I Want to Want Thee

“My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.” — Psalm 63:8 (KJV)

Tozer's first chapter starts with a surprise. You might think the pursuit of God begins with us. It doesn't. “Before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man.” The very wish to look for God is something God puts in you. “We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.” As an old writer, von Hügel, put it: “God is always previous.”

That doesn't make us passive. God starts it, but we must respond. Tozer worried that becoming a Christian had been made to feel like a box ticked. “Christ may be 'received' without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is 'saved,' but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God.” Worse, people were told to be content with that.

His most famous line in this chapter is this: “The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we Christians are in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word.” You can know your Bible well and still treat God as a subject instead of a person. “We have almost forgotten that God is a Person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can.” Think about friendship. Nobody becomes a best friend in one conversation. As Tozer says, “full knowledge of one personality by another cannot be achieved in one encounter.”

So finding God is not the end. “It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit.” He calls this “the soul's paradox of love”: “To have found God and still to pursue Him.” Moses already knew God, yet he asked for more: “I beseech thee, show me thy glory.”

Then comes one of Tozer's sharpest sentences. Jesus, he says, wants to be wanted. “He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.” Instead, we keep busy. He saw churches full of “programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart.”

His answer is to simplify. The problem is the habit of seeking God plus something else. “In the 'and' lies our great woe.” He quotes an old English book called The Cloud of Unknowing, which advises that when you pray, you pick one short word to hold on to: “And such a word is this word GOD or this word LOVE.” God told the tribe of Levi, who got no land, “I am thy part and thine inheritance.” “The man who has God for his treasure has all things in One.”

Then Tozer prays. Notice how honest it is. He does not claim to be full of desire for God. He admits he isn't, and asks God to make him want more:

“O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed.”

Here is the good news hidden in that prayer. You don't have to feel on fire for God to start. You can start where Tozer did: “I want to want Thee.” If you can honestly say even that much, God is already drawing you, because, remember, he is always previous.

And watch for your own “and.” God and good grades. God and being liked. God and a future that goes exactly to plan. None of those things is bad. The trouble comes when God is one item on the list instead of the one you are actually looking for.

One thing to do this week: each morning this week, before you check your phone, pray Tozer's shortest line in your own words: God, I want to want you. Just that. Then notice, by Sunday, whether anything in you has changed.