The Pursuit of God

I’m sitting here, trying to figure out what makes this book so good.

Tozer is convinced that a great many Christians don’t really know God. They know about him. They are “saved” in a judicial sense (Tozer’s word) through Christ’s work on their behalf. But they don’t experience their salvation in day-to-day, moment-to-moment living. Their personalities aren’t really any different as a result of what they believe. They struggle with the same issues endlessly. They have memorized Galatians 2:20, but what it describes is not a living reality in their lives.

“They” in this synopsis sounds too much like me, too much of the time. My faith often feels like a self-improvement project that’s not working very well. The same person keeps looking back at me in the mirror; she’s not changing much. Is she changing at all?

I grew up thinking Tozer was an abstruse, philosophical, inaccessible writer, but he’s not any of these things. This is the second book of his that I’ve read; the first was The Knowledge of the Holy. In the fairly short span of The Pursuit of God, which I got for free on the Kindle, he lays out a path toward a truly saving, transforming relationship with God. He does it simply and clearly, in a way that didn’t leave me tossing confusedly among his terms. Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot that’s “new” here, but something about the way it’s presented makes sense in a way that I needed.

The only problem with having read it on the Kindle is that I can’t flip through it and revisit the underlined passages. I highlighted many parts, but for some reason revisiting them on the Kindle isn’t the same. So I’ll probably be copying chunks of this book out into my notebook. Here’s one passage I already copied, and I can’t think of a better way to conclude this “review” than letting Tozer have the last word…

Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil [of self] we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed…

Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it crucified…

Insist that the work be done in very truth and it will be done. The cross is rough, and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep its victim hanging there forever. There comes a moment when its work is finished and the suffering victim dies. After that is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered in actual spiritual experience the Presence of the living God.