Thoughts about Tozer's "The Pursuit of God"

“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,” states A.W. Tozer in his Pursuit of God. Wow. So profound a statement, and yet so simple and true. This remind me of how the Pharisees knew the legalism of the law so well and yet missed out on knowing who Jesus really is. I pray to know my Bible well, but more importantly to encounter its Author in an amazing love relationship.

Later, Tozer notes that “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.” I pray that this may never again be truly said of me. Rather, I pray that it be said of me that I have tasted of the Lord and seen that He is good, but one taste is not enough to satisfy me. I want to taste again and again. I want to taste Him in His entirety. I hardly know my God, and I desire to ardently desire to know more of Him.

“If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world?” questions Tozer. Why does not the whole world understand and respect this fact. Why is so much of the world in such terrible darkness with no light shed on the presence of God all around them? In Genesis 28: 16 Jacob says, “Surely the Lord was in this place; and I knew it not.” God is there whether we entirely realize it or not.

Tozer continues: “Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew. The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same. There can be one without the other. God is here when we are wholly unaware of His presence. On our part, there must be surrender to the Spirit of God, for His work is to show us the Father and the Son. If we cooperate with Him in loving obedience, God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face. Always, everywhere God seeks to discover Himself to each one.” I like this notion of God desiring to “discover Himself” to us. Jeremiah 29:13 says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all of your heart.” Matthew 7:7 says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” If Tozer’s notion that God desires to “discover Himself” to us is true, then it takes so much pressure off of us and our seeking. We’re sinful human beings whose blundering attempts at seeking after God so often fall incredibly short. What a comfort to know that God is seeking us out as we seek Him out wholeheartedly!

Tozer has some insightful ideas about God speaking, too. “Every one of us,” he says, “has had experience which we have not been able to explain—a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick flash an assurance that we are from another world, that our origins are divine.” Upon reading that, I was immediately inclined to think of moments such as these that I’ve experienced at Lake Forest Ranch, or at God’s Green Acres (my parents’ farm). Even at school or at home or on the beach I have had such moments. Such moments are incredibly unexplainable, but they are moments when you can’t help but know that God is making His presence known to you in some unspeakable but reassuring way.

Philippians 3:20-21 says, “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” I think that when Paul wrote those words, he’d had done of those moments Tozer is talking about, and he knew without a doubt that it was a sure sign that he was not meant for this word.

A contemporary artist, “Between the Trees” has a song entitled “Scarecrow” that I think expresses similar sentiments. The lyrics to the song go as follows: “It ain’t so bad/just try and fit in this hollow mat/’cause you’ve traveled so far from where it all began…./ I think I took the wrong path/and I need to find my way back./ They say you’re never too far/ to start it all again,/ am I too far?” And the chorus: “Maybe I wasn’t made for this world./ All the space in between/ the soul and the seams./ Maybe I wasn’t made for this world.”

Tozer goes on later in his book to talk about the Bible as God’s speaking, living Word. “The Bible,” he says, “will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that they should accept the Bible as the Word of God, and they try to think of it as such, but they find it impossible to believe that the words on the page are actually for them…Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood…The facts are that God is not silent, never has been silent. It is the nature of God to speak…[the Bible] is not only a book which was once spoken, but a book which is now speaking.” His statement certainly rings true. I so often find myself reading the Bible not as if God is speaking to me as I ready it, but as just another textbook among many others I must read. I feel like He’s silent, but, truly, I just have forgotten how to listen and hear Him speak…or perhaps I never knew how. So many people today pick and choose which parts of the Bible are relevant to them, especially relating to current events and social issues. If it’s convenient, then it’s God’s voice to them. If it’s not, then God spoke it thousand of years ago and it no longer applies to them.

A final Tozer quote that I will include is this word of caution: “Let no one imagine that he will lose anything of human dignity by this voluntary sell-out of his all to his God. He does not by this degrade himself as a man; rather he find his right place of high honor as one made in the image of His Creator. His deep disgrace lay in his moral derangement, his unnatural usurpation of the place of God. His honor will be proved by restoring again that stolen throne. In exalting God over all he fins his own highest honor upheld…The man of God set his heart to exalt God above all; God accepted his intention as fact and acted accordingly. Not perfection, but holy intention made the difference.” This notion that God considers our holy intentions to be fact is quite interesting to me. I’m not sure yet what I think about it. If it’s true that intentions matter most to God, then this notion could upturn and revolutionize my life. It could help me forgive myself and others for past mistakes and injuries. I could move on in a greater sense of new life and peace, further grasping my role as my Father’s treasured possession.

Seaworthy

“Wasn’t that a nice eulogy?” asked the woman in front of Lucy. To tell the truth, Lucy had no idea what the woman had said. The sound of the twelve-gun salute had made her cringe as though the bullets were entering her own body, and then her mind became a whirlwind of thoughts, her ears numb to anything but the voice of her own thoughts. “His words were comforting, although he didn’t pay your father enough tribute. He was a fine man, that Lieutenant Brewer,” the woman continued, patting her on the shoulder before moving along. Lucy stayed rooted to the spot by her father’s grave until the last mourner departed and the gravediggers had covered his coffin. No matter how long she stared at the inscription on the tombstone, tears wouldn’t come to her eyes, as if they were frozen in their ducts.

Immobilized, Lucy wondered what she would do now. She had no other family left. Her mother died in a car accident when Lucy was barely a year old. Because her father channeled his bitter anger into becoming the best naval officer he could possibly be, Lucy’s grandparents were left to raise her, and so she grew up beside the sea in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. Although the Navy offered him extended leaves of absence on several occasions because of his dedication, Lieutenant Brewer was always eager to return to sea. For a long time Lucy assumed he didn’t want to see her, but as she grew older she realized he simply couldn’t visit her for long without remembering her mother. Escaping to sea became his means of coping with a grief he never fully relinquished.

Now, at age twenty-two, Lucy Brewer had graduated from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington with a degree in English Education and returned to Atlantic Beach to teach English at East Carteret County High School. As Lucy sucked in a deep breath of crisp October air, she realized this ache in her heart probably wasn’t going to go away. She was too much like her father for that. Not only did her sun-bleached blond hair, olive complexion, and intense brown eyes match her father’s, but their nearly identical personalities would undoubtedly drag out her grieving process, preventing her from leaving the seaside to begin a new phase of life.

Lucy’s insides roiled with a mixture of bitterness and hurt as she contemplated her relationship with her father. Although she knew he was proud of her, Lieutenant Brewer had missed her graduation five months earlier. She’d searched the crowded rows for his familiar face, but it never appeared. He’d said his ship would return in time, but of course, it hadn’t. He’d pulled the same no-show stunt at her high school graduation as well. She was the only graduate there with no parents in attendance. He meant well, but the Navy was his first priority—it was his family now. When Lucy’s grandmother died during her freshman year of college, he’d barely made it ashore in time for the funeral. He’d missed her grandfather’s altogether when he’d suddenly passed six months after his wife— undoubtedly from a broken heart. Her father was considerate though—she’d give him that. Once her grandparents had passed away, with the money he’d saved after his fifth eighteen-month tour at some obscure location at sea, wired her the money she’d used to redo the cottage she’d grown up in— the one she now lived in alone.

The day after the funeral life returned to routine. Every day Lucy walked up and down the beach, scanning the horizon for ships, breathing in the salt air. Her golden retriever, Isabel, always followed her faithfully, and chased birds up and down the beach. Yesterday, she’d somehow embedded a large prickly pear in her paw, so today Lucy had left her at the cottage to allow the injury time to heal free from sand. As Lucy raised her hand to shield her eyes from the sun, she drew in a quick breath, mesmerized by the emerald ocean that glinted with a thousand diamonds as the sunlight hit its surface. While she watched, a tiny seagull dove in to the gentle waves and came up with a small fish squirming in its beak. A sand piper ran through the shallows and sinky sand, not five feet from where she stood, poking and jabbing at sand fiddlers that burrowed desperately into the golden sand to escape the ice pick beak.

Not a cloud dotted the deepest blue October sky that faded in color as it blended into the horizon. Just on the edge of the horizon, right where it seemed the sea might fall away over some distant waterfall, lay a large vessel. Lucy strained to see it better. It certainly wasn’t a cruise ship, and it seemed too large to be either one of the shrimp boats or Coast Guard patrol boats that frequented the shoreline of the island. Could it be a cargo freighter, or perhaps a Navy warship like the one aboard which her father had spent the majority of his days.

Something jabbed at the bottom of Lucy’s foot, causing her to shift her weight and move to see what was causing her pain. As she bent down to get a closer look, she lifted a spiraled piece of a conk shell out of the sand. A sad smile played across her lips. Lieutenant Michael Brewer had given Lucy a beautiful, whole pearly white conk shell laced with rose on the inside when she turned seven years old. “Lucy,” he told her, “I want you to keep this conk shell beside your bed, and every night lift it to your ear before you go to sleep. Then, you will always be able to hear the sound of the ocean wherever you are. Just as I am out at sea, you will feel closer to your Daddy, sweetheart.”

Every night for eighteen months Lucy did just as her daddy asked: she listened to the sounds of the sea in her precious conk shell and whispered a fervent prayer, “Please God, bring my daddy home safe from the ocean. I miss him so much. Please, God.” Finally, Lieutenant Brewer’s ship returned and Lucy and her mother were reunited to him.

“Daddy,” Lucy said, tugging on Lieutenant Brewer’s sleeve a few days after he returned to port, “When will you have to leave us again and go back to the ocean?”

“Not for a whole year, sweetheart!” he said, lifting her high above his head, his hands beneath her armpits. “Daddy gets a whole year to spend with just you!”

Shivering when a particularly cool finger of autumn breeze wrapped itself around her, Lucy glanced at her watch and realized that if she didn’t hurry, she’d be late for her first class of the day. Taking one last longing glance at the surf, Lucy jogged back to her cottage, promising herself she’d go for a swim later that afternoon. One of the greatest things about the Atlantic Ocean was the way water held its summer heat far into the fall, even after the air had grown cold.

Later, as Lucy dove into the surf and fought the waves until she had swam out past the breakers, she paused to tread water as memories flitted like butterflies through her mind. Every time Lieutenant Brewer was furloughed, he spent as much time as possible with Lucy. She remembered how he’d taught her to swim despite her unearthly fear of the sea.

“The ocean is your friend, Lucy,” he’d said, “and there’s no reason you should be afraid of her; only, you must be careful never to trust her because she may change moods in an instant. Learn to know her moods, and you’ll never see trouble on the sea.”

Walking down the beach, hand-in-hand, he’d shown her how to spot a riptide forming and told her how to escape its pull should she ever be caught in one’s grasp.

One day, he’d taken her hand and asked, “Do you trust me, Lucy?”

“Of course I do, Daddy!” she’d replied.

“Okay. Well, we’re doing to get ourselves caught in the undertow of a rip current so you can experience it and know how to save yourself.”

She’d reluctantly followed him into the surf in the receding current between two sand bars. Soon they were being swept out to sea. For nearly half an hour they’d swam parallel to the beach until Lucy was sure she’d drown from fatigue. Just as she was ready to submit to the ocean’s embrace, she felt the tide release its grasp and relinquish its outward tug on them. Stopping momentarily, Lucy screamed to her father as she tread water, “Daddy, Daddy! We did it! We’re out of the riptide!”

“I know, sweetheart!” he said, hi-fiving her. “I knew we would!”

When they’d finally reached the shore and lay panting in the hot sand, it was then Lucy understood the alluring friendship her father shared with his beloved ocean.

After she finished her swim and returned to her cottage for a hot shower, she walked the three blocks to her father’s favorite diner, which he frequented whenever he was home. Although she carried a stack of her student’s papers to grade, she knew she probably wouldn’t get around to them. She went to the diner to feel closer to her father. As she sat in his favorite booth sipping coffee, a Naval officer came in and looked around the room as if in search of someone. When his eyes landed on her, a faint look of recognition crossed his face, and he moved towards her.

“Miss Brewer?” he asked.

“Yes?” she replied.

“Someone told me I might find you here,” he said with a smile. “Excuse me, I’m Lieutenant-Commander Daniel O’Brien, Lieutenant Brewer’s Commanding Officer. It seems that no one has delivered your father’s personal affects to you.”

“No,” Lucy said, “I haven’t received anything yet.”

“Well, here they are,” O’Brien said, handing her a small camouflaged duffel bag. “Miss Brewer, your father was an honorable man. Truth be told, he probably should’ve been my CO. He loved the sea dearly, and he served his country well.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant-Commander,” Lucy said. “I appreciate your condolences.”

“I’ll leave you alone now Miss Brewer, but I want you to know that your father really loved you. He spoke of you often, and well, he carried a worn picture of you with him at all times that he showed off to all his comrades whether they cared to see it or not. He said you would know the ocean better than he one day,” said O’Brien with a crisp salute, and then he left the diner.