The Pursuit of God (For Teens)

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) was an American pastor, born near La Jose in western Pennsylvania. He never went to high school, college or seminary and taught himself from libraries and second-hand bookshops. He became a Christian at about seventeen in Akron, Ohio, was ordained in the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1920, and pastored Southside Alliance Church in Chicago for thirty-one years before moving to Toronto, where he died in 1963.

It means going on to know God himself, as a person, not just believing the right things about him. Tozer taught that becoming a Christian is “not an end but an inception”: the start of a lifelong friendship. God starts the pursuit by drawing us, and we respond by seeking him, the way a psalm says, “My soul followeth hard after thee.”

The Pursuit of God is a short book of ten chapters, each ending with a prayer, published in 1948 while Tozer was a pastor in Chicago. He wrote it because he saw many Christians with correct beliefs but little real experience of God, and a growing number who were hungry for “God Himself.” He called it “a modest attempt to aid God's hungry children so to find Him.”

Yes. It keeps Tozer's blunt criticism of the churches of his day, his use of the disturbing story of Abraham and Isaac, and his insistence that letting God deal with our selfishness hurts. It also says plainly that, according to his biographers, his absorption in God made him distant from his wife and seven children.

It comes from the prayer at the end of Tozer's first chapter. He admits he is “ashamed of my lack of desire” for God, and instead of pretending, he asks God to make him want more. It means you don't have to feel on fire for God to begin: you can start by asking God to give you the desire.

His biographers report that he drafted much of it in a single night on a train journey to Texas. Its introduction, by Samuel M. Zwemer, says it was the result of long meditation and much prayer. Both can be true: the writing may have come quickly because the thinking and praying had gone on for years.

He can be sharp about shallow faith, entertainment in church and self-promoting leaders. But he says “I trust I speak in charity,” includes himself in the blame (“We have all contributed”), and admits when an idea is only his opinion: “you can be a good Christian and not accept my thesis.”

That being hungry for God is a good sign, not a problem; that God is always present, even when we don't notice; that faith is simply looking to Jesus, even when your mind wanders; that you can stop pretending and comparing; and that ordinary things like homework, chores and time with family can be done as worship.