A.W. Tozer on the Holy Spirit: What He Taught and Why It Still Matters

A.W. Tozer had a gift for one-liners that stick in your head for years. On the Holy Spirit he wasn’t trying to be clever. He was sounding an alarm: you can’t figure God out with your brain alone. Straight Bible is working through a collection of Tozer’s sermons on the Holy Spirit, and the second episode, “How Christ Is Revealed by the Holy Spirit, Not Through the Intellect,” is one that a host says shaped his own walk with God. Here’s who Tozer was, what that sermon teaches, and why it still lands.

Who was A.W. Tozer?

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) was an American pastor in the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He spent about three decades at Southside Alliance Church in Chicago and finished his ministry in Toronto. He never went to college or seminary. He taught himself by reading, praying, and preaching. His best-known books are The Pursuit of God (1948) and The Knowledge of the Holy (1961), and both are still widely read. His themes kept coming back to the same place: knowing God personally, His presence, holiness, and worship instead of religious performance.

The sermon in one sentence

The text is John 3:27: “A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven.” Tozer’s point is that people by nature can’t understand the things of God, and that even many teachers in the church don’t realize it. In the episode, the hosts read through Tozer’s outline point by point:

• The mistake: assuming spiritual truth can be grasped with the intellect alone. Tozer calls it a “great blunder” of the orthodoxy of his day.
• The consequences: a Christian life that looks “very much like the natural life, only cleaner and more fun,” plus leaning on philosophy, reason, and science to prop up the faith.
• The answer: Christ is revealed by the Holy Spirit.

Spirit versus intellect

Tozer builds on 1 Corinthians 2:14: “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Then he gives the line that sums up the whole sermon: “God gave a spirit to apprehend himself and intellect to apprehend theology. There is a difference.”

The hosts explain it with the senses. You can’t hear a sunset. You see it. You don’t see birdsong. You hear it. Each thing is picked up by the faculty made for it, and God is known by the spirit He gave us for that.

Does this mean Bible study doesn’t matter?

No, and this is where people misread Tozer. His point isn’t that Scripture is optional. It’s that study by itself doesn’t lift the veil. As read on the episode: “The word does not say no man knows the things of God except the man who studies his Bible. It does say that no man knows the things of God except by the Holy Ghost. It is the Spirit who wrote the Bible and who must inspire the Bible.” Tozer then quotes a motto he says he can’t source: understanding a Bible text “takes an act of the Holy Spirit equal to the act that inspired the text in the first place.” (It’s a staggering statement, and Tozer himself doesn’t claim to have written it.)

The Straight Bible take is balanced. As the hosts put it, “it’s not like we just get rid of our intellect. We just have to surrender our intellect to God.” Reason has a place. It just isn’t how you come to know God. They say they’re comfortable being called foolish, because Paul says the preaching of the cross “is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

“Isn’t that Gnosticism?”

Someone in the live chat raised that objection, and the hosts took it seriously. They looked up the definition on air (Gnosticism: ancient ideas that put secret personal knowledge above the faith) and landed here: Tozer isn’t selling secret knowledge. He’s repeating what the Bible says about the Spirit teaching believers. He cites 1 John 2:27 (“ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things”) and immediately adds that teaching is still one of the gifts of the Spirit. His point is that “your knowledge of God is not taught to you from without. It is received by an inner anointing.” One co-host admits Tozer probably chose provocative words on purpose. Another points out that the preachers the show loves (Tozer, Ravenhill, Spurgeon, Watchman Nee, G. Campbell Morgan) didn’t all share the same doctrine or end-times views, “but they were people who knew God.”

The spirit-filled life as a “perpetual miracle”

Near the end, Tozer walks through 1 Corinthians 1:19–28: God chooses “the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” and the things “which are not, to bring to nought things that are.” The Holy Spirit, he says, “rules out and excludes all Adam’s flesh,” meaning human brilliance, personality, and efficiency. “It makes Christianity depend on a perpetual miracle. The man of God, the true spirit-filled man of God, is a perpetual miracle,” a stranger the world doesn’t understand, “judged of no man” (1 Corinthians 2:15–16).

That ties into another Tozer line from the episode: “I don’t bow down to great men. I bow down to the great man.” If you’ve learned to worship the Son of Man, you won’t worship other men, and that includes famous preachers, Tozer too.

Key Scriptures from the sermon

• John 3:27, where the sermon’s text says every real gift comes from heaven
• 1 Corinthians 2:14–16, on the natural man and the spiritual man
• 1 Corinthians 1:18–28, on the foolishness of the cross
• 2 Timothy 3:16, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God”
• 1 John 2:27, on the anointing that teaches

Keep watching

Start with the first episode of the Tozer run, The Holy Spirit — A.W. Tozer | Straight Bible, then watch this one (embedded above). If you want to read Tozer yourself, The Pursuit of God is short and a great first book.

Wear the heavyweight

The A.W. Tozer Gospel Heavyweight tee treats Tozer like a champion on a vintage fight poster: a black-and-white halftone portrait with four championship rings, one for each Gospel (MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE, JOHN). It’s part of the Classic Sermon Series alongside Spurgeon and G. Campbell Morgan, and you’ll find the rest of the lineup in the Straight Bible shop.