Shepherds Who Don’t Feed - 1948
A. W. Tozer, courtesy of the Alliance Witness.
Introduction
A. W. (Alden Wilson) Tozer was a pastor in the Christian and Missionary Alliance. For thirty years he served the congregation of Southside Alliance Church in Chicago. Editor of the Alliance Weekly magazine, he also wrote many essays on deeper life with God. These were collected into books. The two most famous of these books were The Pursuit of God and Knowledge of the Holy. He dated the preface to The Pursuit of God on this day June 16, 1948.
Quote
“There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.
“I trust I speak in charity, but the lack in our pulpits is real. Milton’s terrible sentence applies to our day as accurately as it did to his: “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.” It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God’s children starving while actually seated at the Father’s table….
“This book is a modest attempt to aid God’s hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.”
Tozer, A.W. Preface to The Pursuit of God.