A. W. Tozer and the Night Train to Texas
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.
Hunger for God Starts in Ordinary Places
Aiden Wilson Tozer was born on a hardscrabble Pennsylvania farm in 1897 and never finished high school. No seminary. No degree. At seventeen, walking home from work in Akron, Ohio, he passed a street preacher who said that a man who does not know how to be saved should call on God for mercy. Tozer went home, climbed the stairs to the attic, and did exactly that. 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 the book money started coming in, he signed most of it away. People who worked with him said he would spend hours face down on the floor of his study.
God Meets the People Who Keep Seeking
Years later Tozer was carrying a burden he could not put down. He looked at the American church and saw people who knew a great deal about God with very little appetite for Him. It grieved him. He had been asking God to give His people back their hunger.
He boarded a train in Chicago to preach a meeting down in McAllen, Texas, and somewhere out on the dark prairie it started to come. When he got stuck he slid onto his knees on the floor of that coach and prayed until it opened up again. Then he climbed back into the seat and wrote some more. Page after page, all night, with the wheels going under him. When the sun came up over Texas the next morning, 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. It has been carried into prisons and hospitals for more than seventy-five years, and it keeps doing the thing Tozer prayed for. It makes people hungry. Jeremiah 29:13 says, And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.
Make Room for God Today
Notice where God met this man. An attic over a house in Akron. The floor of a railroad car somewhere out on the dark prairie. Neither one was a holy place. They were the places where a hungry man stopped and reached for Him. Psalm 42:1 says, As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God.
You do not need a seminary degree to have that hunger, and Tozer is proof. You need what he had, a willingness to get down where you are and mean it. Make some room today. Turn the radio off on the drive home. Open the Book before you open the phone. Tell God plainly that you want to want Him more than you do. That prayer has never gone unanswered, because the hunger itself is something He puts in you.
And that, friend, is how God lifts up your day.