A Man of God

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is. PSALM 63:1

A farm in the hills. Aiden Wilson Tozer was born on the twenty-first of April, 1897, in the farm country of Clearfield County, in western Pennsylvania, near a hamlet called La Jose. The family was poor, the land was hard and the schooling was thin. There was no high school in his future and no college, and certainly no seminary. What there was, from very early, was a boy who read whatever he could reach. The habit never left him. For the rest of his life the most unlettered of American pastors would also be one of the best read, and every scrap of it was gathered by his own effort, at his own expense, from libraries, second-hand bookshops and borrowed volumes.

Akron. When he was in his middle teens the family moved west to Akron, Ohio, a city growing fast on the back of the rubber industry, and the young Tozer went to work in a tyre factory. It was ordinary labour in an ordinary place, and nothing about it suggested what was coming. Then, one day in 1915, when he was about seventeen, he was walking home from work and heard a street preacher. The man was not remarkable, and the words were not new. He was urging his hearers, in substance, that if they did not know how to be saved they could simply call on God and ask Him for mercy as a sinner. Tozer went home, climbed into the attic of the family house, and did exactly that. There was no church in it, no counsellor, no ceremony. There was a sentence heard in the street and a boy alone with God under a roof. It set the pattern for the whole life that followed. The decisive things would happen in private, between him and God, with the door shut.

God be merciful to me a sinner. LUKE 18:13

A preacher without papers. The change was complete, and it went to work at once. He began to pray, to read the Bible and to preach, first on the street corners of Akron and wherever else he could find hearers. In 1918 he married Ada Cecelia Pfautz, a young woman of devout family, and the two were to be married for some forty-five years and to have seven children. He had no training and no degree, and he never acquired either. Yet the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the movement A. B. Simpson had founded a generation before, recognised what it was hearing. After a start among small congregations in West Virginia he was ordained in the Alliance in 1920, and there followed pastorates in Toledo, Ohio, and in Indianapolis. He was learning his craft in public and his theology in private, reading the Puritans, the poets, the church fathers and the old devotional writers with a hunger that astonished those who knew how little formal education lay behind it.

Southside. In 1928 he was called to Southside Alliance Church in Chicago, a modest congregation on the south side of the city. He stayed thirty-one years. It was there that he became the Tozer people remember. The church never grew into a large one; he was not that kind of preacher and did not want to be. But the preaching drew hearers from well beyond the congregation, including students from the Chicago colleges who came to hear a man speak of God as though he had just come from His presence. He broadcast on the radio station of the Moody Bible Institute. In 1943 he published Wingspread, a life of A. B. Simpson, the founder of his own movement. In 1950 he became editor of the Alliance’s magazine, The Alliance Weekly, later renamed The Alliance Witness, and he kept that post until his death. His editorials, short, sharp and often severe, were read far beyond his own denomination, and many of them were later gathered into books.

The book written on a train. His most famous work came, by the account of his biographers, almost in a single rush. He was travelling by train to Texas, and through the long hours of the night he wrote, with the pages coming faster than he could have planned them. The result was The Pursuit of God, published in 1948. It is a short book, and in some ways a simple one. It is also, by general consent, one of the devotional classics of the twentieth century. It gathered up everything he had been preaching for twenty years — that God is to be sought for Himself, that He may be known and not merely known about, that the heart must be emptied of its possessions and its pride before it can be filled — and set it in a form that ordinary believers could carry about with them. It has never been out of print.

Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek him with the whole heart. PSALM 119:2

The man on the floor. Behind the books was a life of prayer that those who knew him found hard to account for. He would go early to his study, and it was known that he would change out of his good suit into old clothes so as not to spoil it, because much of his praying was done not in a chair but stretched full length upon the floor. He was not, most of the time, bringing a list of requests. He was worshipping. His habit was to set before God not what he wanted but what God is, and to stay there. He loved the old hymns as some men love a garden, and he commended a good hymnbook as a companion to the Bible in private devotion. Those who heard him preach sensed that they were hearing the overflow of those hours, and they were right.

Honours and plainness. He had no earned degree of any kind, but two colleges gave him honorary doctorates, Wheaton in 1950 and Houghton in 1952. He accepted them, though he is said to have disliked being called Doctor. In other ways he kept himself plain almost to the point of austerity. He is said never to have owned a car, travelling by bus and train. He gave away much of what his books earned and kept his household on very little. He distrusted money as he distrusted celebrity, and he was sharply aware of the power of both to dull the edge of a servant of God.

The cost at home. It would be dishonest to leave the portrait there, and his biographers have not done so. The same absorption in God and in his books that made him a prophet in the pulpit made him, by their frank account, a distant husband and father. He was often withdrawn at home, sparing with affection, hard to reach. His frugality, admirable in a single man, fell heavily on a wife raising seven children. Lyle Dorsett, whose biography is sympathetic, records that after Tozer’s death Ada married again, and that when she was asked about her happiness she is reported to have said, in effect, that her first husband had loved Jesus Christ, while her second husband loved her. It is not a bitter remark. It is a sad and honest one, and it belongs in any true account of him. A man may pursue God with his whole heart and still fail those nearest to him. Both things were true of Tozer, and neither cancels the other.

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. 1 TIMOTHY 5:8

That verse speaks of material provision, and Tozer did provide. But the wider principle beneath it — that a man’s faith is proved first under his own roof — is one his readers are right to hold before themselves as they read him.

Toronto and the last years. In 1959 he left Chicago for Avenue Road Church in Toronto, where he spent his final years. His great book on the attributes of God, The Knowledge of the Holy, appeared in 1961. It is his most sustained piece of writing and, alongside The Pursuit of God, the book by which he is best known. He continued to preach and to write his editorials, and to lament, as he had lamented for forty years, the shallowness of a church that had kept its creed and lost its God.

The stone. On the twelfth of May, 1963, he died of a heart attack in Toronto, still in the pastorate. He was sixty-six. He was buried near Chicago, and his remains were later moved to Ellet Cemetery in Akron, not far from the streets where he had heard the preacher and the attic where he had prayed. The stone is a plain one. It bears his name and three short words describing him as a man of God. Much of the large shelf of books that now carries his name was compiled after his death by editors working from his sermons, editorials and recorded addresses, and it is still growing. He himself wrote comparatively little. But what he wrote came, as he always insisted everything true must come, out of the place of prayer.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. MATTHEW 5:8

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Tozer’s conversion happened in an attic with no one present. Where is your place of meeting with God, and when did you last use it with the door shut?

2. He educated himself by steady reading. Choose one serious Christian book and set aside a fixed time each week to read it.

3. Consider honestly whether your devotion to God has become an excuse for neglecting anyone near you. Ask someone in your home, and listen.

4. Tozer kept himself free of money and celebrity. Name one thing you own or want that is quietly dulling your appetite for God.

5. Give thanks for one ordinary believer whose word, like the street preacher’s, turned your life toward God.

A PRAYER

Lord, You found a boy on a street corner and met him in an attic. You still meet those who call on You for mercy.

Thank You for the servants You have given Your church, for their hunger and their faithfulness. Keep me from admiring them and forgetting You.

Where I have loved You in words and failed the people You have given me, forgive me, and teach me to love them for Your sake.

Let my life, when it is over, be summed up as simply as his stone. Make me a man, a woman, of God. Amen.