I have just started re-reading A.W. Tozer’s book The Pursuit of God with a group of students. It’s been quite a while since I have read much from Tozer so I was excited when our reading group at the Baptist Student Ministry at Texas Tech wanted to tackle this book.
If you don’t know much about Tozer, I encourage you to look him up. Though not having a formal theological education, Tozer still is known as a “theologian, a scholar and a master craftsman in the use of the English language.” His heart was to know God and so his prayerful study of Scripture and other literature (especially the evangelical mystics) moved him to become a man whose heart burned with and for God.
At the outset of The Pursuit of God, it is obvious that Tozer is concerned with the superficiality of much Christianity in his day (Pursuit of God was first published in 1948). He writes in chapter 1:
The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all.
page 23-24
Has much changed? Well, yes and no. But regardless, our need continues to be one to know God. In the midst of a pandemic and all the anxieties and struggles it has produced coupled with the past election and its creation of walls of division, the people of God, that is, the church, must hunker down and seek God and the story of peace he establishes.
Personally, I find myself listening to the wrong story at times. I get caught up in the panic of the hour rather than the narrative of our Creator. I get sidetracked by the 24 hour news instead of getting oriented by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I must allow God’s story to rewrite my own as well as allow it to help me see the reality behind what is put before me by the kingdoms of this world.
I’m not writing that we should not pay attention to what’s happening in the world around us. We most definitely should. But as we do, it’s not the narrative that defines us. We as the church must live and make our way by diving into into the grace, mercy, goodness, and love of God for as we do, we can then offer the world what it most desperately needs. We can then show the life of peace and unity offered in the true Kingdom of God.
We must know God! As Tozer makes clear, we must pursue him. We must pray for a hunger and a thirst to know him and to be content with nothing else. Let us taste and see that the Lord is good today (Psalm 34:8). Let us grow deep in our pursuit of him knowing that it is God’s presence for which we were created. And it is by his presence in which we go deeper and hunger for more.
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