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.

The Pursuit of God - Week #3

Chapter Three – Removing the Veil

“Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus…”

Tozer starts this chapter by saying that God made every human for Himself and because of that NOTHING will ever satisfy the human heart but God. “God formed us for His pleasure and so formed us that we as well as He can, in divine communion, enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred personalities. He meant us to see Him and live with Him and draw our life from His smile.”

He makes quite a point of God’s desire that in knowing Him, we experience His manifest presence, not simply have head knowledge: “The omnipresence of the Lord is one thing, and is a solemn fact necessary to His perfection; the manifest Presence is another thing altogether, and from that Presence we have fled, like Adam, to hide among the trees of the garden…”

(A little side comment here: fallen humans don't really want to encounter the manifest presence of God for fear of what might get exposed. This was true of Adam and Eve, and it has been true of all of us since then, Jonah being a prime example. Jonah "fled from the presence of the Lord." So we shouldn't be surprised that "religion" will always substitute systems for the real presence of Jesus...)

He goes on to say that God’s work of redemption is to undo the effects of man’s revolt and to open the way for us humans to “return again into conscious communion with God and to live again in the Presence as before.”

The Old Testament tabernacle speaks of the intimate communion we can have with the uncreated God by entering into the “holiest” where God Himself dwelt above the mercy seat. However, getting into that “holiest” place meant going through the curtain that separated the worshipper from the manifest presence of God. Only the high priest could enter once a year with blood that had been offered for his sins and the sins of the people.

On the cross Jesus’ body was torn open, and in that act of obedience to the Father, He ripped open the veil separating sinful man from the Holy One by presenting Himself as the perfect blood offering for sinful humanity. He who had never sinned for one moment in His life as a Man became sin, identifying totally with humanity’s fallenness and sin; this perfect sacrifice removed the veil or curtain that kept humans from experiencing the manifest presence of the Uncreated God.

What has become real to me in recent years is that while my spirit always longed for God and I had consistently experienced Him in my personal walk simply because of simple longing and reaching for Him, I haven’t had a good theology about experiencing His presence. Consequently, over the years, I have unwittingly encouraged younger believers to be content with knowing God “by faith.” And while all in God is ours by faith, my understanding of “faith” was a mixed bag of the real biblical meaning of faith and the religious interpretation of faith.

Tozer quotes a favorite hymn writer of mine, Frederick Faber, who unashamedly wrote:

“Only to sit and think of God,
Oh what a joy it is!
To think the thought, to breathe the Name;
Earth has no higher bliss.

Father of Jesus, love’s Reward!
What rapture will it be,
Prostrate before Thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on Thee!

I love Thee so, I know not how
My transports to control;
Thy love is like a burning fire
Within my very soul.

So while my personal experience of God was alive and real, I didn’t have “permission” to shout from the rooftops that this was something we must eagerly pursue. I believed that to want to touch and feel the manifest presence of God was selfish; Tozer contends that it is the false self that keeps us from entering into the Presence.

Tozer’s thesis in this chapter is that it is the false self that is the “veil” that hinders us from experiencing the intimate presence of God.

It’s important to distinguish between the false and the true self; when the Scripture speaks of crucifixion of the self, it is not referring to the true you that God created but to that “fleshly fallen nature” (self) that lives on unjudged within us, uncrucified and unrepudiated; self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love, etc.

From personal experience I can say that we have no ability to discover this for ourselves! This is the work of the Holy Spirit who alone can discern how self-righteousness is manifesting itself through me in a given moment, or self-sufficiency, etc. Its manifestations are so subtle and even good-looking that it takes the light and power of the Spirit of God to uncover it to me.

“Self can live unrebuked at the very altar. It can watch the bleeding Victim die and not be in the least affected by what it sees. It can fight for the faith of the Reformers and preach eloquently the creed of salvation by grace, and gain strength by its efforts…it seems to feed upon orthodoxy and is more at home in a Bible conference than in a tavern…Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us.”

I believe Tozer is speaking of coming to a place of “absolute surrender” (as Andrew Murray called it); in very simple terms, I see this as a “YES” in my spirit to God; in other words, "Yes, Lord...here I am; do whatever You need to do to make me one with You."

I understand this “yes” to be like the marriage vow in the marriage ceremony. When a couple goes through the public ceremony and pledges themselves wholly to each other, that’s just the beginning of a walk together that is going to require many and constant hard decisions to back up those vows, if the marriage is really going to lead the couple into genuine oneness day by day.

After the marriage ceremony, there’s a whole world of unexpected realities that shows itself, but the covenant vows that were made at the altar keep the couple on the altar where the purifying work of the fire of God is applied in love; little by little the two individuals are becoming one, not losing their own unique identity but losing all that prevents them from uniting with another personality.

I’ll close by saying that our genuine “yes” to Him, like in marriage, must be backed up with ongoing “yeses” when the tests come. The ceremony is the legal and real experience of union; the marriage afterwards is the affirmation day after day of what the couple vowed and is the actual process of union taking place in two separate persons. The healthy growth into oneness with God hinges very much on our correct view of God and how He views us, and so I would encourage you to continually ask Him to show you His beauty and truth, both about Himself and about yourself.

Tozer’s prayer at the end is for the person who wants to give an unequivocal yes to God; I am praying it again even though I have prayed such a prayer before, simply to affirm once more that this is what I asked for a long time ago:

“Lord, how excellent are Thy ways, and how devious and dark are the ways of man. Show us how to die, that we may rise again to newness of life. Rend the veil of our self-life from the top down as Thou didst rend the veil of the Temple. We would draw near in full assurance of faith. We would dwell with Thee in daily experience here on this earth so that we may be accustomed to the glory when we enter Thy heaven to dwell with Thee there. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

He loves you! Have a blessed week; next week we’ll look at chapter four: “Apprehending God.”

The Pursuit of God - Week #2

Chapter Two – The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing

“Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

God placed Adam and Eve in a Garden full of blessings, made for them to enjoy and use with the intention that these “things” would always be external and subservient to humans. Within the heart of man was a shrine that only God could inhabit, not things.

The sin of man complicated things, and now the very blessings that come from God threaten to be “a source of ruin to the soul.” God was removed from within the heart of man and things moved in, and there “in the moral dusk, stubborn and aggressive usurpers fight among themselves for first place on the throne.”

Tozer goes on to say that “there is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets ‘things’ with a deep and fierce passion…The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die…”

The self-life’s primary characteristic is possessiveness, and the Lord Jesus teaches us that the only effective way to destroy this is by the Cross:

“The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the ‘poor in spirit.’ They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of Jerusalem…They have broken the yoke of the oppressor not by fighting but by surrendering. Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. ‘Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’”

The author goes on to speak of Abraham and his love for Isaac. It was a natural love but an “uncleansed” love which threatened to become more important to the elderly father than the love of God. God watches over our hearts carefully and lovingly and He was aware of Abraham’s love and affection for Isaac. When God asked Abraham to offer up his son, Abraham misinterpreted how God wanted him to do that, but “he had correctly sensed the secret of His great heart” and acted on what he saw of God’s heart.

At the last moment God stepped in to hinder the slaying of Isaac, and Tozer paraphrases God’s words to Abraham: “It’s all right, Abraham. I never intended that you should actually slay the lad. I only wanted to remove him from the temple of your heart that I might reign unchallenged there. I wanted to correct the perversion that existed in your love…”

In my walk with God and in helping others with their walk in God, I’ve come to see how much perversion there is in our love as humans. Those that we love are in the “temple” of our heart where only God should be; consequently, our love for them is perverted because it is selfish, and what we think is loving gestures are really ways to manipulate and control. I’ve discovered and continue to discover that without God enthroned as the only God in my heart, all love for humans is tainted with selfishness; I want to own and control those I love, use them to make my life more fulfilling and satisfying. Family relationships are full of manipulation in the name of “love.”

In His great mercy and tenderness, God brings to bear just the right pressures in our lives that force us to either face Him and His truth about our condition or to choose to live a lie.

I remember well when the Holy Spirit did this for me in my younger years, and I was forced to choose between God and another relationship which was very dear to me. It was a painful and wrenching experience because, similar to Abraham, my heart affections were bound up in this person. But I will never cease to be grateful for God’s kind severity with me in dealing with the “uncleansed love” that was there. A created being had taken the place in my heart that belonged only to the Uncreated God. When He, by His grace and power, wrenched this out of my heart, it was very painful but the freedom I experienced was glorious! God was enthroned in my heart, and the human relationship was now in its proper place outside of the shrine of my heart, and I could enjoy it as I had not been able to before!

Tozer goes on to say that after this experience with God, Abraham was a man who possessed nothing and yet was very rich. He came out of this fiery trial with all that had been his before (his herds and goods and family and even his son Isaac):

”He had everything, but he possessed nothing. There is the spiritual secret. There is the sweet theology of the heart which can be learned only in the school of renunciation…

“There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the life. Because it is so natural it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is…We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety; this is especially true when those treasures are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears…Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.”

In closing the chapter, the author gives two instructions to those who long for God to do something about our clinging to other loves:

1. Put away all defense and make no attempt to excuse yourself either in your own eyes or before the Lord. In other words, get brutally honest with God and with oneself.

2. Remember that this is holy business, not something casual. “Let him insist that God accept his all, that He take things out of his heart and Himself reign there in power. It may be that he will need to be specific, to name things and people by their names one by one…”

Tozer goes on to warn that this cannot be done mechanically but must be taken seriously before God, allowing the pain of releasing the idol to touch our soul. “…the old miser within us will not lie down and die obedient to our command. He must be torn out of our heart like a plant from the soil…He must be expelled from our soul by violence as Christ expelled the money changers from the temple. And we shall need to steel ourselves against…self-pity, one of the most reprehensible sins of the human heart.”

In summary, I’ll add that this is the work of God’s Holy Spirit Who knows us and loves us so well; it is dangerous for us to try to do the work of the Spirit and engage in fleshly introspection. What I must do is place my heart before God, giving Him my permission and giving Him time to search me; if He exposes any perverted love (idolatry), then I must agree with His assessment and pray for His deliverance and then walk out my agreement with Him through obedience. When this experience and process is under His leadership, there is grace to bear the pain because He is in it with me.

The closing prayer of the chapter:
“Father, I want to know Thee, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself will be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.”

God bless you this week…Next week we’ll cover chapter three: Removing the Veil.

The Pursuit of God - Week #1

Chapter One – Following Hard After God

The author begins this chapter by reminding us that as Christians, we believe in the reality that before we can seek after God, He must first have sought us. This is a truth that runs throughout our life in God, and one which I have alluded to more than once on this blog: we love God because He first loved us; we enjoy God because He first enjoyed us; we are committed to Him because He first committed Himself to us.

I’ve discovered that without an ongoing unfolding of this truth in my spiritual understanding, I easily fall into the trap of religion which makes me the initiator, the one trying to convince and persuade God of something that He initiated, and this manifests itself in dead works.

* “The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him; and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand: ‘My soul follows hard after you: your right hand upholds me.’ (Psa. 63:8)”

So while God is always the Initiator, the Scripture tells us that if we draw near to God, He will draw near to us. If taken out of the context of the overall biblical revelation of Who God is and His role in human life, this sounds like we are the initiators; but drawing near to God is a response to His secret drawing, and the secret drawing of God must be reciprocated with our active and continual pursuit of Him if we are going to experience Him beyond an initial encounter with Him through which we are brought into His kingdom of light.

Tozer says that our approach to “religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless…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. In fact he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with little.”

We are often taught that faith means not seeking for encounter with His presence, being satisfied to not ever touch and taste and feel Him. We’ve been taught that to want to experience and touch God is selfish. As Tozer says, we train people to be satisfied with very little as far as experiencing the real presence of God goes.

*“The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we Christians are in danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word."

*“We have almost forgotten that God is a Person…full knowledge of one personality by another cannot be achieved in one encounter."

*“God is a Person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires, and suffers as any other person may…He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions."

*“The intercourse between God and the soul is known to us in conscious personal awareness. It is personal…and it is conscious: that is, it does not stay below the threshold of consciousness and work there unknown to the soul, but comes within the field of awareness where the man can ‘know’ it as he knows any other fact of experience.”

I believe we are reaping the fruit in the Church today of not having ongoing encounters with God; in other words, our children are chasing experiences with other “loves” because we have believed that to seek to experience God is selfish. God created us for experiencing, for tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, and seeing; if we don’t experience spiritually how good He tastes and feels and smells and sounds and looks, we will go after other “lovers.” We can’t help it; He made us with this need.

In saying this, I am in no way advocating living by our emotions; I am saying that God is the most real Person there is and to be fully alive as a human means to experience God in all areas of our humanity, and that includes our emotions. We cannot force ourselves to have emotional experiences with God but we can pursue Him with all our heart and strength and cry out for Him to encounter our hearts with His burning affection, and we can refuse to be content with numbness and dullness in our relationship with Him.

Another way to look at this is that knowing God is not a pill we take each day which has all the needed nutrients and strength packed into it for surviving without the need to eat food. Knowing God is meant to be both nutritional for our souls and pleasurable to us and to God. He longs for the pleasure of encountering each one of us personally.

(I’ll remind you here of the book we just finished, Deep Unto Deep, which deals with seasons of darkness and barrenness in the soul of the seeking believer. There’s a great difference between spiritual numbness because of passivity toward the things of God and seasons of barrenness in which the Christian soul is actively seeking God without seeing Him. Tozer is addressing spiritual passivity and calling us to aggressive pursuit of God - the “yes” in my spirit to Him - no matter what season we are in.)

Later in this chapter, Tozer holds before us the example of the great mystics of the faith in the Bible and in post-biblical times who refused to live lives without a burning heart. He chides the modern church for having rejected their example in favor of “a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him we need no more seek Him.”

*“The experiential heart-theology of a grand army of fragrant saints is rejected in favor of a smug interpretation of Scripture which would certainly have sounded strange to an Augustine, a Rutherford or a Brainerd…I want to deliberately encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate…Actual desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted."

*“If we would find God amid all the religious externals we must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity…as always God discovers Himself to ‘babes’ and hides Himself in thick darkness from the wise and the prudent…We must put away all effort to impress, and come with the guileless candor of childhood…"

*“We need not fear that in seeking God only we will narrow our lives or restrict the motions of our expanding hearts. The opposite is true. We can well afford to make God our All, to concentrate, to sacrifice the many for the One.”

I’ll finish with a reminder that Tozer says the first requirement in finding God is to “determine to find Him.” And so there must be an intentional setting of the heart and mind to go after Him. We won’t find Him without intentionality about this. And my warning is that this “determination” of heart and mind will arouse opposition of all sorts from the evil one, but the One who invites us to pursue Him with our whole heart is capable of leading us all the way in this.
The chapter ends with a good prayer that I’ll leave for you, in case you would like to pray it:

>>“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 for 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 I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.’ Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

Next week we’ll look at chapter 2: The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing. Grace and peace to you!

The Pursuit of God - Preface

Pursuit of God - Preface

A. W. Tozer has often been referred to as a “modern mystic” and without doubt was a prophetic voice to his generation and to ours through his writings. Before going to chapter one next week, I want to pause at his preface to the book which is a call to spiritual awakening and desire. It was written in 1948, and the prophetic message in this book is as much, or more so, for our generation as it was for his.

In his preface, Tozer speaks straight to the western evangelical bent towards the over-analysis of the truth, leaving the heart fire out of the Gospel. He speaks of the desperate hunger there is in many of God’s people yet the lack of the manifest Presence of God (fire) in evangelical teaching, leaving the people without what they yearn for.

He agrees that sound Bible teaching is a must in the Church but clearly sounds the trumpet to say that it is not correct doctrine that nourishes the soul but God Himself.

“There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence…Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold ‘right opinions,’ probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the ‘program’…

…This book is a modest attempt to aid God’s hungry children so to find Him…”

This resounds with me because I have seen this reality firsthand, being in the world of Bible schools and missions all my life and seeing how easy it is for churches and Christian organizations to gradually slip into spiritual dullness and cold heartedness while learning and saying all the right things. I’ve been in this kind of situation, and my heart burns for the young generations coming up to know God and not be satisfied with less than experiencing the burning heart that comes with knowing God intimately.

The cool, calculating approach to truth of the past decades (and more) has contributed to the present condition of the western Church, lost and with our children in pain and sin; but as we approach the end of the age, God is raising up a prayer movement worldwide that will lead His people into unashamed lovesickness for Him before Jesus returns. He will win our whole heart, and His Bride will stun the world with her radical love for God expressed in a lifestyle of selfless fasting and prayer and giving and serving.

This book was given to me as a young woman and gripped my heart in my youth. So I look forward to reviewing this classic by Tozer, seeing it in the light of the season of history that we are presently in. Blessings on you as you read this; may the Spirit of God awaken fiery desire in us for God!