Book Report #4: AW Tozer - "The Pursuit of God"
Oy vey. Chapter #4 - “Apprehending God” is challenging. I stopped highlighting after a while, because the whole chapter would have been lime green.
The question is: How do you know God? The easy answer is, “The Bible!” But for most of us, that’s a tall order. There must be personal experience too, and how does that happen? I’m glad you asked.
CHAPTER FOUR: Apprehending God
This chapter talks a lot about seeing God as a real person. He’s not a concept: he’s a real, living person, more real than we are, since he’s the origin of the universe.
[Most people] go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle….Always a living Person is present, speaking,pleading,loving, working and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation.
Tozer says that the reason we don’t have the ability to enjoy the habitual conscious communion with God is our chronic unbelief. It is very hard to believe in and commune with someone we can’t see or feel.
God is real. He is real in the absolute and final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon His.
Our uncorrected thinking, influenced by the blinding of our natural hearts and the intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a contrast between the spiritual and the real; but actually no contrast exists….We must shift our interest from the seen to the unseen. For the great unseen Reality is God.
So the spiritual world is just as real as our physical world, and to deny that is to deny the reality of God. There are those who would do that, but at the root of the Christian life lies a belief in the invisible. We may seem like naive kooks believing in something — or someone — we can’t seen or feel, but that belief is every bit as real as a tree or a piece of bread.
But we must avoid the common fault of pushing the “other world” into the future. It is not future, but present. It parallels our familiar physical world, and the doors between the two worlds are open.
I think a lot of people — myself included — are guilty of thinking that the spirit world is something that we can experience after death, when it is as real right now as it ever will be. Tozer points that out beautifully in this chapter.
On to the next chapter: The Universal Presence!
