The Pursuit of God

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The Pursuit of God

described secondhand. You have to experience them for yourself. The best he could do was point you in the right direction. 11 Nevertheless, The Pursuit of God contains a hint or two. Repeatedly, Tozer mentions the “sweetness,” and even the “piercing sweetness,” of the believer’s experience of the love of Christ. 12 Those who have walked closely with God will certainly have some sense of what he was talking about. Tozer never offered any slick three-, five-, or seven-step program for achieving this spiritual goal. In his mind, there should be no rigid templates or detailed manuals for pursuing God. He believed that “if our hearts keep right,” such things will more or less take care of themselves. Instead, the pivotal issue for him was always the intensity of the seeking Christian’s longing for God. The Christian’s level of desire is the thing upon which everything else turns. And so, Tozer’s personal mission was to inspire and deepen such holy longing in others, and to point them toward the one true source of soul satisfaction. The Pursuit of God focuses primarily on identifying and meeting the preconditions for such satisfying encounter with God. For starters, Tozer explains that it requires an ardent pursuit of God, for he does not give himself to the 11 Tozer once wrote: “The soul’s relation to the Holy Spirit is so highly personal that no third party can understand. The best one can do is to point an inquirer to the Lamb of God and then fade out of the picture. The leap of faith must be made by the seeker, and having made it he can scarcely tell another how he did it.” A. W. Tozer to Catherine Marshall LeSourd, January 25, 1961, Ambrose University Archives. 12 Tozer’s The Christian Book of Mystical Verse (1963) harnesses the poetic descriptors of other mystics to try to convey something of the experience of encounter with God. Typically, Tozer preferred to cite the language of other mystics rather than substitute his own, or attempt to articulate such experiences in his own words.