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(The Chief End of Man - Part 3): Worship Acceptable to God
A.W. Tozer

A.W. Tozer (1897 - 1963). American pastor, author, and spiritual mentor born in La Jose, Pennsylvania. Converted to Christianity at 17 after hearing a street preacher in Akron, Ohio, he began pastoring in 1919 with the Christian and Missionary Alliance without formal theological training. He served primarily at Southside Alliance Church in Chicago (1928-1959) and later in Toronto. Tozer wrote over 40 books, including classics like "The Pursuit of God" and "The Knowledge of the Holy," emphasizing a deeper relationship with God. Self-educated, he received two honorary doctorates. Editor of Alliance Weekly from 1950, his writings and sermons challenged superficial faith, advocating holiness and simplicity. Married to Ada, they had seven children and lived modestly, never owning a car. His work remains influential, though he prioritized ministry over family life. Tozer’s passion for God’s presence shaped modern evangelical thought. His books, translated widely, continue to inspire spiritual renewal. He died of a heart attack, leaving a legacy of uncompromising devotion.
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Sermon Summary
In this sermon, the preacher discusses the concept of worship and the importance of understanding the nature of God. He emphasizes that worship should be acceptable to God and that to do so, one must know what kind of God He is. The preacher uses the story of King's worship to illustrate this point, highlighting how King brought a gift to God but did not understand the need for atonement through blood sacrifice. The sermon also touches on the idea that God created everything with a purpose, including man, who was meant to worship Him but fell away from this purpose. The preacher references Bible verses, such as Psalm 45:10-11, to support his arguments.
Sermon Transcription
Hark, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear. Forget also thine own people, and thy father's house. So shall the King greatly desire thy beauty. For he is thy Lord, worship thou him. Now I've been using that verse as a kind of a point of departure for where I have to take off from in this series on worship. And my thesis has been, and is, and shall remain, that God made everything for a purpose and that he made man to worship him, and that man fell away and is failing to carry out the creative purpose. But that God sent his only begotten son into the world, not only that men should be saved from hell, and not primarily that they should be saved from hell, though that will be a byproduct of the other, but that they should be able to fulfill the original purpose for which he created them, to be worshipers of the Most High God. Now all through the Bible, and I give you some proof texts, but more important than any proof text is that the whole important substance of the Bible teaches the same thing. That God wants us to worship him. That God, who doesn't need anything, nevertheless wants worshipers. That God, who in his uncreated nature is self-sufficient, yet wants us to worship him. And the proof texts I might mention tonight, one would be Genesis 3, 8 and 9, Adam, where art thou? God cried out to the man who had fled from him and hidden among the trees of the garden. And Adam heard the voice of the Lord in the cool of the day. What was God coming to Eden Eastward, the garden of Eden Eastward? What was he doing there? He was coming for his customary time with Adam, when Adam should worship and admire and adore the God who made him. Then Christ our Lord said, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God. Him only shalt thou worship. And in the book of Psalms I have already quoted that, So shall the King greatly desire thy beauty. And then we are told in 2 Thessalonians, that when our Lord shall come, he shall be admired, he shall be glorified first in the Saints, and admired in all that believe. There is glorification and admiration, and our Lord is coming for that. I'd like to say this to you, which contrary to what you usually hear in the average evangelical pulpit, that not only does God want men to worship him, but man, even in his fallen state, wants to worship God. Now I know that is contrary to what is usually heard, because usually we say that men do not want to worship God. But do you know that there isn't a tribe in all the wide world that has some kind of religion? And Paul talked about the whole world that stretched out its hands, if perchance they might feel after God? So men do want to worship God. This was said for us in marvelous language by Isaac Watts, the great hymn writer, when he said, Eternal power, whose high abode becomes the grandeur of a God, infinite lengths beyond the bounds where stars revolve their little rounds. Ye, while the first archangel sings and hides his face behind his wings, and ranks its shining thrones around, fall worshiping upon the ground. Then, Lord, what shall earth and ashes do? We would adore our Maker too, from sin and dust to thee we cry, the great, the holy, and the high. Lord, what shall earth and ashes do? We would adore our Maker too, and from sin and dust to God we cry, who is the great and the holy and the high. Men want to worship God. I once said in a sermon, or no, I wrote this in a little piece somewhere, that when a man falls on his knees and stretches his hands up and says, Our Father which art in heaven, he is doing the most natural thing in the world. Well, a nice old chap down in Florida didn't like it, so he wrote to the President of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and told him that I was a liberal, and that he had better keep an eye on me, because I was teaching that worship was natural, and therefore that I was a liberal. He thought he would go over my head to the President. Well, I hadn't been editor of our magazine very long until I told everybody at a conference, a council, an international council one time, that I might as well lay off of that, because it would do them no good at all to go over the head of anybody, my head to anybody, because I don't recognize anybody except the Lord Jesus Christ, and if you appeal to him, it's perfectly all right with me. But apart from that, I don't mind what men say. I've never had any trouble with those who have been over me in the Lord, and I've always gotten along beautifully with them. But I just wanted to tell all and some degree who might be interested, that if I make a statement, there's no use to write to New York about it, because there won't be anything done about it. Anyhow, he said that I was all wrong in this. Now, my brethren, let me say to you that if man had not fallen, then worship would have been the most natural thing to him in the world, because God made man to worship him. But man fell away, and sin came to his life, and sin is not natural. Sin, we say, is natural because man's nature is bad, but sin is not originally intended to be so. If everybody in the world had cancer, then we would say that cancer was natural. But also, we might say that it was not natural, because when God made the human body, he didn't mean that wild cells should form and be called cancer. So when God made the human soul in his own image, and that's that he acted according to that nature, he never intended that man should have the virus of sin in him. So that sin is the unnatural thing, in that it was never intended by God to be in a man's nature. But still it is natural in the sense that everybody has it. And worship is unnatural only in the sense that so few people really do it. But it is natural in that that's what God created us for, that's what he meant us to do, to worship him and enjoy him forever. Now, I want to point out that you cannot worship God just as you please. And my talk tonight will be a little bit negative, but I don't apologize, because as I've said before, there are two sides to every coin, the positive and the negative, and without two positive and negative poles, you couldn't have any light here tonight. So I want to give a little of the negative side tonight and point out that you can't worship just any old way that you will. This is one of the tricks of the Devil, and also it is a very favorite pet of unconverted poets and unconverted people with a bump of sublimity on their head, but without the new birth to teach that we just worship, just worship God any way you want to worship God and all will be well. Let me point out to you, brethren, that authentic religious experience is altogether possible apart from Christ. Authentic religious experience is possible apart from redemption. It's entirely possible to have authentic religious experience and not be a Christian, not be converted and be on our way. You remember that Cain had an experience, it was an authentic religious experience. He talked to God and God talked to him, and that was authentic, it was entirely authentic. And Judas, the same. Judas talked to God, and it's entirely possible. Judas talked to Jesus Christ, our Lord, and it's entirely possible, to have an experience with God and yet not have a saving experience with God. So it's not only possible to have an authentic religious experience apart from Christ and apart from salvation, it is possible to have authentic worship also apart from Christ and apart from salvation. And this is the thing that chills me and brings me upright to attention when I think that it's possible to worship and not worship aright. They worship, they know not what, said Jesus of a certain group. And it's possible to have the elements of worship, admiration, adoration, self-abasement, surrender, and attachment, all can be present and still may not be redeemed at all. Thomas Carlyle, in his Heroes in Hero Worship, warned us not to make the mistake of thinking that the great pagan religions of the world were all phony. He said, it's not true. They were not phony, they were real, and the terror of them was that they were real. I was in Mexico once, and well, numbers of times, but once when I was in Mexico I saw an old, old church without any floor except the ground. And I walked into it with my hat off and looked around at the statues and all the rest, and I saw an old Mexican lady come in. She had been shopping evidently, she had a little bag with her, and she walked straight down to the front as if she knew the way and could go in the dark with her eyes closed. She'd been there so often. She walked straight to the statue, I think it was of the Virgin, and knelt and looked up into the face of that statue with a longing and with a poured-out devotion that I'd like to see turn to the Lord himself. She was having an experience of worship. It was real to her. She was no phony, she was a real worshiper, but look what she was worshiping. The American Indian used to stand on the bank of the river and stretch his red arms up to the sky and say, "'Twill get thee, Manitou, praises be, praises be, "'Twill get thee, Manitou, praises be.' You tell me that that noble, strong, red man, not the degenerate person we know today after we white people have gotten done with him, but the strong, noble red man of the early days of this continent's civilization, he was real. And when he cried to his Gypsy Manitou, the great Manitou, he meant what he said. Our missionaries tell us that the African devil-worshippers go through a ritual in their teens and are baptized into devil worship, and they seek to become as much like the devil as possible. They labor to become like the devil that they've taken as their patron. Now, I say it's possible to have a religious experience without God. Judas Iscariot did, Cain did, many others. It's possible to have an experience of worship and not be worshiping according to the will of God, and not be accepted by God at all, because idolatry is hated by God, and it's hated for the very reason that it is real. Listen to this. But I say, says Paul, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice the devils and not to God, and I would not that she should fellowship with devils. Now, the man of God said this, so it's possible to have a religious experience and worship and not be accepted of God at all. Our Lord said that there would be a day when people would say, Did not we do miracles in your name? Did not we speak for you on the street corner? And he said, I never knew you depart from me. He did not accept their worship. Now, there are certain worships, certain kinds of worship which God does not accept, though it's directed toward him and meant to be given to him. Let me name them for you, one I will call Cain's worship. That is, God has condemned and rejected the worship of Cain, that is Cain's kind of worship, because it's worship lacking atonement. I saw a church bulletin the other day, and they said our creed is the good, the true, and the beautiful. Isn't that sweet? This is our creed, the good, the true, and the beautiful. I doubt you could get in there, no matter if you were a gangster or with your gun smoking hot from the last bump-off. You could still get into that church if you went in and looked real nice and said, I believe in the good and the true and the dead. Now, Cain's worship, that is, worship that lacks atonement. Worship that rests upon three errors. Cain came bringing not blood sacrifice, that is atonement. Cain came to God with a gift. He said, it's time for me to take a gift from my Creator. So he went out and plucked himself a nice bunch of flowers and some nice, delicious fruit, and he took it to God. And God said, where is the blood? He said, what blood? He said, why, you can't come to me, you're a sinner, and there's got to be atonement. Somebody has to die. And Cain didn't understand that. He said, I don't know about sin. He said, I'll just bring the gift. And the Lord pounded on the gift and it made Cain so mad he went out and killed his brother. His brother brought in a lamb and God accepted it. Now, that was Cain's worship, and that can be educated and turned out of a seminary and taught how to use his hands and taught how to open his A's and make them sound learned. And you'll have a little preacher on your hands. It makes three mistakes, I say. One is that God is a different kind of God from what he is. To worship God, acceptable to God, you'll have to know what kind of God he is. And Cain didn't know what kind of God God was. He thought that sin was nothing to God. And then it has this error that man occupies a relation to God that he doesn't in fact occupy. Cain assumed that he belonged to God and could talk to God without an intermediary. That was false, because Cain was alienated by sin from his God. And then it assumes that sin is less serious than it is in fact. Sin is no serious, my brethren. And God never smiles upon it, nor God never looks with any sympathy upon it. He hates sin, because sin has filled the world with pain and sorrow, and sin has robbed man of his purpose in life of worshiping his God. So Cain's worship. For that reason I wouldn't spend one hour in any church that didn't teach blood atonement by the cross, that didn't teach redemption by the blood of Jesus Christ the Lord. I wouldn't teach it, I wouldn't spend one minute where they didn't teach it. Because Cain's worship, no matter how gentle and tender it is, and how it may be garlanded with beautiful flowers plucked from all the poetry of the world, it's still false, and God frowns upon it because it's false in itself. Now, when there is Samaritan worship, you know what Jesus said to the Samaritan woman. She said first to him, "'Teacher,' she was embarrassed to know, because he had said to her, "'You have five husbands, and the one you are living with now isn't your husband.' And she sweat under that, and so she started arguing theology with him. She said, "'Teacher, I'd like to know.' He said, "'Here's a question I'd like to ask you. The Jews say that you worship in Jerusalem, and our people, the Samaritans, say you worship in Samaria. Which is true?' And he said, "'Nor in Jerusalem, nor in Samaria, do men worship God. They worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Jews know who they worship, but ye know not who you worship.'" So that's Samaritan worship. Now, Samaritan worship is heretical worship in the correct meaning of the term. You know what a heretic is. A heretic is not a man who denies all the truth, he's just a very cushnickety man who picks out what he likes and rejects the rest. A man came to this city not very long ago and went to a big and famous church and told a lot of kids with their feet up on the desk, beatniks, that I'd been preaching too much, and said, "'Get your feet down on the floor, bud! Won't you sit there listening to me and insult me by looking like that?' Well, I'd have got their feet down anyhow. He told them, "'Don't believe anything in the Bible that doesn't square with your own experience.' A lot of kids not dry behind the ears, and this man has the infinite effrontery to tell them to take the word of God and judge it by their own wicked hearts. How can you get any worse than that?' That's Samaritanism, you see. That is heresy. Heresy means, I take what I like and I reject what I don't like. But the Bible says, if any man adds to or takes away, he shall be cursed and his name removed from the book of life. But this selecting and rejecting business, we have applied psychology and humanism under various disguises and religions of all sorts. That's Samaritan worship. The Lord rejects that because it's selective, it picks what it likes. If it thinks this is true, it says that's true. If it doesn't like it, it says, why, that was taken in there from somewhere else. The Lord never said that. And they set themselves up as judges about what the Lord has said. Instead of going down on their knees and letting the Lord judge them, they stand and judge the Lord. Well, then there's nature worship. Now, when we get here, I get clear, I get clear saccharine, you know. I run like honey on a hot day when I get here to this nature worship business, because it is the poetry of religion, you know. It's the high enjoyment and the contemplation of the sublime. I used to see a fellow down in Chicago, I'm afraid he got hit with a car probably, but anyway, I used to see him go up the street and he had his eyes fixed on the heavens. I think he was a sun worshiper because he was always looking up toward the sun in that general direction. And I used to worry about his crossing the street looking up at the sun, and then suddenly I missed him. I'm not sure, but somebody ran over him. But he was a sun worshiper. He believed in the heavens above. And you remember what God said to Israel? He said, when you get into the land and you look up and you see the sun and you see the stars, don't get on your knees and worship the sun and the stars, because Jehovah will destroy you from out of the land when you do it. But we have an awful lot of nature worshipers, and worshipers of God through nature, I suppose, would be a better way to say it. It's a high enjoyment. It's a concentrating of the mind upon beauty as distinct from the eye and the ear. If your ear hears beauty, that's music. If your eye sees beauty, that's art. But if you think beautiful thoughts without music or art, then that's poetry, and you can write that down. Don't do it. I always say, don't write poetry, sister and brother, don't do it. Only the person who can't help it can write good poetry. The ones who can write poetry, they can't. But the ones who just can't help it, they must. Maybe they'll make it. But anyway, we write what we feel inside, that's poetry. Now, some people mistake a rapt feeling for worship. Emerson, you know, said that he used to, and Emerson was not a Christian by his own definition, but Emerson said that he used to cross the meadow. He said, I have crossed the meadow after it rained on a moonlight night, when the moon had come out and the rain puddles were still lying in the meadow, and the moon shining on the little puddles of water in the grass. And he said, I have been glad to the point of fear. He was so happy he was a fool. Odd, but I felt it myself. And this man yet did not believe in the deity of Christ, the blood of Christ, resigned his church rather than serve communion, and denied the folk. And yet he was glad to the point of fear, because he was a good man, he was a great man, and he was a poet and an artist, this man, a mighty man. But I don't think God accepted his worship at all, because it's nature worship. And some mistake the music of religion for worship. That of whatever elevates the mind and raises to a near rapture the soul, that's supposed to be worship. Well, it could be, but also you could be having an experience as the Mexican woman had looking at the Virgin. You could be having an experience as the Red Indian had when he looked up and called on Gethsemane too. You could be having an authentic experience of worship that was not real and not accepted by God Almighty. And then the scripture tells us that God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. And the word must clear away, that word must there, clears away all the myths of obscurity. He takes worship out of the hands of men and puts it in the hands of the Holy Ghost. Now, brethren, I have preached from this pulpit about the necessity of knowing the Holy Spirit. I stand to tell you tonight that it is totally impossible to worship God except to be apart from the Holy Ghost. The operation of the Spirit of God within us enables us to worship God acceptably through that person we call Jesus Christ, who is himself God. So worship originates with God and comes back to us and is reflected from us as a mirror, and that is the worship God accepts. But he accepts no other kind. But in this mixed-up world in which we live, there is always a world of people that claim to be seekers after truth. We are seekers after truth, they say. Come to our church, you don't have to believe anything, just be a seeker after truth. I have piles of religious poetry, and I've got them all sacked around in boxes I haven't unpacked since I came to Toronto. It may just as well stay there, because I've read most of them. I find that when people haven't found God and they do not know the new birth and the Spirit is not on them, and yet they have the ancient impulse to worship something, if they are not educated, they kill a chicken and put a funny thing on their head and dance around and call them doctors. But if they are educated, they write poetry. I just want to quote tonight, and I don't want to sit in the seat of the scornful, and I want to have all the sympathy I can for this man. I won't name him, though if you come to me afterward, I'll tell you who he is. His name is Edwin Markham. But Edwin Markham was an American poet who is dead and gone now. He wrote two or three good things. He wrote Lincoln, and he wrote The Man with the Hoe, and that's good poetry. But I quote this because this is a sample of the way the human mind goes. And there are bushels of this, bushel baskets full of it, that you can throw out. This is the kind of poetry and religion that has no anchor, no God, no high priest, no blood, no altar, but floats around like a drunk butterfly, floating and flopping about, not knowing quite where he wants to go. And they all say about the same thing. It runs like this. I went out in the morning looking for God, and I couldn't find God. And then on my way back, I saw a baby, and something in me said, God. All runs like that. I'll read you one of them here. This man wrote this. He shouldn't have, but he did. It says, I made a pilgrimage to find the God. There was an American poet brought up in the country where you can go to church, and no matter where you are, just go any direction, you'll find a church, and buy a Bible for a dollar from the Gideons. They distribute them for nothing, but you can buy the Bibles for a dollar from the various societies. You can go to a hotel, the Gideons will give them to you for nothing to read while you're there. So, this fellow says, I made a pilgrimage to find the God. Now, I wonder why our Father in heaven would be called the God. He's trying to be a pagan. He's so educated and he's such a genius that he isn't willing to humble himself under the mighty hand of God, so he's out there looking for the God. So he said, I listened for his voice at holy tombs of all the places to go to listen for God in a graveyard. I listened for his voice at holy tombs, and I searched for the print of his immortal feet in the dust of broken altars. I don't know what he'd be doing there, but he said he was there looking for God at broken altars, old, broken down, forgotten altars in the tombs and other places. He said, yet turn back with an empty heart. There we have the old pattern. Then he says, But on the homeward road a great light came upon me, and I heard God's voice singing in a nestling lark. Now, he was a good poet, but his ornithology wasn't very sound, because nestling larks don't sing. A nestling lark is a baby lark, not a nesting lark, but a nestling lark, and that's a baby lark, and baby larks don't sing. But he said he heard God's voice singing in a nestling lark. Then he says, And I felt his sweet wonder in a swaying rose. I received his blessing from a wayside well, and looked up on his beauty on a lover's face. Now, I ask you, my friends, and I want to be kind, we're all dumb on different subjects, but this fellow, how he could get this bad, I'd like to know. This man in the land of the Bibles, where is the gospel being preached? He writes that he went looking for God in altars and tombs and in all dark, dusty places, and didn't find him, and started home and heard him singing in a nestling lark, and saw him in a rose and saw him in the face of a young lover. Then he looked up and, lo and behold, God was signaling from the Son. I never had any signals from the Son myself, and I don't know of anybody who did except Edwin Markham. He wrote about this. Now, I know this made some of you mad. I realize that, I can sense it, but it doesn't make any difference. I enjoy that. Because if you haven't made somebody mad or glad or sad, you might as well have stayed home, out of the pulpit. And this kind of thing, it seems to me, needs to be exposed. We need to tell the world, God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. It must be the Holy Ghost and truth. We cannot worship in the spirit alone, for the spirit without truth is helpless. It cannot be in truth alone, for that would be theology without fire. But it may but not be in the spirit and in truth. It must be the truth of God and the spirit of God. And when a man, yielding and believing the truth of God, is filled with the spirit of God, then his warmest and smallest whisper will be a worship. So, we can find we'll worship God by any means if we are full of the spirit and yielded to the truth. But when we are neither yielded to the truth nor full of the spirit, the so-called worship is not worship at all. Some people wonder why some of us are so rough, and I'm not rough compared with certain brethren that they're preaching these days. But I'm rough enough to ruffle some people. And why? Why am I? Because I can't rest at night, nor can I feel comfortable with the knowledge that there are millions of educated Canadians and Americans and Englishmen and Scotsmen who have a tradition hundreds of years old of Protestant Christianity, who are carrying on some kind of church activity and paying it plenty to carry it on, who are not reaching God at all. Like Cain, like the Red Indians, they are having emotions about it, but they're not reaching God. And this is a terrible thing, ladies and gentlemen. For one of these times you and I are going to have suddenly to be called before God. You remember old everyman of the Middle Ages? Death came to everyman and said, Everyman, I'm sent to call you home to judgment. You must die. And everyman said, My God, I'm not ready. I can't. I can't die. Can't you let me off? No, no, he said, I am sent of God. I am sent to tell you that you must die and come to judgment. He said, I'm afraid to die, and I dare not face judgment. What will I do? And he said, Please, please give me a few days that I may go to my friends and see if I can get them to go with me and stand for me and be my advocate and helper in that hour when I render up accounts. Death said, I'll give you a few days, but I'll be back. He disappeared. Everyman, in a fever of fear and anxiety, went among his friends. He went among the friends with whom he had made money, the moneymakers and the big businessmen, and he told them a story, and they said, We're busy, we can't go with you. Then he went to those that he had his pleasures with, went to the saloons and the bars, went to the theaters, went everywhere where people were that he had rejoiced with and had his fun with, and said, I must render up accounts and I need somebody to go along and go with me, please. They turned him cold, each one one after the other, turned him cold and said, Now, we can't go with you. Always remember it, my man and woman, that the fellow that will last with you is not willing to die with you. And if he would, he couldn't, and he cannot help you in the hour of your need. Everyman searched among all of his friends and found nobody that could help him or was willing to help him. They said, We'll rejoice with you and have fun with you and drink with you and play with you, but we won't go with you to the judgment. Finally he turned to the Lord, and the Lord went with him. And dear friends, we're going to have to go one of these times. These terrible, terrible thoughts of me. I've been around in the world quite a while, not as long as you think by looking at me, but quite a while. And I can't have anybody. If I got sick and went to the hospital, my wife would be there, my boys would come up from California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan. I'd order from New York, buy my website. But in that hour when I'm called to account, not a one of them can go with me, not one. And if I have fooled my soul, and if I have listened to cheap, meaningless poetry, if I have worshiped without atonement and been religious by selection as the Samaritans, or misjudged the poetry of religion for salvation, and have felt because I enjoyed hearing the Christian, or because I liked to hear this old house, I was a Christian. No. We must worship him in spirit and in truth. You stand before the truth to be judged tonight. And the Holy Ghost is not a luxury, he's a necessity. But you should know the Holy Ghost in surrender and faith and warm adoration is not optional, it's imperative. Without an infusion of the Holy Ghost, there can be no true worship. So shall we tonight think this over? Not all worship is acceptable with God. And there's a lot of worship in cultured Canada that God will never receive in this world of the mix. And there's religious experience right here that God never accepts and will not accept. There is the warm feeling of personal friendships with religious people, there's the sound of the organ and the beauty of the hymns. But apart from truth and the Holy Ghost, there's no true worship. Isn't this serious, my friends? This is serious to me. Now, I could be smoother than this, but I shan't, because I'll tell God sometime, you say to me, you preached to those people in Toronto, there at Avenue Old Church. Were you faithful to tell all I told you? Oh, brother, in that hour I hope I can say, yes, God. I feared none of them, but I loved them all. And I told them all I knew to tell them. How big and broad and comprehensive is the work of Christ. How imperative is repentance and regeneration in the Holy Spirit. And by rejecting the Holy Spirit, we put out our eyes and wander on in darkness, sightless and lost. Let's not be guilty of that in a day that opened my books and plenty of truth. Let's pray. Oh God, you've asked me that as we speak, heaven might be opened and there might be a sense of thy presence. The feeling that there is impinging upon this world, another world above. The eternal world touching the time world. The kingdom of heaven touching the kingdom of man. We believe thou hast heard our prayers. Oh God, we pray, speak thou to these friends and let them not take anything for granted. Let them not believe that is true, which isn't true. Or assume they're all right when they're not. Or think that their worship is acceptable when it's not. May we one and all, each and every one of us, come humbly, meekly, looking to the sacrifice, the mighty sacrifice, and hear the words of love, and see the mighty sacrifice, and have peace with thee. Grant this, we pray, in Christ's holy name. Amen. Now, dear friends, it's been my experience that the Lord converts people without my putting pressure on them. So I'm not going to put pressure on them, but I'm going to tell you this. After service, any time I'm happy to talk with you with my open Bible, any time Brother Gray will, and there are, I could name a dozen standing here now who are here tonight who would be happy to spend a long time with you if you need it, you can call and make an appointment for a personal interview for prayer instruction. So I'm not going to make an invitation, but instead of that, I'm going to ask you to rise and to sing with me, all four stanzas, full voice and full tempo, the song 382, 382.
(The Chief End of Man - Part 3): Worship Acceptable to God
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A.W. Tozer (1897 - 1963). American pastor, author, and spiritual mentor born in La Jose, Pennsylvania. Converted to Christianity at 17 after hearing a street preacher in Akron, Ohio, he began pastoring in 1919 with the Christian and Missionary Alliance without formal theological training. He served primarily at Southside Alliance Church in Chicago (1928-1959) and later in Toronto. Tozer wrote over 40 books, including classics like "The Pursuit of God" and "The Knowledge of the Holy," emphasizing a deeper relationship with God. Self-educated, he received two honorary doctorates. Editor of Alliance Weekly from 1950, his writings and sermons challenged superficial faith, advocating holiness and simplicity. Married to Ada, they had seven children and lived modestly, never owning a car. His work remains influential, though he prioritized ministry over family life. Tozer’s passion for God’s presence shaped modern evangelical thought. His books, translated widely, continue to inspire spiritual renewal. He died of a heart attack, leaving a legacy of uncompromising devotion.