Tozer Made Easy - Part 6 of 10

by Dan Grubbs

The Pursuit of God - Chapter Six: The Speaking Voice

In this sublime chapter, Tozer arrests our attention on the reason why we often find it difficult to find God when we pursue him. We don’t realize that God will manifest Himself by speaking His will. If we’re to pursue God, we had better listen to what He says.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The depth and breadth of John 1:1, its cosmic complexity, is at the heart of what Tozer is teaching in this chapter. It is God’s word in the universe, His creating voice, that we seek. The author writes, “God’s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God’s word in the universe.” The voice of God is not limited to ink and paper but is inseparable from God — “... and the Word was God.”

The objective then, for those who honestly pursue God, is to listen as they seek. At no time does Tozer discount the scriptures. On the contrary, God uses the Bible to reveal Himself as the “inevitable outcome” of His voice. Yet, our author writes that God did not send us a book by messenger to be read by unaided minds. “He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to persist across the years.”

God spoke and creation was. This voice has been speaking since and God wants us to find the same voice of creation that is speaking to each one of us today. Just think of having communion with the same voice that spoke the universe into existence. It is what He wants for us. “The order and life of the world depends upon that voice, but men are mostly too busy or too stubborn to give attention.” This is a quote more than 40-years old. Wasn’t life simpler then? Aren’t we more busy today than when Tozer was writing. I’m guessing that God sees us as just as neglectful at spending time with Him today as in the years of wilderness wandering.

Listening is not popular. We have fallen into a cult of busyness and even let ‘church work’ get in the way of listening to the creating voice. God directs us in the scriptures to be still as if to “tell us that our strength and safety lie not in noise but in silence.”

Being still and quiet requires solitude, preferably with our Bibles open. According to Tozer, it’s then we draw near to God in stillness and often hear Him speak to our hearts.

Never forget that God is spirit and seeks those who connect with Him in spirit. That spirit can walk in Presence with us as in the garden and illuminate the Bible for us. With dedication to being still, God’s voice will become an “intelligible word, warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear friend.” It is Tozer’s belief that a fresh existence, “a new world will arise ... when we approach our Bible with the idea that it is not only a book which was once spoken, but a book which is now speaking.”

Tozer admits that some, even those in pulpits, believe that God was once in a speaking period and that time has passed. This is not the truth. The fact is that God is “not silent, has never been silent” because it is in His nature to speak. In fact, the second Person of the Trinity is called the Word.

A very picturesque quote from the author paints a picture of God’s word in the universe. “The universal Voice of God was by the ancient Hebrews often called Wisdom, and was said to be everywhere sounding and searching throughout the earth, seeking some response from the sons of men.”

Are we waiting for some word from God? According to Tozer, if you’re not hearing God, you’re not listening. He goes on to explain that the “Voice is a friendly voice. No one need fear to listen to it unless he has already made up his mind to resist it.”

Tozer goes so far as to discuss his belief that we often hear the Voice and not recognize it as God’s. Sometimes we have a sudden feeling of wonder or awe or realize our universal smallness. Or we experience a “fleeting visitation of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick flash an assurance that we are from another world. We were forced to suspend our acquired doubts while, for a moment, the clouds were rolled back and we saw and heard for ourselves ... the Presence of God in the world and His persistent effort to communicate with mankind.”

Finally, of the words of the Bible, Tozer encourages us to approach them with the same reverence that we do the eternal, omnipotent, omniscient God. He concludes, “If [we] would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to [us]. Do not come with the notion that it is a thing which [we] may push around at [our] convenience. It is more than a thing, it is a voice, a word, the very Word of the living God.”

Tozer Made Easy - Part 4 of 10

by Dan Grubbs

The Pursuit of God: Chapter Four - Apprehending God

It’s clear from this chapter why some who read Tozer’s works call him a mystic — in the true and Christian sense of the word. For he has delved into and helped us understand the mystical elements of our relationship with God. It is apparent that he has experienced a close and profound connection with God and explains how that is available for every human in this fourth chapter.

As he has already demonstrated in the first three chapters, Tozer helps us understand a close personal relationship with the Creator of the universe is possible, and in fact, the Creator desires this. But, man fails to detect God and sense Him in a profound and spiritual way. Many acknowledge God’s existence, but “He remains personally unknown to the individual.” While man mostly admits God is somewhere, many do not believe in Him as knowable as we come to know our friends and loved ones or even our possessions.

Tozer does not leave this with the secular. He points out that many who claim Christ as Savior “go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.”

The scriptural doctrine, however, points out that God is waiting to be known by man in a real and a personal experience. Tozer writes about God, “Always a living Person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestations.”

Tozer teaches that the words of the Bible assume a “self-evident fact that men can know God” with the same veracity and tangibility as any person or object that our senses detect.

How do we apprehend God?

The first thing to understand, according to Tozer, is that we are just as equipped to sense God as we are to sense the physical world. He writes, “We apprehend the physical world by exercising the faculties given us for the purpose, and we possess spiritual faculties by means of which we can know God and the spiritual world if we will obey the Spirit’s urge and begin to use them.”

We’re born with these faculties, but sin clouds them and tarnishes them over to make us spiritually deaf, mute and blind. These faculties can be resuscitated by regeneration and by repentance. According to the author, this is one of the most precious gifts to come to us through Christ’s death and resurrection.

Tozer’s lament and hope for the church

In the author’s mind, he finds it difficult to understand why a believer would not want to stay in close contact with God in the spiritual realm through scriptures and in quiet communion. He acknowledges that it is the case, however. He explains that faith is what enables our spiritual senses. Therefore, Tozer writes, when faith is weak “the result will be inward insensibility and numbness” toward our spiritual walk with God.

The key, then, is for believers to humble themselves before God, acknowledge who He is and cease our self-reliant tendencies. Upon this repentance lay on a deep study of the word of God and our ability to commune with God in the spiritual realm will come alive again.

How do I know the realm is there?

Consider this. Tozer eloquently makes his point of chapter four this way. “A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us, altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize it. God Himself is here waiting our response to His Presence. This eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon its reality.”

What is real?

This is a question that has been pondered for centuries by uncommon minds. However, the true believer understands the answer to this question and is assured of the answer more so than some of the most famous philosophers in history. To use Tozer’s words, “God is real. All other reality is contingent upon His.” This chapter teaches us that God has objective existence independent of any thought we may have of Him. Our teacher writes, “The worshipping heart does not create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration.”

The author teaches in this chapter that we can reckon on the spiritual realm with as much assurance as we do the physical. “Spiritual things are there (or rather we should say here) inviting our attention.” But it is sin, Tozer indicates, that has made detecting spiritual things so difficult for us. To repeat Tozer’s metaphor, “Sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of God, shining around us.”

No distinction between spiritual and real

Tozer helps us understand that another part of our difficulties is that we often separate what we know as real from what is spiritual. He writes that there is no such distinction The spiritual realm is reality. It should be considered with as much confidence as the chair, the wind, a spouse or the color red.

What the author does distinguish between is the real and the imaginary. God is real, but unseen. There are unseen created beings in spiritual reality. The Holy Spirit communes with us in an unseen reality. Imagination builds images and assigns reality to them out of the mind. Faith, however, “simply reckons upon that which is already there.”

The corrective course of action is to shift our focus to the unseen reality. Hebrews 11:6 tells us that “...for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” Since God is the ultimate reality and all other realities are a result of God, then the spiritual realm is the object of “our holiest longing."

The spiritual realm is now

Tozer points out that Christians often think of the spiritual realm as something in their future. He writes, “It is not future, but present. It parallels our familiar physical world.” He quotes a text from Hebrews that Tozer points out is clearly in the present tense.

“But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel.”

This passage is making positive contrasts between Mount Sinai and Mount Zion. Tozer uses it to point to the fact that the reality of Zion is around us and can “be grasped by the soul.” He adds, that our souls have eyes and ears, regardless of how out of use they may have become, that can see and hear this spiritual realm where God is the ultimate reality.

Life application

The author in this chapter has awakened the sleeping believer who trusts in the blood of Christ to redeem sins. Awakened to renew their focus upon God. The result of which will be an awareness of the things of the spirit. He paraphrases a text in the Gospel of John by writing, “Obedience to the word of Christ will bring an inward revelation of the Godhead.”

The scriptures promise that those who seek Him will find God in His unseen reality. Tozer’s lesson says if we focus anew upon God, we will gain a more acute perception of God. “A new God-consciousness will seize upon us and we shall begin to taste and hear and inwardly feel the God who is our life and our all.”

If believers only delve deeply into the scriptures, spend daily intimate time with the Lord, our ability to detect His presence, and understand His will for our lives, will be enhanced to a degree that is beyond description.

It sounds metaphysical. And it is. Our prejudice to deny things we cannot directly experience is a hindrance to our relationship with God. But those who repent of their sins, and seek God in the spiritual realm will find “More and more, as our faculties grow sharper and more sure, God will become to us the great All, and His Presence the glory and wonder of our lives.”

Tozer Made Easy - Part 3 of 10

by Dan Grubbs

The Pursuit of God, Chapter Three: Removing the Veil

Tozer begins his third chapter with one of the most famous quotes in the history of man. He does this to ensure that there is no ambiguity about what he believes is the purpose of created man. Tozer quotes Augustine, “Thou has formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”

He explains this as the origin of our kind because it’s critical to our understanding of our relationship with God. He echoes it in his own words, “God made us for Himself: that is the only explanation that satisfies the heart of a thinking man, whatever his wild reason may say.”

All this is preamble to the point that we are created to be in a right relationship with God, but are guilty of sin. Our “foul revolt” broke this communion and man now lives alone outside of the “manifest Presence” of our heavenly Father. Or more metaphorically, a veil has been erected between us and our Lord because of our sin.

Tozer explains that the redemptive work of God is to “undo the tragic effects of that foul revolt and bring us back again into right and eternal relationship with Himself.”

Why is the veil there?

The veil was what separated the inner chamber of the tabernacle from the holy of holies where the very Presence of God above the mercy seat atop the arc of the covenant. The children of Israel did not have direct access to the holy of holies. They annually sent in the high priest to seek the atonement of his own sins and those of Israel from God. According to Tozer, this was the “beating heart of the Levitical order.” He helps us understand our condition by using the holy of holies and the separating veil and the Flame of the Presence of God as an identical description for us.

He writes, “At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push in to conscious awareness of His Presence.”

Tozer encourages us to remove the veil so that we can know of His Presence not only intellectually, but, more importantly in our hearts, leading to a personal relationship with the Creator.

What will we find when we push through the veil? Tozer answers that God will uncover Himself in “ravishing fullness to the humble of soul and the pure in heart.”

It’s because we don’t push through as believers, that Tozer says we are at a serious loss in the world. “The world is perishing for a lack of the knowledge of God, and the church is famishing for want of His Presence.”

Yes, God is omnipresent. People can understand that intellectually. But, it’s the manifast Presence that we have fled like Adam or Peter after their great sins. However, it is the manifast Presence for which we should seek. This is a spiritual communion — man can know Him really in a “deep spirit” where his “fire must glow or his love is not the true love of God.”

The reason for pushing through

There is something expected when we remove the veil between ourselves and God. It is that communion with a God “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.”

This is the love of God to which Tozer refers. Our relationship with God is an ever overflowing satisfaction of our nature to the point of our hearts being fit to break with love for our God. He writes that it is believers with such breaking hearts who have looked with open eye and lived within the Presence.

The point here is that this level of access and relationship with God is available to us. Every believer has the same access to the Presence as the high priests did and the prophet who reports what he sees.

Sadly, Tozer writes that the church is at a loss for want of those who have removed the veil and entered into the company of the Creator. He tells us that “the church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with an inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience in the holy Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.”

Do we have access today?

As Tozer has already expressed, the joyous report is that every believer has access to God in the holy of holies. It was through the work of Christ on Calvary. Now there is nothing to keep us from His Presence. Nothing except our pride and sinful nature. Tozer asks, “Why do we tarry without? Why do we consent to abide all of our days just outside the holy of holies and never enter at all to look upon God?”

Scripture records for us that at the time of Christ’s crucifixion, the actual veil in the temple in Jerusalem was torn completely in two, forever revealing the holy of holies to all men. Why did God do this? Was it just to send a message to the Sanhedrin or the Pharisees? No, it is a clear message to all men, forever, that Christ has opened the way to the Father because of His shed blood, the atonement secured forever.

But why do we not all take this free gift from God? Tozer explains that it’s more than a cold heart, it is a veil over our own hearts. It’s a veil we must all tear from ourselves so that we do not hide the face of God from our own hearts. Tozer explains this as the veil of the self-life that hides our hearts from the joyous life that could be ours should we remove the veil once and for all. “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.”

To remove this veil will be painful as it is part of our fleshly life. It will tear living spiritual tissue to rend it from our hearts. But, as Tozer writes, “Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess, forsake, repudiate the selflife, and then reckon it crucified.”

When this is done, like labor pains, it will be a faint memory. “After that is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered, in actual spiritual experience, the Presence of the living God.”