I’ve been reading The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer as part of a class I’m taking, and every so often I come across a passage that feels like someone has reached into my heart, taken something I’ve barely understood, and spoken it back with clarity and weight. Usually, I try to write my own devotionals, but in chapter five of the book, several paragraphs expressed something that I’ve carried for years but have never been skilled enough to articulate. The longing Tozer describes, the ache for a deeper awareness of God and the dissatisfaction with shallow spiritual habits, matches something I’ve felt for a long time but have struggled to name. When I read his words, it was as if someone switched on a light in a room I had never fully entered, and that experience stirred me enough that I wanted to share the section exactly as it appears.
Tozer – The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. 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. 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.
For this great sickness that is upon us no one person is responsible, and no Christian is wholly free from blame. We have all contributed, directly or indirectly, to this sad state of affairs. We have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another’s notions, copied one another’s lives and made one another’s experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed.
It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to Biblical ways. But it can be done. Every now and then in the past Christians have had to do it. History has recorded several large-scale returns led by such men as St. Francis, Martin Luther and George Fox. Unfortunately there seems to be no Luther or Fox on the horizon at present. Whether or not another such return may be expected before the coming of Christ is a question upon which Christians are not fully agreed, but that is not of too great importance to us now.
What God in His sovereignty may yet do on a world-scale I do not claim to know: but what He will do for the plain man or woman who seeks His face I believe I do know and can tell others. Let any man turn to God in earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness, let him seek to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days.
Any man who by repentance and a sincere return to God will break himself out of the mold in which he has been held, and will go to the Bible itself for his spiritual standards, will be delighted with what he finds there.
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.
O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ’s sake, Amen.”
Reading Tozer’s words left me both encouraged and troubled because he puts language to a spiritual condition that feels just as real today as it did in 1948. The distance he describes between a life that seeks God with depth and a life that approaches God like a transaction is something I have felt in my own walk. There are days when my prayer feels like just another item on a checklist, and days when my study of scripture becomes a quick task instead of an invitation into a deeper relationship. When I read his description of machine-age Christianity, with its habit of rushing through devotions and hoping something external will fill the emptiness we carry, it resonated deeply because I have lived that pattern more times than I care to admit.
What strikes me most is how Tozer identifies a sickness without aiming blame at a single person. Instead, he helps us see that the spiritual anemia he describes is something we have all contributed to in small ways and probably without meaning to. The pull of convenience shapes our habits, the urge to fit in shapes our expectations of what the Christian life should look like, and the fear of being different keeps us from seeking God with the seriousness that scripture calls us to. That combination forms a subtle downward drift that most people never notice until they wake up and realize they have been living on spiritual fumes. When Tozer says we have accepted one another’s notions and copied one another’s lives, it feels like a mirror held up to the modern church and to my own practices.
His remedy is simple in theory and difficult in practice. We must wrench ourselves loose from the spirit of the age and return to biblical ways, which sounds noble, but requires a kind of determination that does not come naturally to tired believers. Yet he reminds us that Christians throughout history have done exactly this when the moment required it, and the fact that such renewal has happened before should give us the courage to believe it can happen again. Even if there is no Luther or Francis on the horizon, Tozer points us away from the need for a heroic figure and back to the reality that God works in the heart of any man or woman who seeks him in earnest. It is not the scale of the movement that matters, but the sincerity of the seeker.
The promise he offers is both humbling and hopeful. If a believer turns to God, exercises the soul toward godliness, and cultivates a deeper receptivity to the Spirit through trust and obedience and humility, then the results will exceed anything that believer thought possible. That promise reminds me that spiritual growth is not a matter of talent or personality but of appetite and openness. Anyone can know God more deeply if they are willing to break free from the mold that has shaped their expectations and return to Scripture as their standard. In that sense, Tozer is not scolding the church as much as he is inviting Christians to rediscover what they were made for.
The passage ends with a truth that brings both conviction and comfort. God is here, and the entire universe is alive with his presence, yet our senses have grown dull. He has been trying to get our attention, not with spectacle but with steady love, and most of the time we miss it because our eyes are fixed on lesser things. That closing prayer could easily be my own because I know what it feels like to be preoccupied with visible things and to be blind to the presence of God who surrounds and sustains me. The request for opened eyes is not a request for a sign but a request for restored perception, the ability to see the God who has been here the entire time.
When I step back and consider the chapter as a whole, I feel a renewed desire to stop treating my relationship with God as something mechanical and instead cultivate it with intention and patience. I want to resist the pull of a hurried spirituality that leaves no room for depth and choose instead to be formed slowly by the presence of God. And I want to take Tozer’s promise seriously, believing that if I seek God with earnestness, he will increase my ability to receive him and know him in ways that deepen my faith. Ultimately, this chapter is not merely a critique of the modern Christian experience, but an invitation to rediscover a life that is full, receptive, and attuned to the God who is always near.