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A.W. Tozer (Aiden Wilson Tozer)
Early life
Tozer hailed from a tiny farming community in western La Jose, Pennsylvania. He was converted to Christianity as a teenager in Akron, Ohio: While on his way home from work at a tire company, he overheard a street preacher say, "If you don't know how to be saved ... just call on God, saying, 'Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.'" Upon returning home, he climbed into the attic and heeded the preacher's advice.
Pastor
In 1919, five years after his conversion and without formal education in Christian theology, Tozer accepted an offer to serve as pastor of his first church. That began 44 years of ministry associated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA), a Protestant Evangelical denomination, 33 of them serving as a pastor in several different congregations (his first, a small storefront church in Nutter Fort, West Virginia). Later, he served thirty years (1928 to 1959) as the pastor of Southside Alliance Church in Chicago; the final years of his life he spent as pastor of Avenue Road Church in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Observing contemporary Christian living, Tozer felt that the church was on a dangerous course toward compromising with "worldly" concerns.
Born into poverty, Tozer was self-educated and taught himself what he missed in high school and university.
Author
Tozer began writing in 1931 for the denominational magazine of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Alliance Weekly (now Alliance Life), which became the platform from which his writing career emerged. He later wrote the monthly column “There’s Truth in It” (1936–37) and “A Word in Season” (1944–46). In May 1950, he became the editor of the Alliance Weekly, a position he filled until his death in 1963.
At the urging of David W. Fant, publications secretary of the C&MA, Tozer wrote biographies of A. B. Simpson (1943) and Robert A. Jaffray (1947). It was the publication of his third book, The Pursuit of God (1948), that made Tozer a household name among evangelicals. In addition to the 12 books he published in his lifetime, more than 40 other books have been compiled from his magazine features, editorials, and transcribed sermons.
During his lifetime, Tozer’s works were published by Christian Publications, Inc., the denominational press operated by the C&MA. The publishing house declared bankruptcy in 2006 and was purchased by WingSpread Publishers of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.[8] In November 2013, Moody Publishers acquired Wingspread from parent company Zur Ltd., a transaction that included more than 60 Tozer books and pamphlets. Some of Tozer’s works are now in the public domain and have been issued by multiple publishers.
Personal life
Tozer had seven children, six sons and a daughter. Living a simple and non-materialistic lifestyle, he and his wife, Ada Cecelia Pfautz, never owned a car, preferring bus and train travel. Even after becoming a well-known Christian author, Tozer signed away much of his royalties to those who were in need.
Prayer was of vital personal importance for Tozer. "His preaching as well as his writings were but extensions of his prayer life," comments his biographer, James L. Snyder, in the book In Pursuit of God: The Life Of A.W. Tozer. "He had the ability to make his listeners face themselves in the light of what God was saying to them," writes Snyder.
Death and legacy
Tozer died on May 13, 1963, after suffering a heart attack. He was buried in Chicago, and later the family had his remains reinterred at Ellet Cemetery, Akron, Ohio. A simple marker reads: A. W. Tozer—A Man of God. The Alliance Weekly ran a memorial issue with numerous tributes and excerpts. The same issue also featured “God’s Greatest Gift to Man," a transcription of his final sermon. A few months prior to his death, Tozer had submitted the manuscript to The Christian Book of Mystical Verse, which was released in 1964 as his final book. His official publisher, Christian Publications, released many titles after his death, based on his magazine articles and sermon transcriptions. These continue in print with Moody Publishers. Several other publishers have released his public domain works.
In 2000, The Pursuit of God was named to Christianity Today’s list of 100 “Books of the Century.” In 2006, Knowledge of the Holy was named in “The Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals.” Contemporary Christian music artist Lauren Barlow of BarlowGirl later published a compilation of stories told by 59 artists, writers, and leaders about A.W. Tozer’s personal inspiration.
god filled your bible with poems
I define poetry as an effort to share a moving experience by using language that is chosen and structured differently from ordinary prose . Sometimes it rhymes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it has a regular cadence. Sometimes it doesn’t. But almost always the poet has experienced  something — something horrible or wonderful or ordinary — and he feels that he must share it. Using words differently from ordinary prose is the poet’s way of trying to awaken something of his experience (and perhaps even more) in the reader. God Speaks in Poems It has always boggled my mind that so much of the Bible is poetry. God inspired this, and he did not have to do it this way. How much of God’s inspired word is poetry? Leland Ryken answers, One-third of the Bible is not too high an estimate. Whole books of the Bible are poetic: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon. A majority of Old Testament prophecy is poetic in form. Jesus is one of the most famous poets of the world. Beyond these predominantly poetic parts of the Bible, figurative language appears throughout the Bible, and whenever it does, it requires the same type of analysis given to poetry. That is a lot of poetry — language that is chosen and structured differently from ordinary prose . God can raise the dead by any means he pleases. He can waken dull hearts to the reality of his beauty any way he desires. And one of the ways he pleases to do it is by inspiring his spokesmen to write poetry. Resist the Inexpressible Paradoxically, poetry is an expression of the fact that there are great things that are inexpressible. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the depths of human experience and the capacities of language to capture that experience. There are experiences that go beyond the ability of language to express them. For the poet, this limitation of language does not produce silence; it produces poetry. Poetry is a kind of verbal resistance to the impenetrability of human experience. The poet will at least try. Say It with a Poem For example, can we even begin to imagine what it felt like for the fathers and mothers of the children in Bethlehem to lose their little ones when Herod’s murder squad arrived and slaughtered all of them under two years old? Perhaps not. But there was one year (inspired by the loss of a son in our church) when I said: I will try. And I will try with a poem. It has come to be called The Innkeeper . I imagine a father who not only lost two sons that horrible night, but also his wife and his arm. He made room for Joseph and Mary. But he had no idea what it would cost him to embrace the Son of God. Jesus comes back to visit him just before going to the cross. The poem describes the meeting. Slow Communication Is Not Popular We do not live in a day when poetry is in vogue. Perhaps it has never been in vogue. Shaped by smartphones and soundbites, we are impatient with communication that forces us to slow down. Poetry, by definition, is a kind of communication that cannot be fully appreciated on the first reading. Suppose a poem has a structure of cadence and rhyme and form. Two or three attempts are needed to make the path familiar enough to allow the eyes to be lifted. Then, when the reader is comfortably in the flow, he begins to see so much more than when he was too distracted by the form. So poetry books will seldom be best-sellers. And God has mercifully put all kinds of writing in the Bible besides poetry. He knows better than I do that some people prefer stories (like our Gospels) and others prefer arguments (like the epistle to the Romans). So I will understand if you are not a poetry-lover. But don’t limit yourself too quickly. People change. Times change. This may be the season for you to slow down and reconsider.
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