Tozer Pursuit Of God Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Tozer Pursuit Of God. Here they are! All 100 of them:

God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which He must work. Only to know this is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Jesus calls us to his rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshipers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were they to become 'unity' conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His Presence.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
God wants the whole person and He will not rest till He gets us in entirety. No part of the man will do" (101) - "The Pursuit of God
A.W. Tozer
Always, everywhere God is present, and always He seeks to discover Himself to each one
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
You can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
He had everything, but he possessed nothing. There is the spiritual secret.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of Christ.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
The believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and whispers, "God." The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Every man must choose his world.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Millions call themselves by His name, it is true, and pay some token homage to Him, but a simple test will show how little He is really honored among them. Let the average man be put to the proof on the question of who or what is ABOVE, and his true position will be exposed. Let him be forced into making a choice between God and money, between God and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human love, and God will take second place every time. Those other things will be exalted above. However the man may protest, the proof is in the choice he makes day after day throughout his life.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
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.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination, and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, "0 Lord, Thou knowest." Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God's omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing. The word Jesus used means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not something we do, it is what comes to us when we cease to do. His own meekness, that is the rest.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
We now demand glamour and fast-flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals...The tragic results of this spirit all all about us: shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies...the glorification of men, trust is religious externalities....salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such of these are the symptoms of an evil disease.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets `things' with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns `my' and `mine' look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God's gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Question: What is the chief End of Man? Answer: Man's chief End is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
To men and women everywhere Jesus says, "Come unto me, and I will give you rest." The rest He offers is the rest of meekness, the blessed relief which comes when we accept ourselves for what we are and cease to pretend.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
If I understand this correctly Christ taught here the alarming doctrine that the desire for honor among men made belief impossible.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the "poor in spirit.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away." Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Whoever defends himself will have himself for defense, and he will have no other. But let him come defenseless before the Lord and he will have for his defender no less than God Himself.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
We have been snared in the coils of spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him, we need no more seek Him.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they? The hard voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Why do some persons 'find' God in a way that others do not? Why does God manifest His Presence to some and let multitudes of others struggle along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience? Of course the will of God is the same for all. He has no favorites within His household. All He has ever done for any of His children He will do for all of His children. The difference lies not with God but with us.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
What a broad world to roam in, what a sea to swim in is this God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Let us start reading our Bibles with the thought that God means exactly what He says.
A.W. Tozer (My Daily Pursuit: Devotions for Every Day)
Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created personalities to the Creating Personality, God.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
Other before me have gone much father into holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large, it is yet real and it may be those who can light their candle at its flame.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life in regeneration our whole being sense its kinship to God and leaps us in joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the Kingdom of God.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
We need not fear that in seeking God only we may narrow our lives or restrict the motions of our expanding hearts. The opposite is true. We can well afford to make God our All, to concentrate, to sacrifice the many for the One.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
A loving Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
That I may know Him," was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything.
A.W. Tozer (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.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
In making Himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality. He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
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 "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.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular; it is why he does it. The motive is everything. Let a man sanctify the Lord God in his heart and he can thereafter do no common act.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains personally unknown to the individual.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
God's gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God,
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Wherever we turn in the church of God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning, middle and end of everything to us....
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him. They should be recognized for what they are, God's loan to us, and should never be considered in any sense our own. We have no more right to claim credit for special abilities than for blue eyes or strong muscles. "For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive?
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Now, if faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest things possible to do. It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the range of possibility for the weakest and poorest of us.
A.W. Tozer (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. "No man can come to me," said our Lord, "except the Father which hath sent me draw him," and it is by this very prevenient drawing that God takes from us every vestige of credit for the act of coming.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
He is ETERNAL, which means that He antedates time and is wholly independent of it. Time began in Him and will end in Him. To it He pays no tribute and from it He suffers no change. He is IMMUTABLE, which means that He has never changed and can never change in any smallest measure. To change He would need to go from better to worse or from worse to better. He cannot do either, for being perfect He cannot become more perfect, and if He were to become less perfect He would be less than God. He is OMNISCIENT, which means that He knows in one free and effortless act all matter, all spirit, all relationships, all events. He has no past and He has no future. He IS, and none of the limiting and qualifying terms used of creatures can apply to Him.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
If we who follow Christ, with all the facts before us and knowing what we are about, deliberately choose the kingdom of God as our sphere of interest, I see no reason why anyone should object. If we lose by it, the loss is our own; if we gain, we rob no one by so doing.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)
The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. While he looks at Christ the very things he has so long been trying to do will be getting done within him. It will be God working in him to will and to do.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
We must put away all effort to impress, and come with the guileless candor of childhood.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. "Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Being made in His image we have within us the capacity to know Him. In our sins we lack only the power. The moment the Spirit has quickened us to life in regeneration our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
In this hour of all-but-universal darkness one cheering gleam appears: within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself. They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct "interpretations" of truth. They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Lord, make me childlike. Deliver me from the urge to compete with another for place or prestige or position. I would be simple and artless as a little child. Deliver me from pose and pretense. Forgive me for thinking of myself. Help me to forget myself and find my true peace in beholding Thee. That Thou mayest answer this prayer I humble myself before Thee. Lay upon me Thy easy yoke of self-forgetfulness that through it I may find rest. Amen.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Faith is the least self-regarding of the virtues. It is by its very nature scarcely conscious of its own existence. Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus' feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
David's life was a torrent of spiritual desire, and his psalms ring with the cry of the seeker and the glad shout of the finder. Paul confessed the mainspring of his life to be his burning desire after Christ. "That I may know Him," was the goal of his heart, and to this he sacrificed everything. "Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may win Christ.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
God made us for Himself: that is the only explanation that satisfies the heart of a thinking man, whatever his wild reason may say. Should faulty education and perverse reasoning lead a man to conclude otherwise, there is little that any Christian can do for him.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking. Moses used the fact that he knew God as an argument for knowing Him better. "Now, therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight, show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight"; and from there he rose to make the daring request, "I beseech thee, show me thy glory." God was frankly pleased by this display of ardor, and the next day called Moses into the mount, and there in solemn procession made all His glory pass before him.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
All social intercourse between human beings is a response of personality to personality, grading upward from the most casual brush between man and man to the fullest, most intimate communion of which the human soul is capable. Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created personalities to the Creating Personality, God. "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular; it is why he does it. The motive is everything. 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 sacramental and the whole world a sanctuary. His entire life will be a priestly ministration. As he performs his never-so-simple task, he will hear the voice of the seraphim saying, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of the hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Whoever will listen will hear the speaking Heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion. We are at the opposite end of the pole from there. Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God. But we may take heart. To a people caught in the tempest of the last great conflict God says, "Be still, and know that I am God," and still He says it, as if He means to tell us that our strength and safety lie not in noise but in silence.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Let us say it again: The Universal Presence is a fact. God is here. The whole universe is alive with His life. And He is no strange or foreign God, but the familiar Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whose love has for these thousands of years enfolded the sinful race of men. And always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate with us. We have within us the ability to know Him if we will but respond to His overtures. (And this we call pursuing God!) We will know Him in increasing degree as our receptivity becomes more perfect by faith and love and practice.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the "poor in spirit." They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of Jerusalem; that is what the word "poor" as Christ used it actually means. These blessed poor are no longer slaves to the tyranny of things. They have broken the yoke of the oppressor; and this they have done not by fighting but by surrendering. Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. "Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
First, there is the burden of pride. The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest. Continue this fight through the years and the burden will become intolerable. Yet the sons of earth are carrying this burden continually, challenging every word spoken against them, cringing under every criticism, smarting under each fancied slight, tossing sleepless if another is preferred before them. Such a burden as this is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to His rest, and meekness is His method. The meek man cares not at all who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of the world is not worth the effort. He develops toward himself a kindly sense of humor and learns to say, "Oh, so you have been overlooked? They have placed someone else before you? They have whispered that you are pretty small stuff after all? And now you feel hurt because the world is saying about you the very things you have been saying about yourself? Only yesterday you were telling God that you were nothing, a mere worm of the dust. Where is your consistency? Come on, humble yourself, and cease to care what men think.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
In speaking thus I have one fear; it is that I may convince the mind before God can win the heart. For this God-above-all position is one not easy to take. The mind may approve it while not having the consent of the will to put it into effect. While the imagination races ahead to honor God, the will may lag behind and the man never guess how divided his heart is. The whole man must make the decision before the heart can know any real satisfaction. God wants us all, and He will not rest till He gets us all. No part of the man will do.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
If we would rise into that region of light and power plainly beckoning us through the Scriptures of truth we must break the evil habit of ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest from the seen to the unseen. For the great unseen Reality is God. "He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." This is basic in the life of faith. From there we can rise to unlimited heights. "Ye believe in God," said our Lord Jesus Christ, "believe also in me." Without the first there can be no second.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar. The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart. St. Bernard stated this holy paradox in a musical quatrain that will be instantly understood by every worshipping soul: We taste Thee, O Thou Living Bread, And long to feast upon Thee still: We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead And thirst our souls from Thee to fill. Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking. Moses used the fact that he knew God as an argument for knowing Him better. "Now, therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight, show me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in thy sight"; and from there he rose to make the daring request, "I beseech thee, show me thy glory.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
Frankly, I am quite tired of those who tout Christianity as a way to stop smoking or drinking or break wild habits of the world. Is that all Christianity is, to keep us from some bad habit? Of course, regeneration will clean us up, and the new birth will make a man right. If that is what Christianity is all about, what about the person whose life is not that bad? The purpose of God in redemption is to restore us again to the divine imperative of worship. We were created to worship, but sin destroyed that ability. Jesus Christ, on the cross, redeemed us and brought us back to the place where we now can worship and have fellowship with God Almighty. My clean life is a by-product of my conversion. My life may have pointed out to me that I needed a drastic change, but that is not the purpose for which I was converted. The essence of conversion is to bring me into a right relationship with God and have fellowship with Him.
A.W. Tozer (My Daily Pursuit: Devotions for Every Day)
With the veil removed by the rending of Jesus' flesh, with nothing on God's side to prevent us from entering, why do we tarry without? Why do we consent to abide all our days just outside the Holy of Holies and never enter at all to look upon God? We hear the Bridegroom say, `Let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely.' (Song of Sol 2:14) We sense that the call is for us, but still we fail to draw near, and the years pass and we grow old and tired in the outer courts of the tabernacle. What doth hinder us? The answer usually given, simply that we are `cold,' will not explain all the facts. There is something more serious than coldness of heart, something that may be back of that coldness and be the cause of its existence. What is it? What but the presence of a veil in out hearts? A veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us. It is the veil of our fleshly fallen nature living on, unjudged within us, uncrucified and unrepudiated. It is the close- woven veil of the self-life which we have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought to the judgment of the cross. It is not too mysterious, this opaque veil, nor is it hard to identify. We have but to look in our own hearts and we shall see it there, sewn and patched and repaired it may be, but there nevertheless, an enemy to our lives and an effective block to our spiritual progress. This veil is not a beautiful thing and it is not a thing about which we commonly care to talk, but I am addressing the thirsting souls who are determined to follow God, and I know they will not turn back because the way leads temporarily through the blackened hills. The urge of God within them will assure their continuing the pursuit. They will face the facts however unpleasant and endure the cross for the joy set before them. So I am bold to mane the threads out of which this inner veil is woven. It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine)