Illumination of the Spirit

This is from the blog a broken man:

I have been making my way through several of A.W. Tozer’s books lately. Never in my life have I read a book so profound, written by a mere human man. Tozer is often described as a modern-day prophet, a man used by God to bring about dramatic change in an otherwise flippant and godless generation. Here are several quotes that I studied long and hard. I hope they speak to your heart as they did to mine.

“The inability of human reason as an organ of divine knowledge arises not from its own weakness but from its unfittedness for the task by its own nature. It was not given as an organ by which to know God. The doctrine of the inability of the human mind and the need for divine illumination is so fully developed in the New Testament that it is nothing short of astonishing that we should have gone so far astray about the whole thing. Fundamentalism has stood aloof from the liberal in self-conscious superiority and has on its own part fallen into error, the error of textualism, which is simply orthodoxy without the Holy Spirit.

"Everywhere among conservatives we find persons who are Bible-taught but not Spirit-taught. They conceive truth to be something that they can grasp with the mind. If a man hold to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, he is thought to possess divine truth. But it does not follow. There is no truth apart from the Spirit. The most brilliant intellect may be imbecilic when confronted with the mysteries of God. For a man to understand revealed truth requires an act of God equal to the original act that inspired the text.”


“The belief that the human mind is the supreme authority in the judgement of truth. . . . is the confidence in the ability of the human mind to do that which the Bible declares it was never created to do and consequently is wholly incapable of doing.”

“But for the searching of the Scriptures and true knowledge of them, an honorable life is needed, and a pure soul, and that virtue which is according to Christ; so that the intellect guiding its path by it, may be able to attain what it desires, and to comprehend it, in so far as it is accessible to human nature to learn concerning the word of God. For without a pure mind and a modeling of the life after the saints, a man could not possibly comprehend the words of the saints. . . . He that would comprehend the mind of those who speak of God needs begin by washing and cleansing his soul.”


--A.W. Tozer