Book Review: The Pursuit Of God by A W Tozer

This was my first foray into any of Tozer's writings, but it won't be my last. I want to say to all my ministry friends you ought to read this. It is fantastic and challenging. His style is very forthright and sincere that as I read it I was constantly evaluating my own beliefs on the subject. There were probably a place or two that we disagreed but what a prolific approach to the pursuit of God.

Here are thoughts I marked as I read:

• "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."
• "Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended."
• " We must ascend [toward God] a step at a time. If we refuse one step, we bring our progress to an end."
• "It [the veil that separates men and God] 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. To be specific, the self-sins are self-righteousness, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of other like them."
• "The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible, the temporal, of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam's tragic race."
• "Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew."
• "God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is, by His nature, continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking voice."
• "The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends upon our hearing and we have trained our ears not to hear."
• "What then is genius? Could it be that a genius is a man haunted by the speaking Voice, laboring and striving like one possessed to achieve ends which he only vaguely understands?"
• "Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified."
• "In himself, nothing; in God, everything...He will be patient to wait for the day when everything will get its own price tag and real worth will come into its own."

Not a bad harvest of thoughts from a 90 page book. This book is great for devotional reading.

--Ben