The Pursuit of God - Week #4

Chapter Four – Apprehending God

“O taste and see…”

“To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains personally unknown to the individual…others know of Him only by hearsay…To many others God is but an ideal, another name for goodness…These notions about God are many and varied, but they who hold them have one thing in common: they do not know God in personal experience…

“Christians go further than this, at least in theory…but for millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.”

Tozer goes on to say that in contrast to this vagueness about God, the God of the Scriptures can be known intimately…”A loving Personality dominates the Bible…Always a living Person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, manifesting Himself wherever and whenever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation.”

Some Scriptural references to the potential of experiencing Him as a Person:
• “O taste and see that the Lord is good”
• “All thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia…”
• “ My sheep hear my voice”
• “Blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall see God”

In the same way that we have physical sensations (the five senses) so do we (who have come into Christ by faith in His atoning work) have spiritual senses by which we can personally experience the living and true God, the Father of Jesus.

The author contends that the greatest obstacle to our experiencing God in this real way is “chronic unbelief.” He says we must understand two key words: reality and reckon.

Reality = that which has existence apart from an idea my mind may have of it; it has being in itself and “does not depend upon the observer for its validity.” A sincere and honest person knows that the world is real and engages this real world with his five senses. “All things necessary to his physical existence he apprehends by the faculties with which he has been equipped by the God who created him and placed him in such a world as this.”

“God is real in the absolute and final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon His…The worshipping heart does not create its Object.”

Reckon = count on that which is real. “Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons (counts on) upon that which is already there.”

So faith counts on that which is real, what is already there in spite of what I may feel or think about it. God is real and the spiritual, invisible world is real, more real than that which we touch and taste and feel in the natural realm.

Tozer says: “The world of (physical) sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and self-demonstrating…sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of God, shining around us…The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam’s tragic race…At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible…

“If we would rise into that region of light and power plainly beckoning us through the Scriptures of truth we must break the evil habit of ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest from the seen to the unseen. For the great unseen Reality is God…If we truly want to follow God we must seek to be other-worldly.” (Hebrews 11:27; Psalm 63:1,2, etc.)

He goes on to warn that this “other world” is not to be understood as something to experience in the future and adds that even now the door is open between the physical and spiritual world. “The soul has eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear. Feeble they may be from long disuse, but by the life-giving touch of Christ…capable of sharpest sight and most sensitive hearing.”

He ends the chapter by challenging us to focus our attention on God (David declared that he “always set the Lord before” him)…”A new God-consciousness will seize upon us and we shall begin to taste and hear and inwardly feel the God who is our life and our all…More and more as our faculties grow sharper and more sure, God will become to us the great All, and His Presence the glory and wonder of our lives.”

I encourage our college students to get into the habit of “drinking” daily of the life of Jesus through a lifestyle of simple adoration, listening prayer, fasting, obedience. When practiced in faith, such a lifestyle has the effect of enlarging our capacity for the unseen world. I believe that the practice of fasting food, in particular, is powerful for getting the believer more in touch with the unseen world. (Two wonderful books on fasting that can help you in this are “The Rewards of Fasting” by Mike Bickle and “The Fasting Key” by Mark Nysewander.)

(By the way, I believe that beginning to focus our attention on God by faith through the lifestyle mentioned in the previous paragraph is the practical outworking of the removing of the “veil” of the false self life, as Tozer talked about in chapter 3. We cannot artificially put to death the false self but we can focus on Jesus and obey whatever He says to us, and in that place of intimacy and obedience, the false self will be dealt with by the Holy Spirit of God.)

A great man of God, S.D. Gordon, said that we can never comprehend God fully but we can apprehend Him. How true this is! Our finite mind cannot wrap itself around His greatness; but the human spirit, when it is truly awake and advancing in God’s love along with others in Christ, can apprehend (take hold of) and enjoy that which the human mind cannot grasp of His infinite life!

“O God, quicken to life every power within me, that I may lay hold on eternal things. Open my eyes that I may see; give me acute spiritual perception; enable me to taste Thee and know that Thou art good. Make heaven more real to me than any earthly thing has ever been. Amen”

Grace and peace to you in the Lord Jesus! Next week’s chapter is chapter five: The Universal Presence.