The Man with Praying Pants

There are rare Christians whose very presence incites others to be better Christians. I want to be that rare Christian. - A. W. Tozer

In a Tozer biography titled “Passion for God”, I read the line “he took off his trousers and put on a pair of what he called his praying pants so that he would…”

Wait, what? What are praying pants?

Aiden Wilson Tozer got to his office early in the morning, slipped on his “praying pants” and prayed for hours. His sermons and his books are said to have been written from his constant practice of listening and praying to God. Around the beginning of his ministry, he prayed, “Give me vision to see and courage to report what I see faithfully. Make my voice so like thine own that even the sick sheep will recognize it and follow thee”.

I have not read many biographies, but this one statement about praying pants changed my life. Tozer exemplified someone who was dedicated to knowing God better and oriented his life in order that he could deepen that relationship. For me, Tozer has been “that rare Christian” he himself talked about. The life that he led, though with his own flaws and shortcomings, demonstrated a relentless pursuit of God and a submission to the Scriptures.

I wish I knew who to thank for introducing me to this legendary saint, but just under a year ago, I stumbled upon Tozer’s most popular book on the Apple iBooks store for free - The Pursuit of God. It was a fresh, concise and challenging read that sparked my interest in cultivating my relationship with God through prayer and reading His Word. After reading that book, I read some of his other popular books: The Knowledge of the Holy and How to be Filled with the Holy Spirit to name a few. I loved how his books were often short, concise and challenging. He was never afraid to tell his readers the tough things. Tozer also had prophetic insight into things that today’s preachers would not bring to light.

In this short blog post, I will present Tozer’s two most emphasized teachings from his ministry: the importance of experiencing biblical truths and the danger of divorcing Jesus’ saving power and Lordship. If you’ve read Tozer, perhaps you will recognize that these are two of his most repeated views.

Experiencing the Truths of the Bible

“Experiencing the presence of God” has always been something unfamiliar to me, but this was something that Tozer talked about often, perhaps influenced by his reading of Christian mysticism. (I, personally, grew up knowing nothing about this, but my relatively recent conversations and proximity to others who hold this view have largely influenced me. It is still a learning journey I am undertaking and praying through as I analyze my own life experiences and the lives of the saints before me.)

When talking about today’s average church, Tozer said, “According to its teachings, we are in the presence of God positionally, and nothing is said about the need to experience that presence actually” (Tozer, The Pursuit of God). Tozer believed that there is a theological understanding of the presence of God - knowing that He is omnipresent - and there is an experiential understanding of the presence of God.

In one of my favourite chapters that Tozer has ever written, “Are We Losing Our ‘Oh!’?”, Tozer wrote an intriguing statement on the aforementioned experiential understanding:

When the heart, on its knees, moves into the awesome Presence and hears with fear and wonder things not lawful to utter, then the mind falls flat, and words, previously its faithful servants, become weak and totally incapable of telling what the heart hearts and sees (Tozer, Born after Midnight).

Elsewhere, Tozer described the response to experiencing the presence of the Holy Spirit:

Where the Holy Spirit is permitted to exercise His full sway in a redeemed heart the progression is likely to be as follows: First, voluble praise, in prose speech or prayer or witness; then, when the crescendo rises beyond the ability of studied speech to express, comes song, then comes silence where the soul, held in deep fascination, feels itself blessed with an unutterable beatitude (Tozer, The Root of the Righteous).

Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century theologian and preacher, preached a clear and straight-forward analogy that, I believe, clarifies the distinction of the theological and the experiential we are discussing here:

There is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness (Edwards, Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards).

Tozer thought that theological understanding without the experiential, and a “lack of holy desire” is the reason why many of us never experience God in the way he describes. And with that, we transition into another foundational teaching in Tozer’s ministry: the importance of the Lordship of Jesus in the Christian life.

Lord and Savior

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”. Romans 10:9 is one of the most popular verses concerning salvation, however, the tragic reality is that many of us have simply “accepted Jesus” as Savior, but we are still lord of our lives. He is not our Lord even though we confess it with our mouth. This is the second issue that Tozer tackled the most often. Tozer grieved, “Everything is made to center upon the initial act of “accepting” Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible), and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our spirit” (Tozer, The Pursuit of God). Elsewhere he said, “Christ may be “received” without creating any special love for Him in the spirit of the receiver. The man is “saved,” but he is not hungry or thirsty after God. In fact, he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with little” (Tozer, The Pursuit of God).

For about 10 years, I was that Christian. I had accepted Jesus into my heart when I was 8, but there was no real change in lifestyle. There was no radical obedience to Jesus to mark me out from the rest of the world. Sure, I read my Bible independently maybe once or twice a year, went to church on Sundays and attended a youth group. Sure, I knew the answer to many Bible questions. Sure, I memorized Bible passages and could regurgitate them back to my Sunday school teachers. But my life was not transformed. It was what Tozer called a “God-and” life. There was God, but there was also me - and I might add: a lot more of me. I was not a true worshipper or slave of Christ because I was still the lord of my life.

One of Jesus’ most striking words are these: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 16:24-25). This should be one of the most shaping texts to our understanding of discipleship to Jesus. Jesus asks for a complete renunciation of everything, even your own life. In another place, he says, “hate everyone” in comparison to your love and treasuring of Jesus Christ (Luke 14:26). Those who belong to Jesus have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). If you treasure your life more than you treasure Jesus, you will lose it.

If you claim that Jesus is your Lord, your life is no longer yours. Everything you are belongs to God. To think that you can still do what you want after you “gave your life to Jesus” is a misunderstanding that is rooted in a poor reading of Jesus’ call to discipleship.

This will be my last remark:

In every Christian’s heart there is a cross and a throne, and the Christian is on the throne till he puts himself on the cross; if he refuses the cross he remains on the throne (Tozer, The Root of the Righteous).

Who is on the throne of your heart?

Practice #6

Maybe you’re interested in reading A. W. Tozer for yourself! Below, I have listed my top three favourite books by the legend himself. I hope you pick one, if not all, of these up and enjoy his writing for yourself:

1. The Pursuit of God: This book is a “masterly study of the inner life by a heart thirsting after God, eager to grasp at least the outskirts of His ways, the abyss of His love for sinners, and the height of His unapproachable majesty”. It is a classic!

2. The Knowledge of the Holy: In this book, Tozer takes on the different attributes of God in a concise and comprehensive manner and why it’s important to have a correct view of God.

3. Born after Midnight: Better described as a devotional, Born after Midnight is a collection of short takes on different theological topics, such as salvation, discipleship to Jesus, spiritual experience, words and deeds, and many more!

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Next month's (July's) topic is 'Understanding what it means to experience the presence of God'.