The Pursuit of God
by A.W.
Tozer
Chapter 1: Following hard
after God
My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand
upholdeth me. Psa_63:8
Christian
theology teaches the doctrine of prevenient grace, which briefly stated means
this, that before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man.
Before a sinful man can think a right thought of God, there must have been a
work of enlightenment done within him; imperfect it may be, but a true work
nonetheless, and the secret cause of all desiring and seeking and praying which
may follow.
We
pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that
spurs us to the pursuit. 'No man can come to me,' said our Lord, 'except
the Father which hath sent me draw him,' and it is by this very prevenient drawing
that God takes from us every vestige of credit for the act of coming. 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: 'Thy right hand upholdeth me.' In this divine
'upholding' and human 'following' there is no contradiction. All is of God, for
as von Hugel teaches, God is always previous.
In
practice, however, (that is, where God's previous working meets man's present
response) man must pursue God. On our part there must be positive reciprocation
if this secret drawing of God is to eventuate in identifiable experience of the
Divine. In the warm language of personal feeling this is stated in the
Forty-second Psalm: 'As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth
my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when
shall I come and appear before God?' [Psa.42:1-2] This is deep calling unto deep, and the longing
heart will understand it.
The
doctrine of justification by faith--a Biblical truth, and a blessed relief from
sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort--has in our time fallen into evil
company and been interpreted by many in such manner as actually to bar men from
the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of religious conversion has been
made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the
moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. 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.
The
modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we Christians are
in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word. We have almost
forgotten that God is a Person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person
can. It is inherent in personality to be able to know other personalities, but
full knowledge of one personality by another cannot be achieved in one
encounter. It is only after long and loving mental intercourse that the full
possibilities of both can be explored.
All
social intercourse between human beings is a response of personality to
personality, grading upward from the most casual brush between man and man to
the fullest, most intimate communion of which the human soul is capable.
Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created
personalities to the Creating Personality, God. 'This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and
Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.' (Joh_17:3)
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. In making Himself
known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality. He communicates
with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions. The
continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and
the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.
This
intercourse between God and the soul is known to us in conscious personal
awareness. It is personal: that is, it does not come through the body of
believers, as such, but is known to the individual, and to the body through the
individuals which compose it. And it is conscious: that is, it does not stay
below the threshold of consciousness and work there unknown to the soul (as,
for instance, infant baptism is thought by some to do), but comes within the
field of awareness where the man can 'know' it as he knows any other fact of
experience.
You
and I are in little (our sins excepted) what God is in
large. Being made in His image we have within us the capacity to know Him. In
our sins we lack only the power. The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life
in regeneration our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in
joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the
Thine own eternity is round Thee,
Majesty divine!
To have
found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed
by the too-easily- satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by
the children of the burning heart. St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a
musical quatrain that will be instantly understood by every worshipping soul:
We
taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread,
And long to feast upon Thee still:
We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead
And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.
come near to the holy men and women of the past and
you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him,
they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out,
and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long
seeking. Moses used the fact that he knew God as an argument for knowing Him
better. 'Now, therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight,
show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight';
and from there he rose to make the daring request, 'I beseech thee, show me
thy glory.' God was frankly pleased by this display of ardour, and the next
day called Moses into the mount, and there in solemn procession made all His
glory pass before him.
David's
life was a torrent of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with the cry of the
seeker and the glad shout of the finder. Paul confessed the mainspring of his
life to be his burning desire after Christ. 'That I may know Him,' was
the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything. 'Yea doubtless,
and I count all things but loss for the excellency of
the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all
things, and do count them but refuse, that I may win Christ' (Phi_3:8).
Hymnody
is sweet with the longing after God, the God whom, while the singer seeks, he
knows he has already found. 'His track I see and I'll pursue,' sang our fathers
only a short generation ago, but that song is heard no more in the great
congregation. How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for
us by our teachers. Everything is made to center upon the initial act of
'accepting' Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and
we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.
We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we
have found Him we need no more seek Him. This is set before us as the last word
in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever
believed otherwise. Thus the whole testimony of the worshipping, seeking,
singing Church on that subject is crisply set aside. 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 Branierd.
In
the midst of this great chill there are some, I rejoice to acknowledge, who
will not be content with shallow logic. They will admit the force of the
argument, and then turn away with tears to hunt some lonely place and pray, 'O
God, show me thy glory.' They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to
see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God.
I
want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it
has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about
our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a
deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will
be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in
vain.
Every
age has its own characteristics. Right now we are in an age of religious
complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its
stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities
which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart.
The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and the
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.
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. Now as always God discovers
Himself to 'babes' and hides Himself in thick darkness
from the wise and the prudent. We must simplify our approach to Him.
We must strip down to essentials (and they will be found to be blessedly few).
We must put away all effort to impress, and come with the guileless candor of
childhood. If we do this, without doubt God will quickly respond.
When
religion has said its last word, there is little that we need other than God
Himself. The evil habit of seeking God-and effectively prevents
us from finding God in full revelation. In the 'and' lies our great woe. If we
omit the 'and', we shall soon find God, and in Him we shall find that for which
we have all our lives been secretly longing.
We need
not fear that in seeking God only we may 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.
The
author of the quaint old English classic, The Cloud of Unknowing,
teaches us how to do this. 'Lift up thine heart unto God with a meek stirring
of love; and mean Himself, and none of His goods. And thereto, look thee loath
to think on aught but God Himself. So that nought work in thy
wit, nor in thy will, but only God Himself. This is the work of the soul
that most pleaseth God.'
Again,
he recommends that in prayer we practice a further stripping down of
everything, even of our theology. 'For it sufficeth enough, a naked intent direct
unto God without any other cause than Himself.' Yet underneath all his thinking lay the
broad foundation of New Testament truth, for he explains that by 'Himself' he
means 'God that made thee, and bought thee, and that graciously called thee to
thy degree.' And he is all for simplicity: If we would have religion 'lapped
and folden in one word, for that thou shouldst have better hold thereupon, take
thee but a little word of one syllable: for so it is better than of two, for
even the shorter it is the better it accordeth with the work of the Spirit. And
such a word is this word God or this word love.'
When
the Lord divided Canaan among the tribes of
The
man who has God for his treasure has all things in One.
Many ordinary treasures may be denied him, or if he is allowed to have them,
the enjoyment of them will be so tempered that they will never be necessary to
his happiness. Or if he must see them go, one after one, he will scarcely feel
a sense of loss, for having the Source of all things he has in One all
satisfaction, all pleasure, all delight. Whatever he may lose he has actually
lost nothing, for he now has it all in One, and he has
it purely, legitimately and forever.
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 of 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 so 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.