Conclusion

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. REVELATION 5:12

We have covered a good deal of ground in fifteen short chapters, and it would be easy to close this book with the impression that Tozer taught many things. In truth he taught one thing, from many sides, for more than forty years. The one thing is this: God Himself is the soul’s true good, and He may be known. Everything else is commentary. The pursuit of God is that truth turned into desire. The attributes of God — His holiness, His infinitude, His sovereignty and love — are that truth turned into adoration. Worship is that truth turned into response. The surrender of our possessions, the gaze of faith, the listening ear and the practised presence are that truth turned into daily habit. The old cross is that truth turned against the self that stands in the way. The Spirit-filled life and the sacrament of living are that truth spread over the whole of life. And his long quarrel with a worldly church was simply that truth defending itself against its counterfeits.

What to do with it

If you have read this far, you are in a position of some danger, and Tozer would have been the first to say so. The hazard of a book like this is that it can be enjoyed. A man may take real pleasure in reading about the pursuit of God while pursuing nothing but the next interesting book. He may admire Tozer’s hunger and remain entirely full of himself. He may learn to speak fluently about worship and never once fall silent before God. Nothing in these pages is of the slightest use as information.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So here is the plainest counsel this book can give. Go back to the one chapter that disturbed you. Not the one you found most interesting — the one you would rather not read again. That is likely to be where God is at work. Take its application points and do them, one at a time, over the coming weeks. Then take the next. And make room, somewhere in your life, for the thing Tozer most wanted his readers to have: unhurried, unscripted time alone with God, with the door shut, asking for nothing and simply worshipping.

Two things to carry

Carry away, first, a large thought of God. Tozer was convinced that most of the church’s troubles, and most of ours, come from thinking of God as smaller than He is. The cure is not a technique but a vision. Read the Scriptures to see Him. Read the Gospels to see Him in the face of His Son. Let the old hymns and the great confessions lift your eyes. A believer who has seen God high and lifted up will find that a great many of his fears, sins and distractions shrink to their proper size.

Carry away, second, a holy discontent. Not with your circumstances, but with the distance between what the New Testament calls normal and what you have settled for. That discontent, honestly brought to God, is one of the surest signs that His Spirit is at work in you. Do not soothe it. Follow it.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. PSALM 42:1

A last word about the man

We have been honest in these pages about Tozer’s limitations. He leaned on the mystics more than was always safe and spoke of reason more slightingly than Scripture does. He could be severe to the point of unfairness with his fellow believers. He sometimes wrote as though the deeper life belonged to a few. And the man who wrote so tenderly of God’s presence was, by the account of those who knew him best, a distant presence in his own home, and those nearest him bore the cost.

None of this has been raised to diminish him. It has been raised because he would have insisted on it. No theme was dearer to him than the smallness of man before the majesty of God, and a book that set him on a pedestal would have contradicted everything he taught. He knew, as every true servant of God knows, that the treasure is carried in an earthen vessel.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

In one of his Easter sermons, now in the Ochorus library under the title Three Great Days, Tozer read aloud the fifth chapter of Revelation — the Lamb in the midst of the throne, and all creation crying that He is worthy — and declined, in effect, to preach on it, because the passage was too great for any sermon to add to. It is a fitting place to leave him. His whole ministry was an attempt to point away from himself and towards that throne. The right response to him, then, is not admiration. It is worship — not of Tozer, but of the God he spent his life pursuing and the Lamb he spent his life adoring.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the chapter of this book that most disturbed you. Read it again, and do the first of its application points this week.

2. Set a regular time — weekly, if not daily — for unhurried worship with no requests. Guard it.

3. Choose one of the attributes of God considered in this book, and meditate on it every day for a month.

4. Name the lesser thing you have settled for in your walk with God. Tell Him you are no longer content with it.

5. Read Revelation 4 and 5 aloud, slowly, and end in worship.

A PRAYER

Lord God, I have read about Your servant’s hunger. Do not let me stop at reading. Make me hungry for You.

Forgive me for small thoughts of You, for cold worship, for a divided heart and a comfortable faith.

Lift my eyes to Your throne. Show me the Lamb who was slain, and let my heart join the song of heaven.

Worthy is the Lamb. Let my life say it, and my home, and my work, and my last breath. Amen.