The Pursuit of God - Week 5

Chapter Five – "The Universal Presence"

“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your
presence?”

God dwells in all of His creation and is present everywhere in all His works. Tozer says this truth of “divine immanence” is one of the basic Christian truths that is like one of the primary colors needed in painting. We Christians profess such a truth but “for some reason it has not sunk into the average Christian’s heart so as to become a part of his believing self. Christian teachers shy away from its full implications, and if they mention it at all, mute it down till it has little meaning.”

The author clarifies that this doctrine of the divine Presence is nothing like pantheism. God is “transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.” So what does this immanence mean for the Christian experience? “It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here.”

“In the beginning God…the uncaused Cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin.”

Tozer then gives Bible examples of Adam and David as men who tried to hide from the presence of God unsuccessfully. Jonah comes to mind as well in his attempt to flee from the presence of the Lord and could not.

“If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world? The patriarch Jacob…gave answer to (this). He saw a vision of God and cried out in wonder, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’ Jacob had never been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew.”

As we see from Biblical characters, it’s not only pagans that do this, but we believers have our religious and subtle ways of trying to escape His presence. One of these ways is through hiding behind the doctrine itself of the divine Presence. In other words, because we believe in the omnipresence of God, we content ourselves with the theology of that without actively pursuing a real and ongoing experience of His manifest presence.

Tozer says about this,
“The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same. There can be one without the other. God is here when we are wholly unaware of it. He is manifest only when and as we are aware of His Presence. On our part there must be surrender to the Spirit of God, for His work is to show us the Father and the Son. If we cooperate with Him in loving obedience, God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face.”

God is everywhere always present and is also always seeking to discover Himself to us. God “revealed His very Self to Moses so that the skin of Moses’ face shone with the supernatural light…”

“Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us…when we sing, ‘Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord,’ we are…thinking of the nearness of relationship. It is for increasing awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence.”

The author asks the question, “Why do some persons ‘find’ God in a way that others do not? Why does God manifest His Presence to some and let multitudes of others struggle along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience?...the will of God is the same for all. Pick at random a score of great saints whose lives and testimonies are widely known…You will be struck with the fact that the saints were not alike…differences of race, nationality, education, temperament, habit and personal qualities. Yet they all walked, each in his day, upon a high road of spiritual living far above the common way.”

Obviously, these differences in the great saints of God meant nothing to God; so in some vital way they had to be alike. Tozer suggests that the one common quality among them all was “spiritual receptivity.”

Of course, you could argue that everyone has capacity for spiritual receptivity, and the book proceeds to explain that what sets these shining saints apart from the average Christian is that not only did they have a spiritual receptivity and awareness but they took great care to cultivate that “until it became the biggest thing in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing they did something about it. They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response…David: ‘You have said, Seek My face. My heart says to You, Your face, Lord, do I seek.’”

Tozer finishes the chapter by saying that spiritual receptivity is a blending of several things in the soul. It is: an affinity for, a bent toward, a sympathetic response to, a desire to have. However much of it we have can either be increased by spiritual exercise or destroyed by neglect.

Tozer’s prophetic warning is pertinent to us today: “Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture…We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer returned from afar. The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit, etc.”

We have all contributed to this; but God is merciful and loves His Church. I believe the emerging worldwide prayer movement is His awakening today that is preparing His people for the final days of human history before He returns. More and more of His people are weary with religion and want to experience His manifest Presence that Tozer talks about here. On our campus we have been relentlessly crying out for 7 years now for Him to manifest Himself among us and interrupt our programs and human-initiated works; we’re beginning to experience a taste of the sweetness and pain of His manifest presence, and it’s ruining us for anything less and it's causing more and more worship and prayer to arise here.

May the Spirit of God disrupt our lives enough to cause us to want Jesus more than we want anything or anyone else! And may His empowering grace settle over us to develop the wonderful habit of practicing His presence so that we increasingly live in the awareness of His nearness to us.

“O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ’s sake, Amen.”

Next week we’ll look at chapter 6, "The Speaking Voice." May His nearness be your portion this week!