A little library, growing every year is an honorable part of a person’s history. It is one’s duty to have books. A library is not a luxury.
Henry Ward Beecher
I was a zealous and wide-eyed believer in 1970. Like many people in their early twenties, fresh from a conversion experience, I was looking for risk and adventure not peace and safety. I wanted more of God — more challenge and commitment. I found it in a small book called The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer.
I’m not sure if Tozer’s books are as popular today as they were in the 1970s. His writing bears the mark of a prophet and not a therapist; he isn’t safe but he’s good. You’re always uncomfortable reading Tozer yet drawn to the God he writes about.
His introduction immediately caught my attention:
Others before me have gone much further into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.
What a beautifully crafted sentence — what an honest but challenging admission. I dove into the book, wanting to read more about lighting the candle of my faith at Tozer’s flame. I wasn’t disappointed.
Tozer didn’t ease me into his book with a personal anecdote or sentimental story but with a short challenge. Was I willing to follow HARD after God? He got right to the point:
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.
In a later chapter on Apprehending God, he turns up the flame of his faith.
. . . millions of Christians . . . go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a principle. Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural doctrine that God can be known in personal experience . . . The Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or thing that comes within the field of their experience.
Here’s the clincher in following hard after God and apprehending Him. Now is when we feel the prophetic barbs of Tozer:
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 … and we are expected thereafter not 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 no more seek Him . . . . 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.
My conscience was seared by this laser beam of his insight. I didn’t want a stiff and wooden spiritual life. I didn’t want to be conquered by the foe of complacency.
Tozer goes on to write that every age has its own characteristics. Even though the book was written in the distant past of the 1950s his analysis still rings true: “Right now we are in an age of religious complexity,” he wrote. Following Christ should be simple but we replace it with programs, methods, and a “world of nervous activities” (isn’t this a great statement!), which “occupy time and attention but never satisfy the longing heart.”
As a new believer, I had that longing heart and I wanted to rise to the challenge. I wanted God to be real to me; I wanted the simplicity of knowing Christ; I wanted my longing heart to be satisfied with God alone. But there’s more. Now I faced the chapter of The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing.
A.W. counters our contemporary pursuit of self-branding (“discovering the true me”) and luxury possessions with the challenge that “The way to a deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things.” The blessing was in possessing nothing — “The sweet theology of the heart which can be learned only in the school of renunciation.” He then wryly comments, “The books on systematic theology overlook this, but the wise will understand.”
I had to tear out the yearning for ownership that I harbored in my heart; a tearing which was “like a plant from the soil; [it] must be extracted in agony and blood like a tooth from the jaw.” What a picture! Who writes like this today?!
Tozer concludes this bloody illustration by writing, “If we would indeed know God in growing intimacy we must go this way of renunciation.” We must learn the blessedness of possessing nothing.
It’s been more than fifty years since this book burned a hole in my soul. Sometimes I wonder if my zeal has dimmed, my soul more drawn to comfort than challenge. Life beats us up over time and diminishes the flames of our faith. BUT despite a half century of challenges, questions, and a yearning for security I’m still pursuing God. I keep coming back to His loving presence.
Tozer lit within me a flame to keep seeking God, to pursue hard after Him. I’m still praying, “Lord, give me a fresh taste of yourself. Renew my heart to follow hard after you.” I hope that over the years a few people have lit the fire of their faith from the sometimes dimly lit flame of my life.
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