I’m currently reading A. W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. The first two chapters speak volumes of God’s heart to me and I can’t help but linger and ponder on its power and beauty.
Here are some lines I have highlighted on the old, yellow pages of the first two chapters of this book:
- We pursue God because, and only because, he has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit…it is by this prevenient drawing that God takes from us every vestige of credit for the act of coming.
- 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.
- To have found God and still to pursue him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.
- If we would find God amid all the religious externals, we must first determine to find him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity…We must strip down to essentials…We must put away all efforts to impress, and come with the guileless candour of childhood.
- Let the inquiring Christian trample under foot every slippery trick of his deceitful heart and insist upon frank and open relations with the Lord.
- The ancient curse will not go out painlessly; the tough, old miser within us will not lie down and die in obedience to our command. He must be torn out of our heart like a plant from the soil; he must be extracted in agony and blood like a tooth from the jaw. He must be expelled from our soul by violence, as Christ expelled the money chargers from the temple. And we shall need to steel ourselves against his piteous begging, and to recognise it as springing out of self-pity, one of the reprehensible sins of the human heart.
