Pursuit of God Review free essay sample

If the â€Å"Roman’s Road† through Paul’s epistle can be described as a path to salvation, then A. W. Tozer’s book, â€Å"The Pursuit of God† could be described as a culmination of Biblical wisdom as to what to do with one’s salvation once he receives it. Now, to be sure, this book is not Gospel, but in much the same way as the Bible was written, the Holy Spirit has surely spoken through it into the lives of many readers because of the Christ-driven, knee-bent, God-fearing heart of Tozer himself. The Pursuit of God takes the reader on a journey through the truths of Scripture, lovingly correcting and helping us align our will with God while leaving no remorse for sin or misguidance in the congregate church or in its individual members. Tozer’s audience is the modern church. He, from personal experience, grew up in it and saw the ways that it differed from what the Bible teaches. We will write a custom essay sample on Pursuit of God Review or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Through his book, he sought to correct those errors and drive the church back to the whole-hearted love of God that he grew to enjoy himself. In his authentically humble way, he stated his mission for writing this book himself. â€Å"Nothing here is new except in which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame. †1 â€Å"Tozer literally wrote The Pursuit of God on his knees. Perhaps that explains its power and the blessing that has rested on it. He was a man who had foregone formal education by reason of humble beginnings, yet his life seemed to have been submitted humbly to sitting at the feet of his Savior by meditating on His precepts. From a small town in western Pennsylvania, Tozer came to Christ at seventeen and served Him ever since. Beginning with witnessing to those around him, he delved deeper and deeper into the Holy Scriptures, and judging by the fruit of his labor, rightly divided the Word of God. He ended up settling at a church in southern Chicago when he finally published this book at fifty-one years old. It was not until then, however, that he received the respect of the Christian community that he currently has to this day. Beginning with the basics, Tozer starts his first chapter off assuring the reader that it is not of ourselves that we have the desire to know God. Even the desire to be better is not something that we can call our own! Truly, then, it is â€Å"By grace (we) have been saved through faith, and that not of (ourselves); it is the gift of God†. 3 We can therefore claim no glory to be our own, for all belongs to our Christ who saved us from our sin. He then gets into the heart of the chapter and the very first point he makes; that the Christian needs to follow hard after God. â€Å"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 â€Å"accepting† Christ. †4 As the reader continues to be blown away by his pragmatic grasp of the Christian experience in America, he wastes no time moving fluidly from point to point. At the end of chapter one, he points out that the man who follows hard after God will make Him his treasure and that man will have need of nothing else. Chapter two then describes that man and what his life looks like because of that point. He explains that each of us have a need for God and that our tendency is to replace God with more tangible things; the things of this world. But there is blessing in having nothing. â€Å"Everything is safe, which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed. †5 The wonder about committing things to Him is not that we necessarily will be allowed to keep them, it is that we will no longer miss them if we are not so permitted. It is a freeing act that will bless us eternally if we can only learn to let loose our grasp on this world. Logically proceeding, Tozer indicates that we are to remove the veil of this life, world, flesh, etc. so that we can more clearly see Christ and the reality that lives, currently and eternally, beyond and throughout ours. It being reasonable to accept that because we were made in the image of God, we were made to glorify Him, we should do so with abundant joy and the recognition of our great privilege. It is then of the highest importance that we tear through the veil of our flesh, aptly ripping blood and sinew and bone (metaphorically of course, but he speaks of the likened pain that this act will cause) so we can adequately apprehend God. We will then see evidence of His presence in us, around us, besides us: we can never escape God. â€Å"If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. †6 He is truly everywhere at o nce, omnipotent and omnipresent, all knowing and holy. If universe can be broken down to mean single (uni-) spoken sentence (verse), then we know that God’s word lives and is living. In fact, â€Å"The application of the term to the eternal Son leads us to believe that self-expression is inherent in the Godhead, that God is forever seeking to speak Himself out to His creation. †7 God’s voice permeated creation from the very moment He spoke it into existence, and it never left. It still speaks and is speaking through everything. He not only spoke through the Bible, but the Bible is â€Å"the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech†! Where is our faith? The next point is surmised from the acceptance of God’s work in our lives from the very beginning, speaking to us, living in us. That still small Voice urging us to hear while giving us the ability to refuse Him. â€Å"We learn that faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God. †9 When God made the heavens and the earth, He said it was good. When man sinned, that relationship was torn and we fell out of good graces with God. Faith is the avenue by which God gives us to willingly return to Him so that His fellowship with us can return. Thus, we need to continue in faith to restore our relationship with God. If all else were for not, restoring our relationship with the God of the universe should be enough, but His blessings go deeper still and a relationship with Him is so much more. God offers us rest in this life. Though the natural corruption of man incites attitudes that are directly controversial to the Jesus’s teaching of the Beatitudes10, if we accept His teachings and nurture in our lives the meekness He speaks of in the gospel of Matthew, we will begin to experience God’s kingdom manifested in this life. No longer should we see through the corrupt lenses of this world into the kingdom of God, but we are to see through the pure and perfect eyes of God into the kingdom of man. Keeping a heavenly-sighted mind as described earlier in the book, we can now unify God’s precepts with temporal responsibilities to manifest God’s peace and rest in our life on earth. Finally, Tozer concludes, â€Å"Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act. All he does is good and acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For such a man, living itself will be a priestly ministration. Through the same masterful literary prowess that he taught himself through years of devout study, Tozer hammers into the hearts of his readers the keynote of each chapter. He elegantly navigates natural avenues of thought while hitting key points in sequence, tracing logic of the Bible to arrive at the ultimate destination of the heart of a true believer of Christ. Along the way, he checks the hearts of those who assume themselves to fall into that category, strengthening their faith and their walk with Christ and allowing the Holy Spirit to flow through our lives and cleanse our souls. This book is truly a refreshing spring in a vast desert of traditional Biblical orthodoxy. Any negative evaluations of the text that I have personally seen would surely not have been warranted in the day it was written. Although the vocabulary used was slightly higher than the modern norm of Christian non-fiction, Tozer presented his insights in a surprisingly pragmatic way. Testing his words against the backdrop of a lifetime spent in the church and a decade spent reading the Scriptures on my own leaves me without argument to his discernment of the text. Even the solitary questionable opinion that he mentioned in the book was so stated. Overall, to ask for three weaknesses would be to render undue criticism to an otherwise impeccable rendition of the human spirit’s need for God. PERSONAL APPLICATION As I write this paper I find it difficult to put into words just how priceless the lesson that Tozer provides through this book is. However difficult it was to write a term paper in the midst of an already hectic life, I know that I will keep this book and read it again and again. There are seemingly endless applications that I can derive from this book beginning, no less, in the very foreword that describes Tozer himself. It is no coincidence that his words were as powerful as they are and the lessons so meaningful. As stated before, Tozer wrote this book literally on his knees. This is a priceless picture of just what it takes to be a great disciple of Jesus. I want to be such a disciple. To be so enthralled by God that the rest of the world fades away is as close as we can get to Heaven on this earth. I find myself at the very beginning of the path that Tozer lays out for us. He writes in the first chapter, â€Å"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. †12 Humility is the key to a life in the servant hood of God. Neither can He use us or shape us if we first do not come before Him in surrender of our will and our way. God my will is Yours, my path is Yours to direct. Should I stumble I pray that You would pick me up and draw me ever close to You. How can I live in this world without You? God indwell in me and make me Yours. I surrender all of me to You. Make me more like You and less like me. Thank You for the faith that You have given me. Yours is the kingdom forever and ever. Amen.