I’ve recently been re-reading AW Tozer’s short book, ‘The Pursuit of God’. It’s very challenging! He’s particularly scathing about the way modern churches have lost their sense of hunger for God.
“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 encouraged to be content with little.”
Tozer’s point is that many of us have settled for something less than the full Christian life. We think of the process of becoming a Christian as simply ‘praying the prayer’ and agreeing that Jesus is Lord. But something profound is missing. We’ve lost our sense of hunger for God. We’ve lost sight of the fact that God must be pursued.
I think of a number of folks who’ve come to faith in Christ at Grace London. Each of them didn’t just come to a few Sunday services or Salt events. Coming to faith required them to actively seek Christ. To immerse themselves in the gospels. To find Christians and speak with them at length. The search for Christ became the dominating impulse of their lives. For every person who I’ve seen come to faith (and subsequently grow), there’s been a strong sense of them actively pursuing Christ.
And yet the same is true for the believer. We pursued God and found him, but the paradox of the Christian life is we continue to pursue him. We’re satisfied by him. And yet we return to him, day after day, as the only one who can truly satisfy our souls. Too often our prayer lives are simply passively calling to mind God’s promises. Instead, I’m convinced God wants to grow our hunger and thirst for Christ, that we might become a people who experience the deep comfort of knowing that they are his, but are constantly calling out to God for more.
Some of you may be wondering what you should do to grow this sense of hunger for God. Here are three ideas from Tozer:
“Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God”. I’d particularly recommend John Newton’s letters. They convey a deep sense of his humility and a felt need for God. John Piper also has a fantastic range of Christian biographies.
Prayerfully read the psalms. The psalms so often capture both a strong sense of deep need for God and the sweetness of being satisfied by his love.
Pray. This desire for God is actually God’s work in our lives. Cry out to him for this sense of deep longing and desperate need for him.