THE HOLINESS of GOD

THE HOLINESS of GOD

-excerpts by A.W. Tozer.

“God is not now any holier than He ever was. And He never was
holier than now. He did not get His holiness from anyone nor from
anywhere. He is Himself the Holiness. He is the All-Holy, the Holy
One; He is holiness itself, beyond the power of thought to grasp or
of word to express, beyond the power of all praise.”

“Language cannot express the holy, so God resorts to association
and suggestion. He cannot say it outright because He would have
to use words for which we know no meaning. He would have to
translate it down to our unholiness. If He were to tell us how white
He is, we would understand it in terms of only dingy grey.”

“It was a common thing in olden days, when God was the center
of Human worship, to kneel at an altar and shake, tremble, weep,
and perspire in an agony of conviction. We don’t see it now because
the God we preach is not the everlasting, awful God, ‘mine Holy
One’ (Habakkuk 1:12), who is ‘of purer eyes than to behold evil,
and canst not look on iniquity’ (Habakkuk 1:13).”

“We’ve used the technical interpretation of justification by faith and
the imputed righteousness of Christ until we’ve watered down the
wine of our spirituality. God help us in this evil hour!”

“We come into the presence of God with tainted souls. We come
with our own concept of morality, having learned it from books,
from newspapers and from school. We come to God dirty – our
whitest white is dirty, our churches are dirty and our thoughts are
dirty – and we do nothing about it!”

“If we came to God dirty, but trembling and shocked and awestruck
in His presence, if we knelt at His feet and cried with Isaiah, ‘I am
undone; because I am a man of unclean lips’ (Isaiah 6:5), then I
could understand. But we skip into His awful presence. We’re
forgetting ‘holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord’
(Hebrews 12:14).”

“O God, soon every person must appear before you to give an
account for the deeds done in the body. Father, keep upon us a
sense of holiness so that we can’t sin and excuse it, but that
repentance will be as deep as our lives. This we ask in Christ’s
name. Amen.”

-A.W. Tozer.