the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer
Tozer in the Morning
Songs to Live By
Sometimes our hearts are strangely stubborn and will not soften or grow tender no matter how much praying we do. At such times, it is often found that the reading or singing of a good hymn will melt the ice jam and start the inward affections flowing. That is one of the uses of the hymnbook. Human emotions are curious and difficult to arouse, and there is always a danger that they may be aroused by the wrong means and for the wrong reasons.
The human heart is like an orchestra, and it is important that when the soul starts to sound its melodies, a David or a Bernard or a Watts or a Wesley should be on the podium. Constant devotion to the hymnbook will guarantee this happy event and will, conversely protect the heart from being led by evil conductors.
Every Christian should have lying beside his Bible a copy of some standard hymn book. He should read out of one and sing out of the other, and he will be surprised and delighted to discover how much they are alike. Gifted Christian poets have in many of our great hymns set truth to music. Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley (possibly above all others) were able to marry the harp of David to the Epistles of Paul and to give us singing doctrine, ecstatic theology that delights while it enlightens.
Tozer in the Evening
When ''Adjust'' Means ''Maladjust''
A word that is being greatly overused in modern society is adjust.
I am certainly not the first one to complain about it, but my objection to its overuse is, I believe, on a little higher level, for most persons who register their objections are thinking only about its social effects while I am concerned with its effect in the spiritual realm.
Thinking persons who deplore the present mania for adjustment point out that almost all adjustment is made downward to bring people into harmony with the common and the mediocre, so that society is educated toward a dead level with ordinariness as its ultimate end.
This passion to be mediocre and to make everyone else the same begins with the parent in the home, spreads to the schools and is propagated with missionary zeal by the advertisers. And advertising, at least in the United States, is the most powerful educational agent extant. Those who write the advertising copy probably do more to determine the way the average person thinks than the school and church combined.
