Good ol’ Tozer

Driven by What?

“Pure religion and undefiled . . . is this, To visit the fatherless and widows . . . and to keep himself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27).

The essence of true religion is spontaneity, the sovereign movings of the Holy Spirit upon and in the free spirit of redeemed men. This has through the years of human history been the hallmark of spiritual excellency, the evidence of reality in a world of unreality.

When religion loses its sovereign character and becomes mere form, this spontaneity is lost also, and in its place come precedent, propriety, system--and the file-card mentality.

Back of the file-card mentality is the belief that spirituality can be organized. Then is introduced into religion those ideas which never belong there--numbers, statistics, the law of averages, and other such natural human things.

And creeping death always follows.

--A. W. Tozer