The Pursuit of God

It is A. W. Tozer's call to know God Himself, not merely to hold right opinions about Him. Writing for believers who feel a hunger their Bible teaching has not satisfied, he argues that the Scriptures are a means to bring us into an intimate, satisfying knowledge of God, and he traces what it means to follow hard after Him.

In his preface he says he saw a growing number of Christians who were athirst for God and would not be content with correct interpretations of truth. He thought the evangelicalism of his day had laid the altar but lacked the fire, and he offered the book as a modest attempt to help God's hungry children find Him.

In the chapter Removing the Veil he takes the torn curtain of the temple as a picture of the way into God's presence that Christ has opened. What still hides God's face from us, he argues, is the veil of our own fallen nature — the self-life with its self-love, self-pity and self-confidence — and it is removed only as we let it be crucified.

Tozer reads the Beatitude about the poor in spirit through the story of Abraham offering Isaac. God gave Isaac back, but Abraham no longer possessed him; everything was held in trust for God. Tozer urges the reader to surrender every treasured thing in the same way, so that God alone is the heart's possession.

In The Gaze of the Soul he defines faith as the gaze of a soul upon a saving God. Faith, he says, is not occupied with itself or with how it feels; it looks away to God, as the Israelites looked at the bronze serpent, and that steady inward look can become the habit of the whole day.

The last chapter attacks the divide between sacred and secular that leaves many Christians feeling that only their religious acts please God. Tozer argues that eating, working and every lawful task can be done to the glory of God, so that the whole of ordinary life becomes an act of worship.

Samuel M. Zwemer, the veteran missionary to the Muslim world, who knew Tozer from visits to his Chicago church. He describes the book as theology not of the head but of the heart, written by a busy pastor who seemed to burn the midnight oil in pursuit of God.

Slowly, and prayerfully. Each chapter closes with a prayer, and Tozer meant his chapters to lead the reader to seek God rather than simply to learn about seeking Him. Reading a chapter at a sitting and praying its closing prayer suits the way it was written.