Dr. A.W. Tozer’s missionary heart for the lost

Dr. A.W. Tozer’s many writings stir us to think, to feel, to hope, and to search – both locally and globally.  He believed that the widest thing in the universe is not space: it is the potential of the human heart. Tozer knew that the best Christian leaders had large hearts. Nothing can take the place of affection. Why read Tozer? He gives us God’s missionary heart for the lost, for missions.

Tozer saw it as one of the world’s worst tragedies that we allow our hearts to shrink until there is room in them for little besides ourselves.  Through his books, he has been like a ‘heart surgeon’, performing spiritual angioplasty when we have needed it the most.  His writings have helped us keep our hearts open and soft towards our family, our community, our world, and our God.

As a self-described evangelical mystic, he had a heart of passion for the inner life of the soul.  He loved the monastic disciplines of silence and solitude, preferring God’s fellowship to people. The highest motivation for missions was practicing the presence of God. The heart of the matter for Tozer was the deeper life which he saw as key to fulfilling the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20). The deeper life was the third-fold emphasis of his mentor AB Simpson’s Four-fold Gospel (Christ the Saviour, Healer, Sanctifier, and Coming King).  Tozer knew that focusing on missions (Christ the Saviour) required the deeper life (Christ the Sanctifier.) Christlikeness was everything to him.  

In some ways, Tozer was almost a self-taught ‘psychologist’ of the soul.  The extensive time he spent in his prayer closet gave him unique insights into the mysterious motivations of the human psyche.  Prayer for Tozer was about heart-searching and crucifixion of one’s selfish motives. He often said: “As one prays, one is.” Prayer and missions for Tozer were a seamless web.

He called worship the missing jewel of modern evangelicalism.  Tozer was passionate that certain neglected truths must be emphasized: world missions, prophecy, divine healing, separation from worldly things, the work of the Holy Spirit, heart purity, personal victory over self and sin, the indwelling Christ, and the importance of worship.  But for Tozer, worship was the chief end and reason for our very existence.

Leonard Ravenhill commented of Tozer, “His most memorable words to me were ‘There are occasions when for hours I lay prostrate before God without saying a word of prayer or a word of praise – I just gaze on Him and worship.’”

He saw that missionary activism could sometimes distract from the priority of worship and prayer.  Without intimate prayer being central in missions, Tozer saw that a shallow workaholic Christianity would be transported overseas. “Labor that does not spring out of worship,” Tozer would stress, “is futile and can only be wood, hay and stubble in the day that shall try every man’s work.” The Lord of the Harvest is still calling workers who are first and foremost worshippers. 

Tozer extensively warned against false motivations for becoming a missionary.  He was particularly concerned about psychological manipulation and commercialism in missions.  Similar to Dr. Eugene Peterson, Tozer prophetically alerted fellow North Americans about the dangers of outward success and activism.  Tozer wanted all of us, especially young missionaries, to be more like Mary than her sister Martha.  Sometimes the busyness of world missions could swallow the intimate times of just sitting at Jesus feet (Luke 10:38-42).

Sometimes the most successful outwardly are the most wounded inwardly, especially in one’s primary relationships.  “Not the educators nor the legislators nor the scientists can give us tranquillity of heart, and without tranquillity, whatever else they give us is useless at best.”  Tozer commented that in this world, they are rated according to the distance they have come up the hill of achievement.

Tozer believed that excessive preoccupation with the struggle to win narrows the mind, hardens the heart, and blots out a thousand bright visions that might be enjoyed if there were only leisure to notice them.  No one, said Tozer, is worthy to succeed unless he is willing to fail.  Jesus died an apparent failure, discredited by the leaders of established religion, rejected by society, and forsaken by his friends.  We can afford to follow Jesus to apparent failure, even in missions.  Faith, says Tozer, dares to fail.  Jesus’ resurrection is the ultimate reason why failure and crosses need not intimidate us. Is our preoccupation with success blocking our heart for global missions?

We live in an age where the media often does our thinking for us in predigested sound bites. As a prolific reader, Tozer was largely self-taught, reading extensively not just in theology but in poetry, art, philosophy, technology, and science. He was fascinated by the historic meaning of words, always keeping dictionaries by his side. Tozer often said that one should think twice as much as one reads.  He was both a deep thinker and a deep feeler.  He remarkably integrated these two ways of processing life, particularly in his passion for world missions and writing.

For Tozer, writing was a matter of the heart: “The only book that should ever be written is one that flows up from the heart, forced out by the inward pressure…You should never write a book unless you just have to.” As editor of the Alliance Witness magazine from 1950 to 1963, Tozer more than doubled the circulation, far beyond card-carrying Alliance (C&MA) members. He personally wrote nine books during his life.  His first two books were biographies on famous Alliance missionary pioneers, A.B. Simpson and Dr. R.A. Jaffray.  Many people see Tozer as Simpson’s spiritual successor. After his death, many of Tozer’s editorials were collated and turned into thirty-two other books, all of which addressed the highest motivations for missionary involvement.  

Tozer’s love for words also pervaded his family life. He quizzed his children on what they read and made up bedtime stories for them. “The thing I remember most about my father,” reflects his daughter Rebecca, “was those marvelous stories he would tell.”  His humor, written and spoken, has been compared to that of Will Rogers – honest and homespun. People could one moment be swept by gales of laughter and the next sit in a holy hush.  Tozer believed that the essence of true religion is spontaneity.

Spirituality in Tozer’s family came through his mother Prude who prayed Tozer into the Kingdom.  His father Jake, who suffered several nervous breakdowns, only came to Christ later in life.  Tozer was instrumental in leading his dad to Christ.  In 1919, five years after his conversion, and without formal theological training, Tozer began 44 years of ministry with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. For 31 of those years, he gained prominence as pastor of Southside Alliance Church in Chicago, serving there from 1928 to 1959. His final years from 1959 to 1963 were spent preaching in Toronto, Canada where he died of a heart attack at age 66.

While Tozer did not become an overseas missionary, he visited many missionaries overseas.  He also launched hundreds of young people to dedicate their lives to world missions.  His thirty-one years of serving at Southside Alliance Church in Chicago brought about a great passion for overseas missions in the lives of his congregation.  He is remembered for raising up many missionaries through his conference speaking, particularly for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship’s large missionary conventions. He loved calling young people to serve overseas in what he called the fellowship of the burning heart: ““Young men and women, you are called first of all to be burning bushes. Shun the coarse way of the extroverted gospellers, the promoters and organizers and all the rest. Seek to be nobody but a bush in which God dwells, and then you will have upon you an element of everlastingness; eternity will ride on your message…Perhaps some lonely man waits somewhere to see the bush that burns in the darkness. He will turn aside to see that great sight, and God will speak to him out of the midst of the fire.”

Tozer, with true missionary zeal, longed for the day when God would rend the heavens and come down in showers of blessing.  May that be our heart-felt prayer as we focus on God’s heart for the lost.