The Pursuit of God

by A.W. Tozer

“The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.”

“Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this.”

For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself; and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience, they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their being, their spirit.

but if my fire is not large, it is yet real,

The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we Christians are in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word.

Whoever defends himself will have himself for his defense,

He has revealed Himself to some extent in nature, but more perfectly in the incarnation;

The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God, and the church is famishing for want of His presence.

To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains personally unknown to the individual.

Where faith is defective, the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things.

What do I mean by reality? I mean that which has existence apart from any idea any mind may have of it, and which would exist if there were no mind anywhere to entertain a thought of it. That which is real has being in itself. It does not depend upon the observer for its validity.

Now, by our definition God is also real. He is real in the absolute and final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon His. The great reality is God, who is the author of that lower and dependent reality which makes up the sum of created things, including ourselves. God has objective existence independent of and apart from any notions which we may have concerning Him. The worshipping heart does not create its object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration.

But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the city of God, shining around us. The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible, and the temporal, of the eternal.

Prying into them may make theologians, but it will rarely make saints.

The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: These and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul.

The briefest and only satisfying cosmogony is this: For he spoke, and it was done. The why of natural law is the living voice of God immanent in His creation.

The believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and whispers, “God.” The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things. Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper.

The Bible will never be a living book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe.

The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us, put into our familiar human words.

faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the triune God.

Distractions may hinder, but once the heart is committed to Him, after each brief excursion away from Him, the attention will return again and rest upon Him like a wandering bird coming back to its window.

Faith is the least self-regarding of the virtues. It is by its very nature scarcely conscious of its own existence. Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God, we do not see ourselves – blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. While he looks at Christ, the very things he has so long been trying to do will be getting done within him. It will be God working in him to will and to do.

Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified.

Essentially salvation is the restoration of a right relationship between man and his Creator, a bringing back to normal of the Creator-creature relationship.

The atonement in Jesus’ blood makes such a change judicially possible, and the working of the Holy Spirit makes it emotionally satisfying.