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Quotations I love: A. W. Tozer on worship that illuminates work

Lynne Baab • Friday November 4 2016

Quotations I love: A. W. Tozer on worship that illuminates work

“God wants worshippers first. Jesus did not redeem us to make us workers; He redeemed us to make us worshippers. And then, out of the blazing worship of our hearts, springs our work.”
          —A. W. Tozer (1897-1963) [1]

I try to picture who A.W. Tozer was thinking about when he said these words. Was he envisioning a hard working Sunday School teacher who had been teaching kids for thirty years and who was a bit tired, but determined to continue? Maybe he was thinking about people who have what I call a “martyr spirit,” who work hard and get a lot done for the church, but who serve a bit grudgingly, out of a sense of duty. When Tozer was speaking and writing, in the middle years of the twentieth century, the two World Wars and the Depression would have been strong influencers on Christians, teaching them the values of duty, perseverance and hard work.

Even though “duty, perseverance and hard work” are less common descriptors of what motivates people in churches today, I think Tozer’s quotation is valuable in our time for two reasons. The first reason relates to the human tendency for joy in a task to diminish over time. Many Christians today began their Christian life with a sense of joy in God’s goodness. They responded by jumping into some form of service, and their joy has diminished over the years in the hard slog of life. For someone who might use the word “slog” to describe their life of faith and their service of God, Tozer’s emphasis on worship is worth pondering. Perhaps the sense of slog might lessen, and feelings of joy might increase, with a renewed focus on worship.

My second reason why Tozer’s quotation is valuable today relates to the opposite problem, people who view the Christian faith as a means to their own ends and have no intention or desire to work hard for the Kingdom of God. I once read some interviews with young adults, many of whom seemed to view their faith in God as a way to get help to meet their own goals. One of the interviewees said something like this: “I want to be a lawyer, a successful one, and God helps me study and keep my focus now while I’m a student. After I become a lawyer, I know God will help me succeed.”

Tozer refers to the “blazing worship of our heart” as the source of our work. I assume he means all kinds of work: paid work, unpaid work in the home, and various forms of service in the church and community. It’s worth pondering which forms of work in our lives arise most clearly out worship and which forms are somewhat or mostly separate from a heart that’s blazing with the love of God.

And it’s worth pondering what kinds of worship set our hearts ablaze. When, where and how does that kind of worship happen for you?

Work that is motivated and illumined by blazing worship of God will have a different character than work that we view as our right and our achievement. Are we creating climates in our congregations where we encourage “blazing worship of the heart”? Do we talk in small groups and with friends about the connections between worship of God and work/service in everyday life? What would it look like to link worship and work more closely together in your life?

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(Next week: Arnold H. Glasow on hospitality as making others feel at home. Illustration by Dave Baab. If you’d like to receive an email when I post on this blog, sign up under “subscribe” in the right hand column.)

[1] From an address at a Youth for Christ convention, date unknown, quoted in In Other Words, Fall 1999, page 5.



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