Born After Midnight
Overview
This is another collection of Tozer’s essays from Alliance Life. Tozer has said that revivals are born after midnight because they “require a serious mind and a determined heart to pray past the ordinary into the unusual.” These insightful selections point out the disparity between human ways and God’s way. We are cajoled to rise above mere living, to press toward the blessings offered by the Holy Spirit. Christians often fail to reach beyond themselves to all that God has for them and to live in the extraordinary realm of close union with Christ.
Product Details
- Title: Born After Midnight
- Author: A. W. Tozer
- Publisher: WingSpread
- Publication Date: 1989
- Pages: 142
About A. W. Tozer
Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897-1963) was born on a small farm in what is now Newburg, PA. His family moved to Akron, Ohio, when he was just a young boy. At the age of 17, Tozer heard a street preacher, responded to the calling of Christ, and began his lifelong pursuit of God. After becoming an active witness of Jesus as a lay preacher, he joined The Christian and Missionary Alliance and was soon serving as the pastor of West Virginia’s Alliance Church, in 1919. He transferred to the Southside Alliance Church in Chicago in 1928, and his ministry continued there for 31 years. During that time he preached on the Moody Bible Institute’s radio station. In the 1940s Tozer was invited to speak at Wheaton College, and seldom a year passed after World War II that he didn’t preach in the college’s Pierce Chapel. In 1950 he became the editor of The Alliance Life magazine and served in that capacity until his death.
Self-taught, with no formal Bible training, Tozer has been called a twentieth-century prophet within his own lifetime. Through years of diligent study and constant prayer, he sought the mind of God. A master craftsman in the use of the English language, he was able to write in a simple, cogent style the principles of truth he had learned. For Tozer, “there was no substitute for knowing God firsthand.” He wrote many of his books with one idea in mind—that his reader would achieve the heart’s true goal in God and maintain that relationship with Him.
Tozer moved to Toronto in 1959 and spent the final years of his life as the pastor of Avenue Road Church. He and his wife, Ada, lived a simple, non-materialistic lifestyle and let much of the royalties from his books go to those in need. The Tozers had seven children, six boys and one girl. James L. Snyder, said of Tozer that his “preaching as well as his writings were but extensions of his prayer life. He had the ability to make his listeners face themselves in the light of what God was saying to them.”
Top Highlights
“Yet there is considerable truth in the idea that revivals are born after midnight, for revivals (or any other spiritual gifts and graces) come only to those who want them badly enough. It may be said without qualification that every man is as holy and as full of the Spirit as he wants to be. He may not be as full as he wishes he were, but he is most certainly as full as he wants to be.” (Pages 7–8)
“What we are overlooking is that no one can be a worker who is not first a worshiper.” (Page 125)
“‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.’ Hunger and thirst are physical sensations which, in their acute stages, may become real pain. It has been the experience of countless seekers after God that when their desires became a pain they were suddenly and wonderfully filled. The problem is not to persuade God to fill us, but to want God sufficiently to permit Him to do so. The average Christian is so cold and so contented with His wretched condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can rush in satisfying fullness.” (Page 8)
“The best way to control our thoughts is to offer the mind to God in complete surrender. The Holy Spirit will accept it and take control of it immediately. Then it will be relatively easy to think on spiritual things, especially if we train our thought by long periods of daily prayer. Long practice in the art of mental prayer (that is, talking to God inwardly as we work or travel) will help to form the habit of holy thought.” (Page 47)
“The best way to keep the enemy out is to keep Christ in. The sheep need not be terrified by the wolf; they have but to stay close to the shepherd. It is not the praying sheep Satan fears but the presence of the shepherd.” (Page 43)
- Title: Born After Midnight
- Author: A. W. Tozer
- Publisher: WingSpread
- Print Publication Date: 1989
- Logos Release Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subject: Christian living › Meditations
- ISBNs: 9780875094168, 9780875091679, 9781600660290, 0875094163, 0875091679, 1600660290
- Resource ID: LLS:BORNAFMIDN
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T22:18:29Z
A. W. Tozer (1897–1963) was a dynamic preacher, prolific writer, and a no-nonsense man of God. Aiden Wilson Tozer responded to the call of Christ at the age of 17. After becoming an active witness of Jesus as a lay preacher, he joined The Christian and Missionary Alliance and was soon serving as the pastor of West Virginia’s Alliance Church.
In 1928, he transferred to the Southside Alliance Church in Chicago where he served for 31 years. During that time he preached on the Moody Bible Institute’s radio station and was often invited to speak at Wheaton College in Pierce Chapel. Tozer spent the final years of his life as the pastor of Avenue Road Church in Toronto and the editor of The Alliance Life magazine.
Tozer authored over 40 books, including The Attributes of God, Volume One, Tozer on Christian Leadership, We Travel an Appointed Way, The Pursuit of God, and God’s Pursuit of Man.