The Amazon listing for this one reads Man: What it Means to Have Christ Living in You. The book’s original and far better known title is Man: The Dwelling Place of God. Same content, different cover.
Here is the part most listings bury. A.W. Tozer did not sit down and write this book. He died in May 1963. It came out in 1966, assembled after his death from editorials he had written for Alliance Life, the magazine of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which he edited for thirteen years. Anita M. Bailey, the managing editor, gathered the pieces and grouped them around a single theme: the relationship between God and man.
Why that changes how you read it
It is an essay collection. It does not build one argument from the first chapter to the last. Each piece was written to stand alone in a magazine, weeks apart from the next one. Chapter titles include “The Call of Christ,” “What We Think of Ourselves Is Important,” “The Once-born and the Twice-born,” and “Why People Find the Bible Difficult.”
Take it one chapter at a time and it works very well. Read it front to back over two evenings and it will feel repetitive, because Tozer circled back to the same handful of concerns constantly in print. That is simply what a collection of editorials looks like.
What Tozer is after
His subject is the distance between claiming to know God and actually knowing Him. He is hard on comfortable, shallow, culturally respectable Christianity, and he is hard on it in short, quotable sentences. The recurring theme is that God intends to dwell in a person, and that most of us settle for something much smaller than that. He is trying to unsettle you enough to change how you pray.
What it does not have
No study questions, no discussion guide, no application steps, no worksheets. Nothing in it is aimed specifically at men either, despite how it gets marketed. Tozer wrote for whoever picked up the magazine that week. If your small group needs built-in structure, you will have to build it yourself.
Who it suits
Good for someone whose devotional life has gone flat and who wants to be provoked rather than comforted. Tozer is a corrective writer and in small doses he is excellent at it. A poor choice as a first Christian book, and a poor choice during a fragile stretch, because gentle is not something he does.
One practical warning on editions. There are a lot of versions of this in circulation, including cheap print-on-demand reprints with rough typesetting and no editorial care. Moody Publishers keeps it in print, and that is the edition to buy.
Bottom line
A posthumous collection of Tozer’s magazine editorials on what it means to know God, still sharp sixty years on. One chapter at a time, and get the Moody edition. Do not expect a workbook.
Check the current price of Man: The Dwelling Place of God on Amazon