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!