The Pursuit of God

"We pursue God because, and only because, He has first 

put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit"

 Earlier on in my internship at YWAM Ozarks, I read a book by Timothy Keller called "The Reason For God," which got in depth on the secular mind set of Christianity. This book includes questions and philosophies people have about Christianity, the doubts and insecurities that it brings, and starts picking them apart. Keller was able to really make me start seeing the soft foundation in which many of my own personal doubts stood. I in fact started doubting my own doubts. That book has given me so many tools to, one, defend my faith, from others and even from myself, and two, the ability to answer questions people have and to really portray Christianity in a proper way that secular people can relate to. So after reading this book by Keller, since I knew the tools to defend my faith, I really wanted to pursue the Lord further. So I picked this book.

In A.W. Tozer's book "The Pursuit of God," Tozer embellishes on the human thirst for the divine. He dives down into ideas and concepts many christians rather ignore and provides, in my belief, many hard truths necessary to fully follow hard after God. Now this book is full of knowledge and nuggets that people could chew on for months, so I'm not about to give a full length essay on this book in its entirety, but I would like to express how this book has affected me personally and some truths that have really inspired me.

1.    Tozer promotes this Law called prevenient grace simply meaning the quote which is at the top of this page. This idea that God must have pursued man before man even urged to pursue him back is so simple yet so elegant because this reeks of Gods infatuation with us. Even before we had the desire, the want, the enlightenment to even know of God, the Lord pursued us! I would rather not explain the implications of this, but chew on that idea for just a little bit.. This is Love. 
2.    " I want to Pursue God and....." Now imagine this sentence without 'and'. What if it was this sentence, exactly the way it is now with 'and' included, that has prevented so many of us from the full revelation of God? The full essence of God, a full revelation of Him, comes fully by pursuing him and that is it. Not his gifts, not what he has planned next for your life, not anything but him. Now at first thought, whether or not 'and' is included in this sentence doesnt seem imperative but when you actually start looking at the implications of both sentences with and without 'and', the meaning differs almost completely. Consider the pursuing of God with something else and now your are implying that God is as equal to whatever follows the word 'and'. You are saying that something is a valuable as God himself, instead of saying that your pursuit of God alone is what is most important. This was revelational to me because this emphasizes the intimacy God calls us to partake with him. 
3.    "God is real. He is real in the absolute and final sense that nothing else is." This quote shattered my thought process. This means that everything in our reality as we know it, is contingent upon his. God  is the ultimate reality. Yet we habitually think of the visible world as reality and doubt the reality of any other, yet we can rest assure that the spiritual realm is as perceivable and even tangible as the reality we live in today. But since we live by our senses, they have come to cloud and veil our vision to Gods Kingdom around us. As Tozer puts it, "The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible, the temporal, of the eternal." We need to understand the object of our Christian faith is the unseen realm. We need to put to light our bad thought habits and realize Gods spiritual realm is real and accept it.  Now being a Christian for awhile, this idea commonly has the response of  "well of course" or "absolutely" but are we really living as if it were? Are we operating in it as much as we are operating in the physical realm we see, smell, feel and hear? 

Now Tozer goes on to explain in much more detail the ectasy of pursuing God and the far reaches in which you potentially can go. Tozer also explains the amount of sacrifice and pain that devout following often requires but in the end you gain life, true life. Anyone that is seeking to know Gods presence, what it really means to pursue God, this book accurately paints the beautiful picture of what it looks, feels, sounds and in some ways, tastes like. 

Remember this:

"If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." (Matthew 16:24-25)