A Man Of God

A Man Of God

One of the twentieth century’s most widely read Christian authors had just a grammar school education.

AIDEN WILSON TOZER, known as “A. W.,” was born in 1897, the third of six children in a poor Pennsylvania family. His father was so chronically ill that Tozer had to leave school after sixth grade to work the family’s farm. When he was fifteen, his family moved to Akron, Ohio, where Tozer worked in a factory of the Goodrich Tire Company. One of his new neighbors asked Tozer if he was a Christian. “I don’t know,” he answered, “but I’ll think about it.” Over the next years he did think about it.

Three years later while walking home from work one day, Tozer saw a crowd gathered on a corner around an elderly street preacher. Curious, he stopped to listen and heard the old man say, “If you don’t know how to be saved, just call on God, saying, ‘Lord be merciful to me a sinner.’” Unable to stop thinking about what the preacher had said, Tozer went home and climbed up into the attic for privacy, determined to settle the question once and for all. Hours later he emerged a changed young man.

The first thing Tozer’s family noticed was that he would disappear into the basement for hours every day. There behind the furnace he found a nook that served his purpose: a place to spend uninterrupted time reading the Bible and praying. He also began attending a local church, where he met Ada Pfautz, who later became his wife. Ada’s mother loaned Tozer Christian books from her library. Tozer devoured them one by one.

God had plans for young Tozer. He began preaching on the sidewalks himself and through this ministry met other preachers who were pastors in the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Contact with them led to his ordination in that denomination. In 1928 God called Tozer to pastor Chicago’s Southside Alliance Church, where he remained for thirty-one years.

Tozer had a natural gift for communication and excelled as a preacher. But as he prayed over the needs of his congregation, he realized that few of them read Christian books that could help them grow spiritually. Tozer’s own spiritual education had come from books, not schools. It seemed to him that few Christians seemed to have an appetite for books that made them think about, much less obey, God. In 1943 God led Tozer to begin writing the kinds of books he felt would help his people.

For Tozer, writing was a form of worship in which he tried to relate to others his own sense of awe and wonder at the love of God. “The only book that should ever be written,” he said, “is one that flows up from the heart, forced out by inward pressure.” Tozer’s books—over thirty of them, including The Pursuit of God (1948) and The Knowledge of the Holy (1961)—poured out of his deep relationship with God. Tozer credits God alone for their inspiration and their success and gave away most of the royalties.

A. W. Tozer died on May 12, 1963. God had made him a man of many words. But the epitaph on his tombstone reads simply “A Man of God.”

Reflection

Do you read Christian books? After Bible study, reading Christian books is one of the most spiritually helpful things a person can do. Visit your church library or your local Christian bookstore, and ask God to direct you concerning the books you should read.

The godly people in the land are my true heroes! I take pleasure in them!

Psalm 16:3