A Tozer - Chapter 1 from The Pursuit of God
My soul follows hard after thee: thy right
hand upholds 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 out working 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 upholds me."
In this divine "upholding" and human
"following" there is no contradiction. All is of God, for as Friedrich von
Hügel 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
pants after the water brooks, so pants my soul after thee, O God. My soul
thirsts for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before
God?" 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."
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 Kingdom of God. It is, however, not an end but an inception, for
now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart's happy exploration of the infinite
riches of the Godhead. That is where we begin, I say, but where we stop no man
has yet discovered, for there is in the awful and mysterious depths of the
Triune God neither limit nor end.
Shoreless Ocean, who can sound Thee? 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
ardor, 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."
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 Brainerd.
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 that 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 pleases God."
Again, he recommends that in prayer we
practice a further stripping down of everything, even of our theology.
"For it suffices 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 folded 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 accords 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 Israel Levi received no share of the land. God said to him simply, "I
am thy part and thine inheritance," and by those words made him richer
than all his brethren, richer than all the kings and rajas who have ever lived
in the world. And there is a spiritual principle here, a principle still valid
for every priest of the Most-High God.
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.
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