This World: Playground or Battleground?
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
There was a time, Tozer says, when Christianity exercised a dominant influence over the thinking of our forefathers, when they knew the world was a battlefield. They believed in sin, the devil, and hell as constituting one force pitted against the other force of God and righteousness and heaven. People today, however, think of the world, Tozer laments, not as a battleground, but as a playground; the world has become a place to frolic, not a place to fight. Although Tozer sees the world as a battlefield, he sees it as one where the victory is certain.
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Product Details
- Title: is World: Playground or Battleground?
- Author: A.W. Tozer
- Publisher: WingSpread
- Publication Date: 2007
- Pages: 121
About Aiden Wilson Tozer
Aiden Wilson Tozer 897-1963) was born on a small farm in what is now Newburg, PA. His family moved to Akron, Ohio, when he was just a young boy. At the age of 17, Tozer heard a street preacher, responded to the calling of Christ, and began his lifelong pursuit of God. After becoming an active witness of Jesus as a lay preacher, he joined The Christian and Missionary Alliance and was soon serving as the pastor of West Virginia’s Alliance Church, in 1919. He transferred to the Southside Alliance Church in Chicago in 1928, and his ministry continued there for 31 years. During that time he preached on the Moody Bible Institute’s radio station. In the 1940s Tozer was invited to speak at Wheaton College, and seldom a year passed after World War II that he didn’t preach in the college’s Pierce Chapel. In 1950 he became the editor of The Alliance Life magazine and served in that capacity until his death.
Self-taught, with no formal Bible training, Tozer has been called a twentieth-century prophet within his own lifetime. Through years of diligent study and constant prayer, he sought the mind of God. A master craftsman in the use of the English language, he was able to write in a simple, cogent style the principles of truth he had learned. For Tozer, “there was no substitute for knowing God firsthand.” He wrote many of his books with one idea in mind—that his reader would achieve the heart’s true goal in God and maintain that relationship with Him.
Tozer moved to Toronto in 1959 and spent the final years of his life as the pastor of Avenue Road Church. He and his wife, Ada, lived a simple, non-materialistic lifestyle and let much of the royalties from his books go to those in need. The Tozers had seven children, six boys and one girl. James L. Snyder, said of Tozer that his “preaching as well as his writings were but extensions of his prayer life. He had the ability to make his listeners face themselves in the light of what God was saying to them.”
Top Highlights
“Spiritual people are indifferent to their feelings—they live by faith in God with little care about their own emotions. They think God’s thoughts and see things as God sees them. They rejoice in Christ and have no confidence in themselves. They are more concerned with obedience than with happiness. This is less romantic, perhaps, but it will stand the test of fire.” (Page 23)
“The spiritual quality of a prayer is determined not by its intensity but by its origin.” (Page 16)
“But the free man—never. He has nothing to protect, no ambition to pursue and no enemy to fear.” (Page 20)
“How different today. The fact remains the same, but the interpretation has changed completely. Men think of the world not as a battleground, but as a playground. We are not here to fight; we are here to frolic. We are not in a foreign land; we are at home. We are not getting ready to live, but we are already living, and the best we can do is rid ourselves of our inhibitions and our frustrations and live this life to the full. This, we believe, is a fair summary of the religious philosophy of modern man, openly professed by millions and tacitly held by many more millions who live out that philosophy without having given it verbal expression.” (Page 3)
“The idea that this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of fundamentalist Christians.” (Page 4)