Introduction

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God. PSALM 42:1–2

Some teachers are remembered for a system. A. W. Tozer is remembered for an ache. He was a Chicago pastor with no schooling beyond the elementary years, a man who taught himself from second-hand books and public libraries, who preached for more than forty years in one small denomination and wrote only a handful of books with his own hand. Yet more than sixty years after his death his sentences are still copied into notebooks, pinned above desks and read aloud from pulpits in every part of the world. The reason is not that he told Christians anything new. It is that he told them something old which they had quietly stopped believing: that God Himself is to be sought, found, known and enjoyed, and that anything less is a religion of words.

He was not a theologian in the academic sense, and he never pretended to be. He had little patience with men who could describe God in fine detail and had never been silent before Him. What he had was a single conviction pressed home from every angle, and it is the thread that runs through this whole book. The Christian’s great need is not more activity, more method or more information. It is God. Not the blessings of God, not the gifts of God, not even the doctrines about God, true as they are — but God Himself, known personally, loved above everything, worshipped for His own sake.

Why he still matters

Tozer saw, earlier and more clearly than most, what happens to a church that keeps its orthodoxy and loses its awe. The creed stays correct. The meetings grow bright and busy. The talk is all of programmes, techniques, numbers and results. And somewhere along the way the sense of the living God simply goes out of the building, and nobody notices, because everything else is still running. He called the church of his day to account for exactly this, and the call has not grown less urgent.

Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. JEREMIAH 6:16

He matters, too, because he held together things that are often torn apart. He was an evangelical who believed in the new birth, the blood of Christ and the authority of Scripture without reservation. He was also a man who read the old devotional writers of every century, Catholic and Protestant alike, and who insisted that the Christian faith was meant to be experienced and not merely assented to. He was a fierce critic of the church and a tender lover of it. He could write about the attributes of God with a grandeur that silences the reader, and then turn in the next paragraph to the washing of dishes and the mending of fences as work to be offered to God.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, fifteen short chapters set out his teaching. The first group follows the soul’s search for God: the pursuit itself, the importance of how we think of God, and a sequence on His holiness, His infinitude and self-existence, and His sovereignty and love. The second group turns to the response God asks of us: worship, the surrender of our possessions, faith as the gaze of the soul, the voice of God in Scripture and the awareness of His presence. The third group is the most searching: the cross that ends the old life, the fulness of the Holy Spirit, the sacred character of ordinary work, the worldliness of the church, and the deeper life that Tozer believed was open to every believer who would pay its price. A conclusion and a reader’s guide close the book.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. That is deliberate. Tozer held that truth which does not move the heart and change the life has not really been received. He warned constantly against the Christian who reads about God with pleasure and never goes near Him. Read one chapter at a time. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own — and then stay a while in silence before God, which is what he would have most wanted.

A word about his words

Tozer’s books remain in copyright and in print, and this companion does not reproduce them. Every description of his teaching here is a summary in our own words. His books are named throughout so that the reader may follow any thread back to its source, and a short guide to them is given at the end. Readers are warmly encouraged to buy and read them. Nothing here can stand in for the compressed, burning sentences that made him loved.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and there are places where Tozer must be read with care. It is kinder to say so at the start.

First, he had a strong mystical streak. He loved the medieval and later contemplative writers — men and women who wrote of union with God, of the dark cloud of unknowing, of the vision of God — and he commended them freely, sometimes with too little warning about where they departed from Scripture. He was also inclined to speak slightingly of reason and theology, as if careful thought about God were a rival to knowing Him rather than a servant of it. Chapters six and twelve weigh this.

Second, he could be severe. His prophetic temper made him a necessary voice, but he sometimes painted his fellow believers in broad and bitter strokes, and his censures of the church’s music, entertainment and methods were not always fair to the sincere people behind them.

Third, the man who wrote so movingly about the presence of God was, by the frank account of his biographers, a distant husband and father. That cost was real, it was borne by others, and it should not be hidden.

Fourth, he sometimes spoke as though the deeper life were the possession of a spiritual few, set apart from the ordinary run of believers. The New Testament knows no such aristocracy.

So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture:

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Where Tozer is faithful — on the majesty of God, the emptiness of religion without Him, the necessity of worship, the cross and the Spirit — receive it gladly and act upon it. Where he presses beyond what is written, mark it and set it aside. You will lose nothing. He would not have wanted you to follow him. He would have wanted you to follow hard after God.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down, honestly, what you most want from God at present. Then ask yourself whether it is God Himself, or something from Him.

2. Recall the last time you were silent before God with no request to make. If you cannot remember, note that, without excusing it.

3. Decide now how you will read this book: one chapter a day or a week, with a Bible open beside it and a few minutes of quiet after each prayer.

4. Obtain one of Tozer’s own books — The Pursuit of God is the place to begin — and read it alongside these chapters.

5. Ask God to show you where your faith has become correct but cold.

A PRAYER

O God, You have made us for Yourself, and we have filled our lives with lesser things and called it religion.

Forgive me for knowing so much about You and seeking You so little. Forgive me for loving Your gifts more than I love You.

As I read these pages, do not let me admire a hungry man and remain full of myself. Make me hungry too.

Draw me after You, and I will run. Let me find You, and in finding You, want You more. Amen.