God as a Person

I just started reading A.W. Tozer's The Pursuit of God again. It's such a profound book that I try to read it through at least once every few years.

I have the book in the van so that I can read bits and pieces when I'm riding while DH is driving. The use of little moments of time like that is turning into quite a useful tool for me. I've been listening to parenting tapes while driving, taking a few minutes here and there while drinking coffee or waiting places to read my Bible, and am currently reading another Tozer book, Men Who Met God, in 2-minute increments while brushing my teeth. If I just have books and tapes in various places where I can easily pick them up and read for a minute or two, I actually get some reading in.

Here are some excerpts from the preface and chapter 1 of The Pursuit of God that say better than I did what I was trying to describe in this post: Pursuing God Himself, without letting non-essentials derail us, and seeing the Bible and doctrine as a way to get to know God and have an active relationship with Him rather than as important for their own sake.

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Tozer says in the preface:

It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving while actually seated at the Father's table. The truth of Wesley's words is established before our eyes: `Orthodoxy, or right opinion, is, at best, a very slender part of religion. Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions,yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is proof of this.' . . .

. . . Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the living God. Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. 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.

And in Chapter 1:

The doctrine of justification by faith--a Biblical truth, and a blessed relief from sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort--has in our time fallen into evil company and been interpreted by many in such manner as actually to bar men from the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be `received' without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is `saved,' but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with little.

. . . We have almost forgotten that God is a Person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can. It is inherent in personality to be able to know other personalities, but full knowledge of one personality by another cannot be achieved in one encounter. It is only after long and loving mental intercourse that the full possibilities of both can be explored.

. . . 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.' (John 17:3) . . . 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.

. . . 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. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the Kingdom of God. It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart's happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead. That is where we begin, I say, but where we stop no man has yet discovered, for there is in the awful and mysterious depths of the Triune God neither limit nor end.