST book on Christian living that I've read in a while. To clarify, the best general book on Christian living that covers a dozen different subjects of Christian living--as opposed to a "Christian living" book that just focuses on one subject (grace; atonement; prayer; church leadership; worship; assurance of salvation; etc.) Many great, great books just focus one or two subjects. This one truly covers it all. No matter WHERE you are in your faith, in your life, no matter what you're struggling with....this one is just right for meeting your needs.

There are 46 chapters in The Root of the Righteous. Don't be intimidated though. Each chapter is three to four pages in length. This one would be a GREAT book to read devotionally--before or after Bible reading/prayer.

• The Root of the Righteous
• We Must Give Time to God
• God is Easy to Live With
• Listen to the Man Who Listens to God
• We Must Hear Worthily
• That Utilitarian Christ
• On Receiving Admonition
• The Great God Entertainment
• Bible Taught or Spirit Taught?
• The Terror of the Lord
• No Regeneration without Reformation
• Faith is a Perturbing Thing
• True Faith Brings Committal
• The Great Disparity
• Our Enemy Contentment
• Christ is the Pattern
• The Cross is a Radical Thing
• We Must Die If We Would Live
• Christ Died For Our Hearts
• We Stand in Christ's Triumph
• To Be or To Do
• Make Room for Mystery
• The Whole Life Must Pray
• No Saviorhood without Lordship
• "A Sweet Lute, Sweetly Played"
• The All-Importance of Motive
• The Presence More Important Than the Program
• The World's Most Tragic Waste
• The Hunger of the Wilderness
• Our Fruit Will Be What We Are
• Needed: A Baptism of Clear Seeing
• Narrow Mansions
• The Sanctification of Our Desires
• In Praise of Disbelief
• Thankfulness As A Moral Therapeutic
• Understanding Those Dry Spells
• About Hindrances
• The Uses of Suffering
• Praise God for the Furnace
• Victory in the Guise of Defeat
• Love of the Unseen is Possible
• Something Beyond Song
• Three Degrees of Love
• We Need Cool Heads
• We Can Afford to Wait
• God, the First and the Last

Each chapter is rich--very, very rich--in truth. Some truths *are* hard to hear, you should be warned. Reading Tozer might just challenge and convict you. Especially when he talks about complacency and laziness. But Tozer's passionate zeal, his enthusiasm for God, for the Bible, is super-contagious. And reading Tozer is very inspiring.

Favorite quotes:

The Christian is strong or weak depending upon how closely he has cultivated the knowledge of God. (8)

Progress in the Christian life is exactly equal to the growing knowledge we gain of the Triune God in personal experience. And such experience requires a whole life devoted to it and plenty of time spent at the holy task of cultivating God. God can be known satisfactorily only as we devote time to Him. (9)

No man has any right to offer advice who has not first heard God speak. No man has any right to counsel others who is not ready to hear and follow the counsel of the Lord. True moral wisdom must always be an echo of God's voice. The only safe light for our path is the light which is reflected from Christ, the Light of the World. (16)

A truth fully taught in the Scriptures and verified in personal experience by countless numbers of holy men and women through the centuries might be condensed thus into a religious axiom: No one can know the true grace of God who has not first known the fear of God. (39)

People must be told that the Christian religion is not something they can trifle with. The faith of Christ will command or it will have nothing to do with a man. It will not yield to experimentation. Its power cannot reach any man who is secretly keeping an escape route open in case things get too tough for him. The only man who can be sure he has true Bible faith is the one who has put himself in a position where he cannot go back. (50)

To many Christians Christ is little more than an idea, or at best an ideal; He is not a fact. Millions of professed believers talk as if He were real and act as if He were not. And always our actual position is to be discovered by the way we act, not by the way we talk. We can prove our faith by our committal to it and in no other way. Any belief that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief. (51)

Orthodox Christianity has fallen to its present low estate from lack of spiritual desire. Among the many who profess the Christian faith, scarcely one in a thousand reveals any passionate thirst for God. (61)

In every Christian's heart there is a cross and a throne, and the Christian is on the throne till he puts himself on the cross; if he refuses the cross he remains on the throne. Perhaps this is at the bottom of the backsliding and worldliness among gospel believers today. We want to be saved but we insist that Christ do all the dying. No cross for us, no dethronement, no dying. (72-3)

We must never underestimate the ability of human beings to get themselves tangled up. Mankind appears to have a positive genius for twisting truth until it ceases to be truth and becomes downright falsehood. By overemphasizing in one place and underemphasizing in another the whole pattern of truth may be so altered that a completely false view results without our being aware of it. This fact was brought forcibly to mind recently by hearing again the discredited doctrine of a divided Christ so widely accepted in many religious circles. It goes like this: Christ is both Savior and Lord. A sinner may be saved by accepting Him as Savior without yielding to Him as Lord. The practical outworking of this doctrine is that the evangelist presents and the seeker accepts a divided Christ. We have all heard the tearful plea made to persons already saved to accept Christ as Lord and thus enter into the victorious life. Almost all deeper life teaching is based upon this fallacy, but because it contains a germ of truth its soundness is not questioned. Anyway, it is extremely simple and quite popular, and in addition to these selling points it is also ready-made for both speaker and hearer and requires no thinking by either. So sermons embodying this heresy are freely preached, books are written and songs composed, all saying the same thing; and all saying the wrong thing, except, as I have said, for a feeble germ of truth lying inert at the bottom. Now, it seems odd that none of these teachers ever noticed that the only true object of saving faith is none other than Christ Himself; not the "saviorhood" of Christ nor the "lordship" of Christ, but Christ himself. God does not offer salvation to the one who will believe on one of the offices of Christ, nor is an office of Christ ever presented as an object of faith. Neither are we exhorted to believe on the atonement, nor on the cross, nor on the priesthood of the Savior. All of these are embodied in the person of Christ, but they are never separated nor is one ever isolated from the rest. Much less are we permitted to accept one of Christ's offices and reject another. The notion that we are so permitted is a modern day heresy, I repeat, and like every heresy it has had evil consequences among Christians. No heresy is ever entertained with impunity. We pay in practical failure for our theoretical errors. It is altogether doubtful whether any man can be saved who comes to Christ for His help but with no intention to obey Him. Christ's saviorhood is forever united to His lordship. (95-7)

The man who has met God is not looking for something--he has found it. he is not searching for light--upon him the Light has already shined. His certainty may seem bigoted, but his is the assurance of one who knows by experience. His religion is not hearsay; he is not a copy, not a facsimile print; he is an original from the hand of the Holy Ghost. (181)

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

Book Review: The Pursuit of God

The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine. A.W. Tozer 1948/2006. WingSpread Publishers. 70 pages.

Christian theology teaches the doctrine of prevenient grace, which briefly stated means this, that before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man. Before a sinful man can think a right thought of God, there must have been a work of enlightenment done within him; imperfect it may be, but a true work nonetheless, and the secret cause of all desiring and seeking and praying which may follow. We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit. "No man can come to me," said our Lord, "except the Father which hath sent me draw him," and it is by this very prevenient drawing that God takes from us every vestige of credit for the act of coming. The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the out working of that impulse is our following hard after Him; and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand: "Thy right hand upholdeth me."

I have just been LOVING my A.W. Tozer Bible. As in there are no words for how much I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE reading it. So when my library got a copy of A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God, I knew I had to read it.

It is a short book: ten little chapters, around 70 to 80 pages. I'll share a list of chapter titles with you because I think the titles alone can help you decide if this is something that you'd be interested in reading for yourself:

• Following Hard After God
• The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing
• Removing the Veil
• Apprehending God
• The Universal Presence
• The Speaking Voice
• The Gaze of the Soul
• Restoring the Creator-Creature Relation
• Meekness and Rest
• The Sacrament of Living

Each chapter is three or four pages in length. Each chapter concludes with a prayer. I just LOVED these prayers, it's true. For me, they were the highlight of the whole book. I wish the A.W. Tozer Bible had a fourth feature--prayers of Tozer.

From "Following Hard After God"

O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away." Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

From "The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing"

Father, I want to know Thee, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

From "Removing the Veil"

Lord, how excellent are Thy ways, and how devious and dark are the ways of man. Show us how to die, that we may rise again to newness of life. Rend the veil of our self-life from the top down as Thou didst rend the veil of the Temple. We would draw near in full assurance of faith. We would dwell with Thee in daily experience here on this earth so that we may be accustomed to the glory when we enter Thy heaven to dwell with Thee there. In Jesus' name, Amen.

From "Apprehending God"

O God, quicken to life every power within me, that I may lay hold on eternal things. Open my eyes that I may see; give me acute spiritual perception; enable me to taste Thee and know that Thou art good. Make heaven more real to me than any earthly thing has ever been. Amen.

From "Restoring the Creator-creature Relation"

O God, be Thou exalted over my possessions. Nothing of earth's treasures shall seem dear unto me if only Thou art glorified in my life. Be Thou exalted over my friendships. I am determined that Thou shalt be above all, though I must stand deserted and alone in the midst of the earth. Be Thou exalted above my comforts. Though it mean the loss of bodily comforts and the carrying of heavy crosses I shall keep my vow made this day before Thee. Be Thou exalted over my reputation. Make me ambitious to please Thee even if as a result I must sink into obscurity and my name be forgotten as a dream. Rise, O Lord, into Thy proper place of honor, above my ambitions, above my likes and dislikes, above my family, my health and even my life itself. Let me decrease that Thou mayest increase, let me sink that Thou mayest rise above. Ride forth upon me as Thou didst ride into Jerusalem mounted upon the humble little beast, a colt, the foal of an ass, and let me hear the children cry to Thee, "Hosanna in the highest."

The text of this one is available through Project Gutenberg.

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible