The Pursuit of God

My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me. PSALM 63:8

Every one of Tozer’s books is, in the end, about one thing, and the title of his most famous book names it. The Christian life is a pursuit of God. Not a pursuit of happiness, or of usefulness, or of blessing, or even of holiness considered as a thing in itself, but of God — the living, personal God, sought for His own sake and loved for what He is. Tozer believed that this pursuit had been almost entirely forgotten in the church of his day, and that its absence explained nearly everything else that was wrong.

God seeks first

He began where Scripture begins, with God. It would be easy to read a book called The Pursuit of God as a manual of human effort, and Tozer was at pains to prevent it. Before any man can follow hard after God, God must first have come after him. The desire itself is a gift. The very hunger that sends a believer to his knees was put there by the One he is hungering for.

No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. JOHN 6:44

This is the ground of all hope in the matter. If the pursuit depended upon our native appetite for God, there would be no pursuit at all, for the natural heart has none. But God has taken the initiative. He called to Adam in the garden when Adam was hiding. He sought out Jacob at Bethel and wrestled him at Jabbok. He came to Moses in a bush in the desert. And in the fulness of time He came to us in His Son, seeking and saving the lost. The believer’s pursuit of God is only ever a response. We follow, Tozer liked to point out, because His right hand upholds us, and we seek because we were first sought.

The great deception

Yet having said that, Tozer turned sharply on what he saw as the characteristic error of the evangelicalism around him. It had reduced the Christian life to a single transaction. A man accepts Christ, is told that he now has everything, and is encouraged to go on his way. What was meant as the door into a lifelong fellowship with God was presented as the end of the matter. The effect, Tozer believed, was disastrous. It produced a generation of Christians who were sincerely converted and yet had no expectation of ever knowing God more deeply than they did on the day they first believed. They had been taught to find Him and then stop looking.

Against this he set the testimony of the whole Bible and of the saints of every age. Those who have known God best have always wanted Him most. Far from ending the search, finding God begins it. Moses had spoken with God face to face, as a man speaks with his friend, and it was precisely then that he asked for more.

And he said, I beseech thee, shew me thy glory. EXODUS 33:18

Paul had seen the risen Christ, founded churches, suffered for His name and been caught up into the third heaven. Yet near the end of his life he wrote as a man who had only begun.

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death. PHILIPPIANS 3:10

That, Tozer said, is the true shape of spiritual life. Finding God and going on seeking Him is no contradiction; it is simply the way love behaves. The heart that has met Him is content and hungry together. The more it has, the more it wants. Complacency, not desire, is the mark of spiritual decline.

One thing

The pursuit requires singleness. Tozer loved the verse in which David gathers all his longings into one.

One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple. PSALM 27:4

Most Christians want many things from God, and God in addition. Tozer argued that the blessed life begins at the moment a man wants God alone, and wants everything else only in Him. He did not mean that other desires are evil. He meant that they must take their place beneath the one great desire, or they will quietly replace it. The man who seeks God and something else has already begun to seek the something else. The man who seeks God only finds, to his surprise, that everything else is given back to him in its proper place.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. MATTHEW 6:33

God is a person

Beneath all this lay a conviction that Tozer returned to constantly. God is a Person, and a Person may be known. Not known exhaustively — the creature can never exhaust the Creator — but truly, increasingly and with all the intimacy of friendship. He insisted that the knowledge of God is not the same as the knowledge of doctrine. A man may master every article of the creed and never once have met the God it describes. He said as much, repeatedly, in his preaching, and his sermon The Infinite God, which is in the Ochorus library, presses the point that theology tells us about God while eternal life is to know Him.

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. JOHN 17:3

It follows that the pursuit of God is personal, not technical. There is no method that guarantees it and no technique that shortens it. It is conducted the way any friendship is conducted: by time spent together, by attention, by honesty, by love. The saints whom Tozer most admired had no secrets in the modern sense. They simply wanted God badly enough to give Him their time, their attention and their hearts.

Weighing it

Tozer’s call to pursue God is one of the most bracing things in modern Christian writing, and it is overwhelmingly faithful to Scripture. But it needs one safeguard, which he himself supplied in places and not in others. The pursuit of God must never be confused with a restless anxiety about whether we have yet found Him. The believer’s acceptance with God is settled by the finished work of Christ. We do not pursue God in order to be accepted; we pursue Him because we have been accepted and have tasted His goodness. Where this order is reversed, the call to seek God more deeply can become a new law, and the sensitive conscience can be driven into endless self-examination, always wondering whether it has sought hard enough.

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us … let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith. HEBREWS 10:19–22

The pursuit, in other words, starts from assurance and moves into intimacy. It is the joyful exploration of a relationship already secured, not a desperate climb towards one still in doubt. Read in that light, Tozer’s summons is pure gospel: the God who has given Himself to you in Christ is inviting you to know Him more.

Beginning the pursuit

How does a man begin? Tozer’s counsel was plain. Stop being content. Confess the coldness. Ask God to create the hunger that you lack. Then make room for Him — in time, in attention, in silence — and keep making room. The pursuit is not a crisis to be passed through but a direction to be kept.

Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. JAMES 4:8

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself whether you have treated conversion as the end of your search for God rather than the beginning. Write down what has changed in your knowledge of Him since you first believed.

2. Read Psalm 27 and Psalm 63 slowly, aloud, once a day this week. Notice how often the writer wants God rather than something from Him.

3. Set aside fifteen minutes this week in which you ask God for nothing. Spend it thanking Him for what He is.

4. Name one good thing you have been seeking alongside God that has begun to crowd Him out. Put it back beneath Him.

5. If you have been anxious about your standing with God, read Hebrews 10:19–22 and rest in it before you seek anything more.

A PRAYER

Lord, You sought me before I ever thought of seeking You. Every desire I have for You is Your own gift.

Forgive me for stopping at the door of Your house and never going in. Forgive me for being content with so little of You.

I do not ask for new experiences or great sensations. I ask for You — to know You, and to know You better, and to want You more.

Let the one thing I desire be You, and let everything else take its place beneath You. Amen.