Episode #40
A. W. Tozer and the Night Train to Texas (Psalm 42:1)
Send us Fan Mail A porter on a train out of Chicago brought a small man his toast and tea, came back down the aisle, and stopped short. The passenger was down on the floor between the seats, praying, with the train rocking underneath him. His name was A. W. Tozer. Aiden Wilson Tozer was born on a hardscrabble Pennsylvania farm in 1897 and never finished high school. No seminary. No degree. What he had was a hunger. It started at seventeen in Akron, Ohio, when he walked home from work, passed a street preacher, climbed to the attic of his family's house, and called on God for mercy. He came back down a different young man. He pastored forty-four years in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, thirty-one of them at Southside Alliance Church in Chicago. He never owned a car. He rode buses and trains. When book royalties came in, he signed most of them away. Then came the night on the train. Tozer boarded in Chicago to preach a meeting in McAllen, Texas, carrying a burden he could not put down. Somewhere on the dark prairie he began to write. When he got stuck he slid onto his knees on the coach floor and prayed until it opened up again. Page after page, all night. By sunrise over Texas, the manuscript was finished. That book came out in 1948. It is called The Pursuit of God, and it has never once gone out of print. Psalm 42:1 says, As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God. Jeremiah 29:13 says, And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. Notice where God met this man. An attic in Akron. The floor of a railroad car. Neither was a holy place. They were where a hungry man stopped and reached for Him. Read the full devotional: https://rodneycoe.com/aw-tozer-night-train-pursuit-of-god/
