We love the old saints, missionaries, martyrs, and reformers. Our Luthers, Bunyans, Wesleys and Asburys, etc... We will write their biographies, reverence their memories, frame their epitaphs, and build their monuments. We will do anything except imitate them. We cherish the last drop of their blood, but watch carefully over the first drop of our own.
Interpretation
People admire and honor historical figures for their sacrifices but often fail to emulate their selflessness and commitment.
This quote reflects the tendency of society to idolize and romanticize the past while neglecting to adopt the virtues that made those figures great. Aiden Wilson Tozer critiques how we celebrate the legacies of saints, martyrs, and reformers, honoring their memories without truly engaging in the sacrifices and challenges they faced in their lives. In doing so, he points out a hypocrisy: we revere their suffering but often shy away from making similar sacrifices in our lives, suggesting that true reverence would involve living out the values they exemplified.
In practice
In a speech commemorating historical reformers, one might quote Tozer to highlight the need for contemporary action.
Peace of heart that is won by refusing to bear the common yoke of human sympathy is a peace unworthy of a Christian. To seek tranquility by stopping our ears to the cries of human pain is to make ourselves not Christian but a kind of degenerate stoic having no relation either to stoicism or Christianity.
The average Christian is so cold and so contented with His wretched condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can rush in satisfying fullness.
Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. If we understand our first and sole duty to consist of loving God supremely and loving everyone, even our enemies, for God's dear sake, then we can enjoy spiritual tranquility under every circumstance.
The church that can't worship must be entertained. And leaders who can't lead a church to worship must provide the entertainment.
Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, ‘What is God like?’ and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind
People who are crucified with Christ have three distinct marks: 1. they are facing only one direction, 2. they can never turn back, and 3. they no longer have plans of their own.
Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.
Beggars should be entirely abolished! Truly, it is annoying to give to them and annoying not to give to them.
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
Even though the body appears to be material, it is not. In the deeper reality, your body is a field of energy, transformation and intelligence.
One judge is coughing his life out into bloody handkerchiefs and the other is burying his wife, and you think this is how God answers your prayers?
At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done. We will be judged by "I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in.
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