That Incredible Christian: How Heaven's Children Live on Earth
Overview
Compiled by Anita M. Bailey, these essays show us how heaven’s children are to live on earth. The thread that ties this edition of Tozer’s essays together is “recognizing God for who He is and giving Him the worship and honor due Him,“ says Bailey in the Introduction. In these forty-one essays Tozer tells us that God intends for truth to move us to moral action, that the Holy Spirit is working to bring the believer into a spiritual development that accords with the nature of the Heavenly Father, and that whatever keeps us from the Bible is our enemy no matter how seemingly harmless it appears to be.
Product Details
- Title: That Incredible Christian
- Author: A. W. Tozer
- Editor: Anita M. Bailey
- Publisher: WingSpread
- Publication Date: 2007
- Pages: 170
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
“At the heart of the Christian system lies the cross of Christ with its divine paradox. The power of Christianity appears in its antipathy toward, never in its agreement with, the ways of fallen men. The truth of the cross is revealed in its contradictions. The witness of the Church is most effective when she declares rather than explains, for the gospel is addressed not to reason but to faith. What can be proved requires no faith to accept. Faith rests upon the character of God, not upon the demonstrations of laboratory or logic.” (Page 1)
“To try to find a common ground between the message of the cross and man’s fallen reason is to try the impossible, and if persisted in must result in an impaired reason, a meaningless cross and a powerless Christianity.” (Page 2)
“The truth is that time has no more power to sanctify a man than space has. Indeed time is only a fiction by which we account for change. It is change, not time, that turns fools into wise men and sinners into saints. Or more accurately, it is Christ who does the whole thing by means of the changes He works in the heart.” (Page 6)
“To accept Christ is to form an attachment to the Person of our Lord Jesus altogether unique in human experience. The attachment is intellectual, volitional and emotional. The believer is intellectually convinced that Jesus is both Lord and Christ; he has set his will to follow Him at any cost and soon his heart is enjoying the exquisite sweetness of His fellowship.” (Page 11)
“Faith is simply the bringing of our minds into accord with the truth. It is adjusting our expectations to the promises of God in complete assurance that the God of the whole earth cannot lie.” (Page 22)
- Title: That Incredible Christian: How Heaven’s Children Live on Earth
- Author: A. W. Tozer
- Publisher: WingSpread
- Print Publication Date: 2007
- Logos Release Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subject: Christian living
- ISBNs: 9780875091976, 9780842370257, 9780875092508, 9781600660061, 0875091970, 0842370250, 0875092500, 1600660061
- Resource ID: LLS:INCRDBLCHR
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T00:43:08Z
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.
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Ricardo de Paula Meneghelli
6/12/2014
