It’s “The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine” by A.W. Tozer. My dad let me borrow it – thanks, Dad. Published in 1948, it is one of those books whose clear, evocative language on a deep subject give it a timeless quality, and it is full of great insight on what it means to seek God.
So how do you express that in a cover image? The publishers of this edition couldn’t decide, so went with two different representations.
At the bottom, a classic – the winding road. We’re on safe ground here. Jesus used this one.
At the top – a man in a kayak paddling into the sun.
Wait, what?
Every time I picked up this book I saw that kayak and just had to shake my head a little. A friend that I shared my disbelief with pointed out that the man in the kayak is soaking wet, though he seems to paddling across crystal clear water. Photoshop? Or poor kayaking skills? I have seen soaking wet people in a clear stretch of water before.
But, if we let our imagination loose for moment, I can make sense of these two images in a way that I sure the publishers did not intend.
There are two ways to pursue God. 1) You can thrash about, furiously paddling, exerting all your energy to achieve an impossible goal, like a man trying to kayak as quickly as possible into the sun.
2) You can walk down the road. To make sure you are on the right road, follow someone who has gone there before. I recommend Jesus. In this way you exercise trust, and aren’t depending solely on your own effort, like a mad kayaker. You may not always be able to see the destination clearly, and there will be rough patches and sunny spots. Also, you have the benefit of knowing Someone put that road there, so clearly Someone wants to be found.
There, enough of that. Now, some gems from Tozer:
“We have laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seem satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not one sign of fire upon lofty Carmel.”
“Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of created personalities to the creating personality, God.”
“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love – justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.”
“To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate, but He remains personally unknown to the individual. Others do not even go so far as this; they know of Him only by hearsay. To many others God is an ideal, another name for goodness or beauty or truth; or He is law or life or the creative impulse back of the phenomena of existence. Christians, to be sure, go further than this, at least in theory. But for millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.”
“Faith is the gaze of the soul upon a saving God. Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God.”
“The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One. While he looks at Christ, the very thing he has been trying to do will be getting done within him.”
“If faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest possible things to do. It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the range of possibility for the weakest and poorest of us.”
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