A Fire Not Large, but Real

“And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” — Jeremiah 29:13 (KJV)

In 1948 a Chicago pastor named A. W. Tozer published a short book with a huge hunger inside it. He was born on 21 April 1897 near La Jose, in rural western Pennsylvania. He never sat in a high school classroom or a seminary. He taught himself from libraries and second-hand bookshops.

When he was about seventeen, walking home in Akron, Ohio, he heard a street preacher urging people to call on God for mercy. He went home, up to the attic, and gave his life to Christ. In 1918 he married Ada Cecelia Pfautz, and in 1920 he was ordained in the Christian and Missionary Alliance without a single formal qualification. In 1928 he came to Southside Alliance Church in Chicago, and he stayed for thirty-one years.

He often prayed lying face-down on his study floor, sometimes for hours, simply gazing at God and worshipping. The Pursuit of God grew out of that hunger. His biographers also do not hide something harder: the same absorption made him distant from his wife and their seven children. We will come back to that at the end.

Samuel M. Zwemer, who wrote the book's introduction, could hardly believe a book like this had come from “a busy pastor in Chicago,” in a small study on that “vast, flat checker-board of endless streets.” He had visited Tozer's church and found “a self-made scholar” who “seemed to burn the midnight oil in pursuit of God.” He noticed that every chapter ends with a prayer. Those prayers, he said, “are for closet, not pulpit,” meaning they are for praying alone, not for performing in public. “I felt the nearness of God while reading them.”

Tozer's own preface explains why he wrote. Among ordinary Christians there were “increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself.” These people “will not be put off with words.” In his words, “They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water.”

He was also worried. He borrowed the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel, where God sent fire on the altar. Many churches, he said, had built the altar and laid out the sacrifice, “but now seems satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel.” That is blunt, but he adds, “I trust I speak in charity,” and what he feels is sadness: “It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving while actually seated at the Father's table.”

His main point is simple. “For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself.” The Bible matters enormously to him, but it is “not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God.” Then he ends with a sentence that is almost shy:

“This book is a modest attempt to aid God's hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.”

This book follows Tozer's ten chapters in order and keeps his prayers in his words. You might know a lot about God already: Bible verses, church, youth group, the right answers. And you might still feel strangely hungry. Tozer would say that hunger is the best sign there is. It means God is drawing you toward himself and not just toward facts about him.

One thing to do this week: finish this sentence honestly, in writing, and keep it somewhere you will see it again: What I actually want from God is... Don't make it sound good. Make it true. You will come back to it at the end of this book.