Book Report #2: AW Tozer - "The Pursuit of God"
Well, apparently my comments about church in the previous post sparked the impression from some folks that I was being unduly critical of the Body of Christ. “You will not find a perfect church,” and “Why are you so critical of the Body of Christ”, to just get started. Friends, yes, I am critical of “The Program”:
Worship service: a full band with contemporary songs sung at full roar. I haven’t heard my fellow congregants sing in YEARS, just the worship leader. Thus — it’s a concert, not worship, on my part, anyway. And I’ve noticed that many, many of the songs are introspective, talking about personal experiences vs. heavenly-raised praise of God. Like AW Tozer says in this book, “The pronouns ‘my’ and ‘mine’ look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant.”
Right about the time I’ve settled into the service, I’m yanked out of worship by 20 minutes of announcements.
God is the most complex Being in the universe, but we’ve relegated ourselves to giving sermons to appeal to the guy coming in the door to drink milk vs. the flock whose stomach is growling for meat. The other day, the pastor pulled a vacuum cleaner out on the stage, plugged it in, ran it for 15 seconds, and then proceeded to compare ensuring that one’s vacuum cleaner was plugged in to being “plugged in” to the Holy Spirit! Yes, that sucking sound you hear is the Holy Spirit doing His work.
Maybe I’m just in the wrong church — thus, I am once again on the hunt. But in all my church wanderings in the DFW metroplex, this is a common non-denominational experience.
But back to Tozer!
CHAPTER TWO: The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing
By all rights, the patriarch Abraham possessed everything a good patriarch could want: a loving wife, a loving concubine, tents, goats, sheep, respect of everyone in the land — he had everything but an heir. And when the promised son finally was born,
…the child at once became the delight and idol of his heart….He was an eager love slave of his son….The baby represented everything sacred to his father’s heart: the promises of God, the covenants, the hopes of the years and the long messianic dream.
Given that the first of the Ten Commandments deals with just this proclivity of humans to make idols out of anything but God, soon the relationship bordered on the perilous, according to Tozer. So God stepped in, and told Abraham to give his son to Him — to sacrifice him to God, who had provided the heir to the 100-year-old in the first place!
The sacred writer spares us a close-up of the agony that night on the slopes near Beersheba when the aged man had it out with God, but respectiful imagination may view in awe the bent form and convulsive wrestling alone under the stars.
The heart bleeds for Abraham. God led him to the point where he was just about to kill his son before he laid a staying hand upon him. He basically says:
I only wanted to remove him from the temple of your heart that I might reign unchallenged there. I wanted to correct the perversion that existed in your love.
This “story” — and it’s much more than a story; it actually happened — always got me in the throat, because in the end, God Himself did not spare His Son hundreds of years in the future. He went through with the sacrifice.
We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety…Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not committed.
Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him. They should be recognized for what they are: God’s loan to us, and should never considerered in any sense our own.
Much to think about in this chapter. Much hits home. I’m guilty of praying for safety above all: for my home, my finances, my job, my family, when if I just gave it over to God, all of it would be super-safe in the ultimate sense. Tozer’s point in this chapter is that we actually, really, possess nothing in this temporal world (in the event that we die old men and women, basically all we’ll have is the drool on our chins), so best to place our hearts in the eternal, which has no beginning nor end.
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21)
