A Walking Miracle

At a glance

UECF.NET summary

Becoming a walking miracle

Tozer is careful not to let this vision turn into an excuse for oddness. He wants Christians to be, in his words, perfectly normal, perfectly sound, perfectly practical people — not aloof, not affected, not performing spirituality for an audience. And yet, underneath that ordinary surface, he wants something that psychology and natural explanation cannot fully account for: a life that runs, at some level, on spiritual law rather than merely natural law, the way (Tozer nods here to Henry Drummond's old argument that the visible world's laws prefigure spiritual ones) a plant reaching toward light pictures something true about the soul reaching toward God. A Christian who has genuinely seen God on His throne should be, quietly, a walking miracle — explicable finally only by grace, even while doing perfectly ordinary things in a perfectly ordinary way.

Hatred of sin

Here Tozer will not let his hearers relax. Whatever spiritual maturity a person reaches, however far along the road of "seeing" God they travel, their hatred of sin must never cool. He reminds his listeners what sin has actually cost: it is what brought the Savior to a Roman cross; it is what fills prisons and institutions; it lies under every divorce, every act of violence, every ruined life the newspapers report. Before the holiness Isaiah saw, sin cannot be relabeled as a mistake or a phase — it is, in Tozer's word, heinous. And if a believer should stumble into it anyway, Tozer's counsel is not to make peace with the fall but to hate what was done, "with holy hatred," and get out of it quickly. Growth in grace, for Tozer, is not measured by growing more relaxed about sin; if anything, true growth makes a person more allergic to it, not less.

Seeing God with the eyes of the heart

Tozer returns to something he said near the start: the intellect alone cannot climb up to God, but God can and does disclose Himself directly to the human spirit. He wants his hearers to leave room in their own faith for mystery — for the parts of God that will not resolve into a tidy explanation. In his view, a Christian who has actually seen something of God stops being quite so quick to pronounce final verdicts on every other believer's convictions or experience; too much fluency, too much ready certainty about the things of God, can be a sign that no real vision has occurred at all. The heart, not the intellect alone, ends up doing the deepest theology.

God's glory and Christian service

All of this returns, finally, to where the sermon began: God does not use people as instruments; He works in them and through them, and that work always seems to follow the same order Isaiah lived through — a true sight of God, an honest undone-ness, a real cleansing, and only then a call that the person is now free to answer without pretending to any competence of their own. Service that by-passes that order, in Tozer's assessment, is service resting on the wrong foundation, however sincere.

Conclusion

Tozer closes the message, as he tells it, with a hymn he considers to have come from someone's knees rather than their desk — an old, anonymous piece beginning "Eternal Light, Eternal Light," which wrestles with exactly the paradox this whole sermon has been circling: a soul must be perfectly pure to stand in that searching gaze, and no fallen soul can produce that purity in itself; only God's own eternal love can lift a creature to where it can meet the Uncreated at all. Tozer's closing prayer asks that God's people would see Him clearly enough to be genuinely undone by it — because it is only out of that kind of undone-ness, he says, that real exaltation, and a real sending, can ever come. See God on His throne. Be undone. Be cleansed. Be sent.

Key ideas

• A Christian shaped by this kind of vision should look ordinary and practical, not strange — while quietly living by more than natural explanation can account for.
• Hatred of sin must never soften with spiritual maturity; Tozer treats growing comfortable with sin as a warning sign, not a sign of growth.
• Real encounter with God leaves room for mystery; excessive certainty about spiritual things can signal the absence of real vision rather than its presence.
• God works in and through people, not merely by using them — the theme the sermon opened with returns to close it.
• The sermon's closing order is deliberate: see God, be undone, be cleansed, be sent — in that sequence, not any other.

Hear and read the original message

This study companion summarizes and reflects on A. W. Tozer's sermon; it is not a substitute for it. The full spoken message runs about 31 minutes, and the full transcript and PDF are hosted at SermonIndex.net, which shares Tozer's recorded ministry for non-commercial use with attribution.

🔊 Listen & read at SermonIndex.net